[The following is excerpted from a June 21 telephone interview with Hugo Blanco that appeared in the June 23 issue of Amauta, a leftist weekly published in Lima. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
Question. What do you think are the immediate tasks at this time?
Answer. We compañeros in the
FOCEP have an especially great responsibility now, I think. I have heard that the FOCEP and the UDP are preparing to hold a joint meeting.
The FOCEP and the UDP represent the popular sectors that are struggling and that want to continue to struggle, so I think it is our obligation to form a big party, or front, of the masses-the
FOCEP and the UP together. We should call on other sectors such as the
Communist Party, for example (and if perceive the PSR as a governmental alternative. When I say that, they call me a divider.
After General Leonidas Rodriguez came back from exile for the election campaign, they don't come along it will be because their leaders don't want to), and on the ranks-not the leadership-of the PSR, to form a big mass party on the basis of two or three elementary points: class independence, no pact with bourgeois sectors, support to the people's strug gles, and intransigent struggle against capitalism.
I think that a big political organization of the masses must be formed around these points, with the FOCEP and the UDP as its basis. Each of our small parties could be a current inside this party.
It has to be understood that the masses are not going to come in the course of a few months to any of the small groups that make up the left parties. Nevertheless, the masses have shown that they are generally in combative position, so our obligation is to call for a big workers party where each one of our parties could be a current of opinion.
he went on television once just before me. He dwelt on the fact that the PSR intended to uphold small- and medium-sized private ownership, and that he by no means wanted to divide the armed forces. When my turn came to speak, I had an obligation to explain that those military officers from the first phase of the military junta after 1968, who today pose as progressives, did not shrink from firing on the people when things started to go badly for them.
Notes
7. Partido Socialista Revolucionario- Revolutionary Socialist Party, a bourgeoisnationalist group led by former members of the military government.