[The following article by Marcel Niedergang appeared in the June 22 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
Can one be a parliamentary deputy and political exile at the same time? That is the question facing Mr. Hugo Blanco, leader of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Expelled from Peru by military force on the eve of the June 18 elections, together with several other political and tradeunion leaders, he was elected on Sunday to the new Constituent Assembly, which is due to meet for the first time on July 28.
Once again, he took refuge in Sweden, his "second home." He is waiting impatiently. "As soon as possible, I will return to Lima." He has kept intact a gut-level taste for struggle, despite imprisonment and exile. A force of nature-sturdy, firm on his feet, strong in the torso like the rough peasants of the Altiplano, bending their backs under the great cold wind of the high plateaus, but tireless.
It was while struggling with them, near Cuzco in the valley of La Convención, that he began to make a name for himself in the 1960s. He organized peasant unions, challenging the power of the terratenientes (landowners) and mestizo foremen. Hotly pursued, he took to the jungle. Arrested, taken to Lima, implicated in the murder of two policemen, and condemned to death, his sentence was commuted to
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(wenty-five years in prison, and he was incarcerated in El Frontón prison outside Callao. Amnestied at the end of 1970 by the government of General Velasco, he spent nine months in Lima, forbidden to leave the capital, and was then exiled to Mexico. Escaping to Argentina, where he was imprisoned, he then lived in Chile until the fall of Allende. He escaped the military, who were circulating his photograph, and hid out in the Swedish embassy. Then a brief return to Peru in 1975, and again exile to Sweden.
The amnesty decreed in April 1978 by the Morales government enabled him to return long enough to run as a candidate on the FOCEP slate, which, to everyone's surprise, has just won 12% of the vote in the elections. Heading the slate was Hugo Blanco, the eternal wanderer, whose breathless itinerary over twenty years is symbolic of his fight. The years have planted a strip of white in his full head of hair.
Is he satisfied with his victory? "Mainly happy to be alive. When I stepped off a Peruvian military plane in Jujuy, in northern Argentina, I thought it was all over. Argentina is a slaughterhouse. They killed the Chilean Prats, the Bolivian Torres, and so many others. But the local press reported our expulsion. Then we spent ten more days in a Buenos Aires police station, then the plane to Stockholm."
What about the FOCEP's unexpected electoral victory? "A result of the dramatic economic crisis. In the barriadas, the vast encroaching shantytowns of Lima, the residents set up FOCEP support committees. The working class of Lima is now playing a role, but the bulk of our support has come from the unemployed, those on the edge of starvation who have come down from the high plateaus toward the sprawling city to look for some sort of job. The social question is in the forefront in Peru. It's a time bomb."
Mr. Hugo Blanco thinks that the agrarian reform has not seriously improved the living standards of the peasant masses, most of whom are illiterate and thus do not have the right to vote. "Their crime is that they speak Peruvian, not the language of the Spanish conquerors," he says. "The peasants are struggling now against the state bureaucracy and occupying the cooperatives set up by the reform." According to the Trotskyist leader, "the nationalizations decreed in the first period of the Velasco government have been stripped of all meaning, for example, in the fishing, petroleum, and copper industries.
"Within the current system, it was obviously impossible to withstand the pressures from the International Monetary Fund. The only solution is socialism, which is what we propose. I believe in the contagious power of examples. A socialist Peru would speed up the thawing-out process elsewhere in South America. And today the United States government is in no position to send in marines."
In the medium term, he is pessimistic. "The situation is explosive. The army is willing to let APRA* play the parliamentary game, but it still holds the reins. But within three months they will feel like doing some 'housecleaning' and kicking out the far left in one way or another."