[The following interview was conducted in Paris June 20 by Marcelo Zugadi. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor.]
The results of the Peruvian Constituent Assembly elections were reported on June
19. Twelve candidates of the Workers, Peasants, Students, and People's Front (FOCEP) were elected out of a total of a hundred deputies making up the assembly.
The FOCEP slate included candidates of differing views and was headed by Comrade Genaro Ledesma, a fighter for socialism who does not belong to any party. But the names best known to the broad masses were those of avowed Trotskyists. One of these was our comrade Hugo Blanco, who has a long history of dedication to the fight for socialist revolution. This once again won him a vote of confidence from the Peruvian workers. Some 70% of those who voted for the FOCEP slate cast their preference votes for him.
But in order to understand the real importance of this vote, you have to hear Comrade Blanco himself explain the conditions under which these elections were held:
The elections were totally rigged, because illiterates had no right to vote. It is as if the illiterates are supposed to be responsible for the inability of the various regimes to educate the people.
The denial of votes to illiterates is still worse because it is one of the manifestations of the cultural oppression suffered by a large part of the population of Peru, who do not speak the language of the conquistadores. They speak Quechua or Aymara, or other less widely spoken languages. So, since they neither speak nor write Spanish, they cannot participate in electing the government.
For example, I am a member of the leadership of a peasant confederation, and most of the rank and file of the organization could not vote. We know that if they had, they would not have voted for the right!
Obviously not. That was why the military government deprived three million persons, out of a total adult population of eight million, of the right to elect their representatives to the Constituent Assembly.
The left as a whole (FOCEP, the UDP,' and the CP) got 22% of the vote. This goes up to 28% if you include the PSR, a bourgeois party that put forward a demagogie reformist program and gets its support from sections of the poor masses. But if we take into account the 40% of the citizenry represented by the illiterates, it is clear what sort of situation the military government is in. Hugo Blanco continued:
It cannot be said that the peasants were kept from voting because they had no political consciousness. In the great struggles of the 1960s and in the present ones, they have proved that they have a high level of political consciousness.
Another feature of this electoral farce is that soldiers can't vote, altbough this government and all the putschist regimes have ruled in the name of the armed forces. It might be said that generals can't vote either. OK. But for every general, there are thousands of soldiers. When the generals want to vote, they have tanks, which don't know how to read and write.
Besides using such methods to give a distorted view of the opinion of the people, the sort of economic power and control of the media that the right has in Peru is obvious, as in all capitalist countries. This gives the right an advantage in elections.
There are many other examples of rigging. For example, very little time was allotted for getting slates on the ballot. A climate unfavorable to exercising democratic rights prevailed throughout the campaign. Before the time for turning in petitions to get on the ballot, there were prisoners and exiles who could not participate in the campaign to collect signatures. Under the pressure of the masses, the government was forced to let exiles be nominated as candidates. Many of us exiles were nominated. This forced the government to let us return to the country, even though it did not release the prisoners.
1. Unión Democrática Popular (Democratic People's Union).
2. Partido Socialista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Socialist Party).