By Jean-Pierre Beauvais by Jean-rierre beauvals
LIMA-The results of the May 18 general elections-the first held in Peru since 1963—brought an unexpectedly decisive victory for the bourgeois People's Action Party (AP) and its presidential candidate, Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Unofficial returns made public May 19 showed Belaúnde receiving some 42% of the vote with Armando Villanueva del Campo of the bourgeois American People's Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) running a distant second with less than 25%.
Hugo Blanco of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), Peruvian section of the Fourth International, was receiving a little more than 4% of the presidential vote and was outpolling all other leftist candidates, with the possible exception of teachers' union leader Horacio Zeballos, candidate of the Maoist coalition UNIR (Revolutionary Left Union). The bloc between the pro- Moscow Communist Party (Unidad) and the bourgeois-nationalist Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR) was receiving about 2%, as was the centrist Democratic People's Union (UDP). Genaro Ledesma's FOCEP! trailed with less than 1%
Hugo Blanco is assured of election to the House of Deputies from a Lima district. Other Congressional candidates elected on the PRT slate include metalworkers leader Hipólito Enriquez, Enrique Fernández of the PST, and Ricardo Napurí of the POMR.2
The high vote for Belaúnde allayed fears among the imperialists, the Peruvian bourgeoisie, and the military rulers that no candidate would receive the 36% required for election by Peru's constitution. This would have thrown the presidential contest into the Congress and threatened political instability similar to that eroding Bolivia's shaky bourgeois democracy.
The victory of Belaúnde and the AP is being viewed here above all as a rejection and other forces around a program of working-class political independence. Ledesma broke with that position and unsuccessfully sought a popular-front alliance with the CP and PSR.-IP/I
Congress in Peru by the voters of the military dictatorship, which had openly favored Villanueva and the APRA. Belaúnde focused much of his campaign propaganda on the fact that he had been Peru's last elected president from 1963 to 1968 and was ousted in General Velasco's coup d'état. He claimed to oppose military rule and support democratic rights. Belaúnde also demagogically promised to create 1 million jobs within a year's time and solve Peru's other severe economic problems, which he blamed on the military regime.
The APRA's poor showing in the elections, after originally having been widely favored to win, will exacerbate the deep crisis inside Peru's oldest bourgeois party. ince the death last year of its tounde /ictor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the APRI has been wracked by internal disputes, which at times have even led to violent street battles between rival APRA gangs.
Division of the main working-class forces into five competing slates of candidates was another factor in Belaúnde's victory. A short-lived attempt early in the campaign to unite the PRT and other Trotskyists, the UNIR, and the UDP behind Hugo Blanco's candidacy broke up owing mainly to the divisive tactics of the Maoists and the POMR (see Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, April 7, p. 341).
The total vote for the left showed a marked decline from the nearly 30% it had received in the 1978 Constituent Assembly apparently elections. Many workers sought to cast an "effective" vote against annaht to noct on toffortin" unto andinat APRA and the military by voting for Belaúnde for president while choosing leftist candidates for the Senate and House of Deputies.
Hugo Blanco and the PRT outran all other left parties in the Lima metropolitan area and in much of southern Peru. In Moquequa Province, a stronghold of the militant copper miners union, the Trotskyists received 18% of the vote, and in Tacna Province, where Blanco was tried by a military court on frame-up murder charges in 1965, the PRT received 15%.
Impressive gains were scored by the PRT in the course of the election campaign. Hugo Blanco spoke to tens of thousands of persons at rallies held throughout the country. The PRT's final rally in Lima's San Martín Plaza on May 12 drew nearly 50,000 persons-the largest gathering held by any left party during the election campaign.
Everywhere Blanco spoke, he encouraged his supporters to become active and to join the PRT. By the end of the campaign more than 2,300 new militants were paying weekly dues and attending meetings and educational classes in Lima alone. Some 2,000 are reportedly partici pating in similar activities in other parts of the country.
On election day, the PRT organized some 3,000 persons to serve as pollwatchers in Lima, considerably more than any other leftist party.
Notes
1. Genaro Ledesma organized the split of a small faction from the Workers, Peasants, Students, and People's Front (FOCEP), which was originally a bloc of Trotskyist
2. The Socialist Workers Party (PST) and the Revolutionary Marxist Workers Party (POMR) are Peruvian affiliates of the so-called Parity Committee for the Reorganization (Reconstruction) of the Fourth International. They supported Blanco's candidacy for president and were allowed to present some Congressional candidates on the PRT's glate.-IP/I on the PRI's slate.—IPT1