[The following protest statement, issued by Hugo Blanco, appeared in the September 12 issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly magazine published in Paris under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The translation from the French is by Intercontinental Press.
[Hugo Blanco is a leader of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), Peruvian section of the Fourth International.]
On August 29 I was suspended from my functions as a member of parliament for having used the parliamentary rostrum to accuse Gen. Clemente Noel, military chief of the Ayacucho region, of murder.*
I protest the form and substance of this hasty procedure, which suspends my mandate through the end of the parliamentary session, i.e., until December, and deprives me of my parliamentary immunity during that period.
This procedure goes against Article 10 of Chapter 9 of the internal rules of the legislative chambers, which stipulates that such a suspension cannot exceed 15 days.
The manner in which this suspension was voted is illegal according to the very rules of the Peruvian parliament. The vote must be taken by calling on deputies to rise or remain seated. Abstention is excluded. A roll-call vote must be taken if a deputy calls for it.
But the vote that suspended me was a complete farce that discredits this parliament. It took place anonymously, and deputies were simply asked to approve the proposal by banging their desks, by acclamations, by volume of sound as it were. As a result, the chair could not even furnish a breakdown of the vote!
The demand by parliament member Enrique Fernández Chacón for a roll-call vote received no response from the chairman of the chamber.
In the final analysis I stand by my accusations of murder and genocide. I cite lists of
*Ayacucho and adjoining provinces are under Peruvian army and police occupation as the regime seeks to crush a guerrilla movement based among the region's impoverished Indian peasanty. - IP
names of peasants executed and villages bombed on Gen. Noel's orders. And I am not the first one to make them public. Already at the beginning of the year the judge of Ayacucho province called for Gen. Noel's indictment. Then in late June the vice-chairman of the Chamber of Deputies' commission on human rights filed a similar demand
These indictments did not lead to a judicial inquiry solely because the general is covered by his military functions and because journalists no longer have access to the operational zone. Involved in my suspension is the negation of the most elementary democratic rights. It takes place in the context of a rightist couplike escalation, marked by a campaign of denunciation of Amnesty International, by a restriction of democratic guarantees for the coming [municipal] election campaign, and by systematic harassment against my party, the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT): an attack on its offices several weeks ago, an assault against one of its elected officials, the arrest and torture of one of its trade-union leaders.
Experience has shown that any back-pedalling in the face of this type of right-wing escalation serves only to increase the right's arrogance. The democratic gains of the masses must be defended step by step, without yielding to the threats and blackmail.
That is why, once again, I alert public opinion and call for protests against a flagrant violation of parliamentary freedoms by an Assembly that is supposed to defend them.