[The following interview with Hugo Blanco, a leader of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), Peruvian section of the Fourth International, was obtained Dec. 27, 1983, by a U.S. socialist during a visit to Peru. The interview was conducted in Spanish: the translation and footnotes are by Intercontinental Press.]
Question. The U.S. news media has recently carried quite a number of reports about armed group known as "Sendero the Luminoso." What can you tell us about this group and its actions?
Answer. The fundamental reason for the emergence of Sendero Luminoso — whose full name is Partido Comunista del Perú — Sendero Luminoso (Communist Party of Peru — Shining Path) — is the desperate poverty in the mountains of Peru.
Sendero Luminoso operates primarily in the provinces of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurímac. This is the poorest region of the country. It has also been sporadically active in other areas, including the province of Junin and the cities of Lima, Cuzco, and Arequipa, but these are not the main arena of its activities.
It is the desperate poverty of the peasants in Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac — along with the failure of the rest of the left to present an alternative to the present conditions - that provides the base for Sendero's support. Its leadership is largely made up of intellectuals, teachers, and students.
Q. What about its ranks?
A. The ranks are students as well as some peasants. Thus far there have been very few working-class elements in Sendero Luminoso.
The workers they have attracted have come largely from among the unemployed. who make up a big, and growing, percentage of the population. Many of these we could describe as subproletarians — peddlers and the like who are semiunemployed and earn much less than workers.
O. How would you characterize Sendero Luminoso in political terms?
A. Many people here have described them as "Pol Potists," because their behavior is very similar to that of Pol Pot's forces in Kampuchea.
Sendero exhibits many of the most negative aspects of Maoism in its most sectarian period.
Today, however, the organization is completely opposed to the present government of China, which they describe as totally reactionary. They are also against the Nicaraguan government, the Cuban government, the Albanian government, and the Soviet government.
For them, Comrade Gonzalo, their leader, is right up in the same league as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Sendero members act very much like members of a religious sect. This has both positive and negative sides to it. The positive side is that they are very firm in their convictions and will not yield even when tortured or facing death.
Sendero's ultrasectarianism is not unique. Up until a few years ago, the left in Peru was characterized by groups, mainly based in the universities, that were very sectarian and viewed other left groups as the main enemy. Even among the Maoist groups like Sendero Luminoso, the attitude was that the other Maoist groups were the main enemy.
Fortunately most of the Peruvian left is overcoming this. But Sendero remains fixed on an ultrasectarian course.
Q. How does this sectarianism manifest itself?
A. In two ways. First, the group pays no attention to public opinion in its activities. Secondly, it is completely hostile to other sectors of the left, treating them as enemies.
Sendero Luminoso's attitude toward the population in general is sectarian because there
COLOMBIA
QUITO ECUADOR Guayaquil
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Marañon •Piura
* Chiclayo
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Pucallpa
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Cerro de Pasco Chimbote o
La Oroyas PACIFIC
16 Andamarca
LIMA Callao o Huanta
Huancavelica
° Cuzco Ayacuchol LAKE
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Puno 8 Arequipa® Toquepala kilometers 500 0
is no attempt to apply what we Trotskyists call a transitional approach - one that assesses the level of consciousness and combativity of the people and determines what things can and cannot be done, what slogans can and cannot be raised.
Sendero does not even let the population know why it carries out its acts. Even groups like the ETA in the Basque country and the Baader-Meinhoff group in West Germany issue communiqués. But Sendero does not inform the people because it is uninterested in public opinion.
As a result, the population has no idea of what Sendero is doing and what it is not doing. The people have no idea which acts are in fact carried out by the repressive apparatus but blamed on Sendero. The repressive apparatus spreads terrible slanders about Sendero, but since Sendero never denies any of these sianders, many people take them for good coin. Sendero also has published very little written material, and what has appeared is extremely general in character.
Sendero does not even give consideration to the level of consciousness of those sectors among whom it is working most closely. There are peasant areas, for example, where it has forbidden peasants to produce more than they can consume themselves. Sendero claims this is to sabotage the Belaúnde government. But considering the minuscule percentage of the gross domestic product that these harvests make up, obviously this has no effect on the regime.
It has a terrible effect, however, on the peasants themselves. When they are unable to sell part of their crop, they cannot buy matches or any other commodity they need but do not produce themselves. The result is they are being forced down to a bare subsistence level.
Sendero's disdain for public opinion is also seen in the trials they organize. Their so-called People's Tribunals are made up of Sendero Luminoso members, who decide who should be punished or even executed.
Sometimes they try people who really are rich landowners or repressive authorities who abuse the population. But at other times they put on trial small shopkeepers who, while living somewhat more comfortably than the rest of the population, cannot in any way be categorized as exploiters and are not viewed as such by the local population.
Sometimes they have even tried peasant leaders elected by the masses themselves — some of these leaders have been executed by Sendero.
At times when Sendero Luminoso wants to hold a mass meeting, it goes out with weapons in hand and rounds up peasants to bring to the plaza where the meeting will take place.
These things are not taken from the bourgeois press — which does contain huge doses of slander against Sendero Luminoso. I have heard these things directly from the peasants.
Take the example of the community of San José de Azangaro, in Puno Province, where the community had elected a mayor. Sendero threatened him and ransacked his store. They also took food that was being stored by the Municipal Council and was to be used to feed peasants while they worked on public works projects. Sendero stole that food and then told the people to come and take it. Some did, but others said "this is already ours. " Sendero then set fire to whatever had not been taken.
Sendero also set fire to the plastic tubing that was to be used to bring irrigation water to the peasants' fields.
They have also attacked the offices of some cooperatives run by the SAIS Social Interest Agricultural Association]. It is true that bureaucrats often head these cooperatives, as is also the case with trade unions. But the property belongs to the peasants, and we are struggling only to oust the bureaucrats and replace them with a democratic leadership elected by the peasants themselves.
Sendero, however, treats the cooperatives as though they were enemy organizations. Often, by ransacking the cooperative offices, they have unwittingly helped the bureaucrats. Some of the bureaucrats have been under fire for theft and have been unable to cover their tracks. When Sendero comes in and burns all the records and ransacks the cooperative, it becomes impossible for an elected peasant leadership to prove that the bureaucrat was stealing.
Q. Could you describe Sendero Luminoso's attitude toward other organizations of the lefi?
A. Sendero is far more sectarian toward the rest of the left than other groups that have taken a similar course. For instance, groups like the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Revolutionary People's Army (ERP) and the Montoneros in Argentina also described the rest of the left as reformist and opportunist. But they never carried out armed attacks against other left organizations. And when they could make use of the rest of the left, they would.
The Tupamaros, for example, felt that other groups were made up of cowards who were afraid to take up the armed struggle. But they also held that there was a division of labor in which other groups could contribute by fighting for the release of Tupamaro prisoners and so on.
But Sendero Luminoso does not even try to use other groups for its own ends. More than once we have gone to visit the Sendero prisoners to bring them aid. All we have gotten from them in return is insults.
0. How does the rest of the left view Sen-
Fred Murphy/P
HUGO BLANCO
dero Luminoso?
A. There are various opinions. Some groups are sharply critical of Sendero, and go so far as to make a common front with rightwing forces to crush it.
We consider Sendero to be revolutionaries, even though we do not agree with their methods. We try to defend their rights.
Of course, we understand that the people will have to respond to violence with violence. But this must be the product of mass consciousness, not of paternalistic actions by a group that appoints itself the representative of all the peasants.
The peasants themselves must decide what they must or must not do. It is up to the people in any given sector to make that decision. That is why we so deeply disagree with Sendero's methods.
Some sectors of the left are sympathetic to Sendero but critical of certain nonessential aspects of its methods. This attitude flows from frustration with the generally reformist course the left has taken and its inability to project an alternative.
These sectors criticize Sendero Luminoso's sectarianism toward the other sectors of the left, its actions preventing peasants from selling their produce, and the like. But they feel everything would be fine if only Sendero acted like the Tupamaros did.
Q. Does Sendero Luminoso have a base in the countryside?
A. The fact that they have not been destroyed shows they do have some popular support. I believe that this is due to the miserable living conditions and the despair that exist among our people, and to the fact that the left has not been able to provide a real alternative.
In some areas of the countryside people really have been caught in the middle. Sendero comes in and threatens the informers. Then the police come and kill many innocent people, who have never given any support to Sendero or sheltered anyone. Then Sendero comes back, and if the Sinchis [special counterinsurgency police units] were billeted in your house, you are attacked as an informer.
Many people simply flee to escape this situation. There are areas in the mountains that are being depopulated.
In some areas in the provinces of Tayacaja and Huancavelica, former hacienda owners whose land was taken under the agrarian reform of the early 1970s are using the situation to make a comeback. The easiest way to get back land that had been turned over to peasants is to accuse the peasants, or their village leaders, of being supporters of Sendero Luminoso. Then the repressive forces come in and take care of them.
A few days ago, in my capacity as human rights secretary of the Peasant Federation of Peru [CCP], I visited jailed peasant leaders in Huancayo. These are members of the CCP, so what I say comes from direct sources. Although these peasants are not connected with Sendero Luminoso, they have been imprisoned as Senderistas.
Another of our comrades has told me that because of a personal dispute, enemies of her family accused them all of being Senderistas. As a result, the Sinchis came and demolished everything, not just their house but the houses of the neighbors too. Now there are children out on the barren high plateaus without their parents, and no one knows where they are. These people are totally terrorized.
Q. We would also like to hear your opinion of the United Left (IU).' whose candidate was just elected mayor of Lima.
A. Our party, the Revolutionary Workers Party [PRT], has made a series of errors regarding the IU.
There are two key things we have to look at. One is the question of unity and of the united front, which is central to the revolution. The other is the question of political line, of clarity about upholding working-class political independence.
The essential question is how to combine these two things in the concrete situation we face. We now feel that we underestimated the need for unity and the sentiment in favor of unity among the masses and that we overemphasized, or even fetishized, our own doctrinal purity.
As a result of this, we did not fight energet-
After the elections, the PRT reassessed its position toward the IU and formally requested to join the coalition. See Intercontinental Press, January 23. p. 13.
ically enough to unify the FOCEP and the UDP, which were two powerful fronts that arose in the period when the Morales Bermúdez government was coming to an end.?
Later, we were unable to consolidate and maintain the ARI as a left front led by revolutionaries. And we did not join the United Left when it was formed. As a result, we have now been pushed to the sidelines in the consciousness of the masses.
We made a big error. We should have paid more attention to concrete actions and deeds than to formal declarations and nit-picking over words. Such an attitude led us into a kind of sectarianism that isolated us.
We started out from the position that if any bourgeois current is in the united front we cannot take part. And we said that the Revolutionary Socialist Party [PSRI* was a bourgeois force. Clearly the PSR was formed by the heirs of Velasco, whose regime was bourgeois. But origin cannot be the sole determinant of class character. And in any event, the PSR is an insignificant group with no power.
We also acted with excessive scruples toward the participation of a group like Socialist Political Action, which had only four members! But if they were included in a front, we would not participate. Such sectarian scruples have done us great harm.
And the fact is that the force that really gives the reformist edge to the leadership of the United Left is not some tiny bourgeois grouplet, but the Communist Party, which is a work-
We hope to correct and overcome these sectarian errors. Of course we have already lost very valuable time. but the story has not yet been played out. The country has entered a new and important stage with the municipal elections, one in which we feel that the government and the bourgeoisie will try to make life very difficult for the left in order to prevent a left victory in the countrywide elections in 1985.
UDP — Democratic People's Unity, another bloc of leftist groups that presented candidates in 1978. receiving 4.2 percent of the vote. Two of the Trotskyist groups that later participated in founding the PRT were originally part of the UDP. Today the UDP is part of the United Left.
Security forces interrogate suspect.
And if they are unable to block the left's victory in those elections, there will be a coup either before, during, or after the voting.
We must try to prepare the masses to counter this coup, and the closer we are to the masses the better. That is why we want to be inside the United Left, even though the leadership does not accept our views.
We feel that the character of the United Left has not yet been decided. It can become a revolutionary front that leads the Peruvian masses to power, or it could turn into a reformist front that holds them back.
There are leaders of the United Left, like Javier Diez Canseco and Agustin Haya, who are saying the same things 1 am about how the right will refuse to let the left take power through elections. These leaders have not been prevented from expressing their views. They have not been silenced by the United Left, as happened in Chile during the Popular Unity period.
Of course there are also reformist sectors and elements in the United Left who are saying the exact opposite. They share the same hopes that Allende had in Chile: the hope that if they are nice to the bourgeoisie, to the imperialists, to the armed forces, they will be able to get into power.
So we want to be inside the United Left in order to help determine whether it becomes a reformist front that holds back the mass movement or a revolutionary front that pushes the process forward.
We would not, of course, accept the proposition that to join the United Left we have to keep quiet about some of these truths. But we don't think that they will make this a condition for our entry into the United Left.
Some say that since we are not vote-grabbers, we should wait until after the 1985 elections before coming in. The problem is that the class struggle does not wait. To set the minds of these comrades at ease, we are ready to sign an agreement guaranteeing that we will not contest a single post in the Chamber of Deputies or Senate and stipulating that we want to enter the IU in order to work among the ranks to resist the possible coup and bourgeois sabotage in 1985.
Q. How can the left use the gains it made in the recent municipal elections to strengthen its position?
A. We think that if the left-controlled municipal governments are based on people's assemblies and open town meetings, on the organization of the masses, they will be strong enough to resist any attack by the bourgeoisie. which wants to discredit the left by sabotaging its officeholders.
Already some mayors from the United Left — although still few in number — have begun to do this. For example, the mayor of the Comas district in Lima sent a circular around to all the leaders of the organized neighborhoods, to the precincts in the northern zone of Lima, calling on each sector to elect a delegate responsible for clean drinking water, for electricity, a delegate for sanitation, one for education, and so on. He called on these delegates to form a body to oversee these problems so that it is not only the mayor and the district council members who are looking into them.
The mayor of Cuzco has called for the formation of an ongoing organization that could serve as a channel through which "people's power" — as it was called in Chile — can develop.
Strengthening the local governments in this way will help build a bulwark against the right's attempts to sabotage and discredit the left-controlled municipalities. It will also help prepare against the possibility of a coup.
Q. What other kinds of things do you think should be done to prepare to resist a coup?
A. The results of the November 13 elections showed the right wing that it can no longer place its confidence in People's Action (AP) or in the Christian People's Party (PPC), because they are now discredited among the masses. Although they will continue to use the AP and PPC, if they hope to hold back the left they will have to play their APRA card."
If they can convince the masses to vote for
APRA, this will solve the bourgeoisie's problem. But if the masses don't vote for APRA, there is a coup waiting in the wings.
We have to use this period to strengthen ourselves against a possible coup. One of the things we can use is the Peruvian constitution and other laws. The Peruvian constitution contains a clause on the right of insurgency against illegitimate authority. We feel this right exists even before a coup takes place. The right of insurgency does not mean the right of Pinochet's victims to rise from their graves. It means we have the right to prevent the development of something that goes against constitutional authority, such as preparations for a coup d'état.
Just as the right to vote is not simply the right to deposit your ballot but involves the right to prepare oneself and make a considered choice, so too the right of insurgency also involves the right to prevent a coup from taking place.
No government in Peru elected by the people has finished its term of office since 1945. So we have the full right to prepare for the eventuality of another coup attempt. We believe the cornerstone of this preparation must be the unification of the mass movement into a single workers federation and a single peasant federation. We have the example of the Bolivian Workers Federation [COB]. which has blocked a series of coups and has thrown out several governments that have arisen from coups. Unification of the workers and peasants movement is one of the steps that must be taken here.
We must also, as I said, convert the left-controlled municipal governments into vehicles for the installation of people's power of the Chilean type, so that such people's power bodies can resist a coup.
We also have to begin propagandizing among the ranks of the armed forces — something that is completely protected by the constitution. We should explain to the soldiers and non-commissioned officers that their principal obligation is to the Peruvian people, that their principal loyalty must be to the Peruvian people, and that insubordination against civilian authority is a crime punishable under the constitution.
Therefore the soldiers have no obligation to comply with an illegal order, an anticonstitutional order, such as an order to carry out a coup.
There will be some who begin foaming at the mouth, saying that we are calling for insurrection. But we can point to the bourgeois Peruvian constitution.
We are entering a critical period in the class struggle today. The sooner the left groups unite and the more they overcome their sectarianism, the better will be our chances.
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Notes
1. The United Left is made up of most of Peru's working-class political parties, as well as independents such as recently elected Lima Mayor Alfonso Barrantes. The IU's candidates in the Nov. 13. 1983, municipal elections received 26 percent of the vote countrywide, running second to the bourgeois opposition party known as the American People's Revolutionary Alliance (APRA).
2. FOCEP → Workers. Peasants, Students. and People's Front. A coalition of leftist groups, including three that were later to join in founding the PRT. the FOCEP presented candidates in the May 1978 Constituent Assembly elections. Hugo Blanco was a leading candidate on its slate, which received 11.5 percent of the vote and outpolled all other currents on the left.
3. ARI - Revolutionary Left Alliance, a shortlived electoral bloc formed in January 1980 among the PRT. UDP. and various other Maoist and Trotskyist currents. Hugo Blanco was to have been the ARI's candidate for president in the May 1980 general elections, but the bloc fell apart less than two months after its founding.
4. The PSR was originally founded by prominent figures, including military officers, from the 1968- 75 populist military government headed by Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado.
5. The AP is the party of Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry; it rules with the support of the PPC, a rightist party. In the municipal elections, the AP came in last with 10 percent and the PPC received 23 percent of the vote.
6. The APRA is a bourgeois-nationalist party that has long had wide support among the Peruvian masses. On occasion it has won elections but has always been blocked from taking office by military coups. In the 1960s and 1970s the APRA was outspokenly anticommunist, but in recent years its leadership has sought to give the party a "social democratic" image and has made overtures to the left.