[The following interview with
Hugo Blanco appeared in the February 15 issue of the Guardian, a radical weekly Pullo Bia do and Pert retton the published in New Jork under the title
Trotskyist Peruvian peasant leader was interviewed by James Petras, a specialist on Latin America who teaches at Pennsylvania State University, in July 1968 in El Frontón prison where Hugo Blanco is serving a twenty-five-year sentence for his role in organizing peasant unions.
[The editors of the Guardian dia not indicate why publication of the interview was delayed so 1ong. Nevertheless, the Trotskyist leader's comments remain as timely today as they were last summer. Of particular interest is his insistence on the need for a revolutionary party in Peru and his suggestion to the students to become integrated in the mass movement.]
How do the other prisoners regard the political prisoners?
I'he prisoners from the provinces generally know what we fought for and are sympathetic. Ihe prisoners from the big city slums have absolutely no confidence in any political person and do not have any trust in any political solution.
Have you any thoughts on contemporary Peruvian political developments?
Ihe key problem today is the absence of an organized vanguard in politics. In the past four years the spirit of struggle has persisted among the peasants, workers and students, but these struggles have occurred as isolated actions, isolated from groups which could provide political leadership.
Before we go on further, I'd like you to note that one of the peasant leaders, Gerardo Carpio, has been persecuted after finishing oy the police ever since.
his term here at El Fronton, he returne and spoke at the May Day meeting at La Convención.
What has happened to the peasant unions that you organized and led in the Cuzco area?
They continue to function, though many who have received land have achieved a major demand in our struggle. The problem now is between the government, which is demanding that the peasants pay the ola landowners, and the peasants, wno. laving the land in hand, see no reason to impoverish themselves by paying their old exploiters. Ihe majority of peasants are refusing to pay.
Outside of this small area, where some peasants obtained land through revolutionary struggle, there is growing discontent. At this time two factors are exacerbating the situation in the countryside: the severe drought and the complete failure of the Belaúnde government's agrarian reform to solve the agrarian problem. This has led to increasing pressure by the campesinos for action. Up to now, however, in the Sierra - unlike in Cuzco -- the campesinos are isolated and lack a strong organizational structure.
What do you think of the Peruvian agrarian reform law?
The agrarian reform law has been merely a means of legitimizing land already seized by the peasants, themselves in areas such as La Convencion, Cerro del Pasco, etc. In areas such [as]
Puno ani
Ayacucho where the peasants have not moved onto land yet, the law has done nothing to alleviate their plight.
What is the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary process?
The peasantry in Peru today is a major revolutionary force, but in the long run once they obtain land, the peasants become bourgeois. The working class is the only guarantee in the long run of a socialist revolution. Our work was concentrated in the countryside, but only our limited resources prevented us from developing the struggle on a national basis -- in the factories as well as in the fields.
Would you care to evaluate Peruvian left-wing politics today?
Iwo positive factors have emerged in recent years on the Peruvian left: the breaking down of sectarianism, including amongst our own people, and the willingness to work with other revolutionaries; and the growing tendency among the left to see the need for armed struggle. The big problem for the Peruvian left continues to be its isolation from the mass struggle.
How do you explain the exceptional the fact that nature of your own career,_ you left the university and became a revolutionary socialist organizer when 95% of Latin-American left-wing students upon graduation become bourgeois conformists?
Up till now the Peruvian students have lacked the will to integrate themselves on a continuous and serious basis in the workers' and peasants' struggles. When the students take this leap it will be magnificent. Students with great heroism preferred to go to the mountains and become guerrillas but not to work with the masses. Many are disposed to die for the revolution, but few are willing to live to make the revolution. There is great revolutionary potential in the Peruvian masses that students have not seriously considered. For example, when the sol was recently devaluated, thousands of Peruvian workers spontaneously struck, but since there was no political leadership little else occurred.
The peasants also have great revolutionary potential. In Puno and Juarez there is a very militant peasant movement, but they lack a revolutionary vanguard. In Puno, the wealthy bourgeois family, the Cacires brothers, end up directing
Paris
Thousands of Jouth staged lightning actions in several parts of Paris February 14 in defiance of the Gaullist ban on demonstrations, giving a militant answer to the government's new persecutions of student revolutionists.
Some 2,000 young people staged a surprise march around the Reuilly recruiting center. They stoned the building and burned an effigy of a uniformed military man. The students completed their demonstration and dispersed peacefully before the police arrived.
At the Gare de l'Est train station 2,000 assembled for a demonstration but were barred from entering by a heavy deployment of uniformed police and plainclothesmen. About 100 students were able to enter the station on trains from the suburbs. They distributed leaflets to commuters, shouted slogans, and sang the "Internationale" before they were attacked by the police.
The cops threw a dragnet around the station. All those who looked like students and could not prove that they lived in the suburbs were arrested and sent to the Beaujon police station for identification. Police later told the press that 694 persons were taken in for questioning.
Other demonstrations took place late the same afternoon in the Rue du 4- Septembre and the Rue Réaumur.
The demonstrations were called to the discontented peasantry.
What is your view of the recent guerrilla struggles?
The guerrillas were not successful mainly because they did not have a firm social base. They had little mass popular backing to sustain them.
What do you think of Régis Debray's book, _
"Revolution in the Revolution?"?
'My main criticism is that he lacks a conception of a party, he sees the foco as a panacea for all Latin America. There is no specific analysis of the conditions in each country. Peruvian revolutionary politics cannot be advanced by such an arbitrary approach. Only by being part of a mass movement will the armed struggle develop successfully.
protest the drafting of eleven student activists who lost their military deferments when they were expelled from the Sorbonne February 3 along with twentythree other revolutionary-socialist student leaders.
The expelled students were accused of organizing two "invasions" of university property: one was a showing of banned films of the May events at the Lycée Saint-Louis; the other was a mass meeting in the Sorbonne courtyard to protest the rescinding of scholarships of politically active students.
The Paris daily Le Monde conceded February 15 that the student action at Reuilly at least had been a notable success. It granted that the size of the turnout was significant, given the conditions under which it had to be organized and the fact that two broad campus organizations had opposed the action: the UNEF [Union Nationale des Etudiants Français -- National Union of French Students] and SNESup [Syndicat National de l'Enseignement Supérieur -- National University Teachers Union].
The aspect of the February 14 events which most disturbed the astute capitalist journal was the harsh attitude taken by the police, which threatened to touch off new explosions by French youth.
Referring to the mass round-up of young people in the vicinity of the Gare de 1 'Est, Le Monde asked if the government did not risk "institutionalizing a kind of masked civil war between youth and the police."
PARIS STUDENTS DEMONSTRATE AGAINST GAULLIST REPRESSION PARIS STUDENTS DEMONSTRATE AGAINST GAULLIST REPRESSION
PORIOCARRERO'S SAN QUINTIN MESSAGE
LEfforts are being continued to bring international pressure to bear against the military junta in Peru to grant Elio Portocarrero Ríos his democratic rights. As reported in Intercontinental Press February 10, he is still being held in Lambayeque prison under inhuman conditions in reprisal for joining with the prisoners in his previous jail in protesting the diversion of funds earmarked for kitchen supplies.
[The following message from him, written while he was being held in San Quintín prison, provides additional details concerning his case.]
was tortured both physically and mentally. I was held in seclusion for a month in the División de Seguridad del Estado [State Security Division]. My wife was shot in the hand when I was arrested, and other members of my family have been arrested, threatened, or tortured. They have tried by every means to force them to inform on my comrades in struggle and to make me betray my revolutionary convictions.
But the repressive bodies are not satisfied.
all this off, I am be "tried" by a military tribunal which
Man octoBer Ricardo a Ma, and threatened with the death penalty, that
The APRA-Belaúnde* regime, the
It is tryin" aisappearances" and murders.
my of the Peruvian people, is trying to
They are persecuting the fighters of 1965 with the sinister intention of physically liquidating them. Our enemies are well aware of the liberating power that lies in the example of the guerrilla commanders, who fell in battle, and of the danger constituted by the survival of men who know how to fight, arms in hand.
Many guerrillas and revolutionists have perished as victims of this criminal repressive policy. Carlos Valderrama, Máximo Velando, Basilio Chanta, Edwin García, and Enrique Amaya, among others, were murdered after their capture, in flagrant violation of the judicial norms in this country.
Finally it was my fate to fall into the hands of the repressive forces. I
* From the 1963 elections to the military coup ousting President Belaúnde Ierry last Octuber, control of parliament was divided between two rivals: the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana [American People's Revolutionary Alliancel, an old reformist party turned rightward; and Belaunde's latecoming reformist party, Accion Popular [People's Action]. -- I.P.
Some 4,000 doctors attached to the Ministry of Health in Venezuela ended a two-week strike, according to the February 16-17 Le Monde. The doctors struck February 4 for wage increases, modernizais, with legalized murder.
In the next few days I am to be taken to the city of Chiclayo by members of the Policía de Investigaciones [the ill-famed Peruvian political policel. I cannot be sure that they will not take advantage of this occasion to have me "commit suicide" -- as in the case of Velando -- or murder me openly on a pretext of "attempted escape" - as the peasant leader Juan Paucarcaja was murdered in Satipo.
However, whatever the penalties this corrupt and antipopular government may subject me to, I maintain and will maintain publicly the revolutionary positions which I have defended, arms in hand. Without a revolution our country cannot escape from the abysmal vassalage and exploitation to which American imperialism subjects us. And there is no other road for the Peruvian revolution than the road of guerrilla struggle.
As a member and leader of the MIR [Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria -- Movement of the Revolutionary leftl, the organization of Luís de la Puente, Guillermo Lobatón, and Máximo Velando, I call on the Peruvian people to continue their revolutionary struggle indefatigably until the final victory. Neither repression, murders, nor Yankee intervention can long prevent our national and social liberation.
San Quintín September 24, 1968
ion oi equipment, and the right to participate in planning. President elect Caldera promised a "favorable and honorable" settlement, but there was no indication of the terms of the agreement.