Vol. 4, No. 38 December 2, 1966
DEMONSTRATION FOR HUGO BLANCO AT PERUVIAN UNITED NATIONS MISSION
A petition, appealing for amnesty for the Peruvian peasant leader Hugo Blanco, was taken to the Peruvian Mission to the United Nations in New York City November 22 by John Gerassi, Felix McGowan and Paul Sweezy, officers of the newly established U.S. Committee for Justice to Latin American Political Prisoners. However, the petition could not be delivered for the time being. The mission had locked its doors.
The petition had been circulated and signed by students on New York campuses after news from Peru indicated that Blanco's appeal to the Supreme Council of Military Justice against his 25-year sentence in the dungeons of El Frontén had led to a new demand by military authorities for the death penalty.
Some 130 pickets, representing the Pro Independence Movement of Puerto Rico, the Young Socialist Alliance, the DuBois Club, the Socialist Workers party, Spartacus League
New York, N. Y. 10010. Sus
and student groups, marched in front of the mission for an hour protesting the threat to the peasant leader's life. Their signs read: "Down with Belatinde's Democratic Farce"; "Free Hugo Blanco Now!"; "Support the Just Struggles of the Latin American People"; "Free Latin American Trotskyists." :
A heavy police detail encircled the shouting pickets but did not attack them.
Hugo Blanco, the noted leader of the Cuzco Peasant Federation, was tried by a military court and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in September, after having been held incommunicado in prison at Arequipa for three years. When his counsel appealed the savage sentence, prosecutor Alberto Vargas Ruiz moved that it be changed to the death penalty. The Supreme Council of Military Justice, the highest court for military trials, heard the appeal November 7-12.
; After the picketing, the committee officers addressed a brief meeting of the demonstrators across the street from the mission. "This first action is only part of the big job that has to be done in acquainting the people of the United States with what is going on in Latin America," declared Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review editor.
New sponsors of the committee include Prof. Thomas I. Emerson of Yale Law School; Prof. Robert S. Cohen, chairman of the Physics Department, Boston University; Paul Booth, Students for a Democratic Society; William Kunstler, noted attorney; Sidney Lens, author; Harvey O'Connor; and André Gunder Frank of Sir George Williams University, Montreal.
ITALIAN LABOR CONFEDERATION