MONDE" OUTLINES HUGO BLANCO CASE
[The following is a translation by World Outlook of an article which appeared in the Paris daily Le Monde of December 7. The author is Marcel Niedergang, the well-known specialist in Latin-American affairs who contributes regularly to the influential French newspaper. The headline on the article reads, "Already Condemned to 25 Years in Prison -- the Peruvian Union Leader Hugo Blanco Is Threatened with the Death Penalty. "]
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Already condemned to twenty-five years in prison, incarcerated in a dungeon in the fortress-prison El Frontén in Peru, Hugo Blanco, young peasant union leader and head of the FIR (Revolutionary Left Front), is threatened, as we have previously reported, with a new trial and the death sentence.
Following his being sentenced to twenty-five years in prison by a military tribunal at Surena-de-Tacna, Hugo Blanco filed an appeal. After examining the dossier, the prosecuting attorney Ruiz de Somocursio held that "the crimes of premeditation, perfidy and cruelty" charged against the peasant leader deserved "capital punishment." At the same time, the prosecuting attorney demanded an increase in the sentence of twenty-two years in prison already imposed during the same trial on Pedro Candela, who is considered by the authorities to be a "lieutenant of Hugo Blanco."
Of what "perfidy" and "cruelty" were these men guilty to make them subject to sentences that are so obviously excessive that they have begun to arouse indignation in broad sectors of public opinion in the United States and Europe, where even the military tribunals of the most authoritarian countries no longer venture to practice such extreme harshness?
In 1961, Hugo Blanco, a student of agronomy, a generous idealist, revolted by the immense misery of the Indian peasants in the high Andean valleys, who are subjected to feudalistic exploitation, decided to help these serfs try to win a better life. He ran up against the two main obstacles that have blocked and continue to block all those
who cannot acquiesce, out of regard for dignity and justice, in the Peru of the mountains living in the Middle Ages while the Peru of the coast lives, at least for the privileged classes, in the twentieth century: First of all, the instinctive distrust of the rough and simple men of the altiplano toward "strangers" from Lima. Next, and above all, the archaic but powerful structures of a "slave-like" social system in which the “gamonal," the foreman, is the executive and repressive agent of a big landholder, living most often far from his lands.
However, very quickly, Hugo Blanco succeeded in organizing in the Cuzco region, a "Federation of Peasants of the Valley of la Convencién.” Located in Quillabamba, surrounded by dynamic "advisers," explaining to the peasants how, concretely, they had the possibility of exercizing the rights denied them for four centuries, Hugo Blanco succeeded in building -- something never before seen in these desolate highlands -- schools and dispensaries. The movement widened and took over the entire valley.
Headed by a banner bearing the national emblem of Peru, escorted by women and children, columns of thousands of peasants, their cheeks burned by the cutting winds of the sierra, started out on "peaceful marches" from their villages toward abandoned land or land notoriously uncultivated by the “hacenderos." Utilizing titles going back to the "ayllus," the Indian communities of the period preceding the Spanish conquest, the peasants installed themselves on the lands which they held belonged to them and waited for the authorities to.recognize their "rights."
No violence occurred at the beginning of this movement of revolt which caught the landowners and the government by surprise. But incidents inevitably flared up and multiplied between the hated “gamonales" and the landless peasants. An order was issued to arrest Hugo Blanco. On November 14, 1962, two policemen fired at the union leader. He fired back, killing a policeman and wounding another. In flight, he still succeeded in organizing mass meetings on the theme, "Land or Death." Abandoned and betrayed, he was captured on May 30, 1963. Lo *
"Then, wrote Hugo Neira, a young student of Lima who witnessed the "peaceful marches" of the. peasants, "the police took Blanco to Quillabamba like a martyr, barefooted and naked from the waist up, wounded, looking like a dying man. I saw people crying..."
The arrest did not immediately stop the movement to "take possession of the land." Almost three hundred haciendas were occupied before the end of 1963, and in December the unions staged a demonstration to win Hugo Bianco's release that was unsuccessful.
It was in this same region of La Convencién that a "guerrilla focal center" appeared in the spring of 1965. Imis de la Puente Uceda, leader of the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) and his friends Guillermo Labatén (who did postgraduate work in France and married a French girl), Héctor Béjar, Elio Portocarrero and other militants of the MIR, unleashed an armed insurrectional movement in hope ‘of creating "a revolutionary situation." Eight months later an offensive of the Peruvian "special forces," having at their disposal unlimited means had crushed the main centers of the insurrection. Bs
In April 1964, while incarcerated in Arequipa, Hugo Blanco, in a letter to his friends, had prophetically indicated the reasons for the defeat ofan insurrection, the unleashing of which he could not foresee at the time. "A great number of peasants are ready to lay down their lives, but not to leave the land they live on. They approve the slogan: ‘Land or death!'...Out of one hundred peasants ready to struggle, ninety-nine are willing to be militiamen, only one a guerrilla. I don't want to go into details, but you can believe me: I know from experience..."
Iuis de la Puente and Guillermo Lobatén are dead. Héctor Béjar and Ricardo Gadea are threatened with capital punishment. Walter Palacios, a student leader of Lima, is in prison and has been tortured, according to the Peruvian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Man. The life of Hugo