Blanco!" The students shouted "fascist" at the Peruvian diplomat. The newspapers published candid photographs of the unlucky princess. She was on the run, with students close behind, shouting in favor of Hugo Blanco.
-4W
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S PLEA FOR HUGO BLANCO
Jean-Paul Sartre, the main speaker at the huge meeting sponsored by the War Crimes Tribunal in Paris November 28 [see World Outlook December 16] against the escalating war in Vietnam, went out of his way to express solidarity with Hugo Blanco, who is threatened with the death sentence. The following is the text of Sartre's remarks on this point:
"The struggle of the Vietnamese people is the main combat being carried on today against American imperialism. It is not the only one. In Peru, the former student and great peasant leader, Hugo Blanco, is threatened with being shot any day.
"His crime: to have unionized the most poverty-stricken rural area of the country for the first time. Unionized and educated, the peasants began to recuperate the land which the big landowners had stolen from them; and began demanding a better standard of living. Their movement ran up against the ‘democracy' of the military -- violence.
“Hundreds of peasants were massacred, and, in the struggle, three policemen were killed. It is for the death of these puppets that Blanco must now 'pay.'
"Imprisoned in 1963, tried in September 1966, condemned to 25 years in prison by a military tribunal, the judgment is being reconsidered right now. A month after the meeting of the heads of the inter-American armies in Buenos Aires -- the armed forces seek his death.
"Hugo Blanco was not an armed combatant -- his movement was purely unionist. He should not have been tried by a military court but by a civilian tribunal. He sought economic development and human advancement for the most poverty-stricken workers in the world. He does not merit death.
"The sentence demanded against Hugo Blanco (and the comrades imprisoned with him who have asked to share his fate) would constitute a series of judicial murders perpetrated against the peasants' and workers' union leaders, and threatens all Peruvians who seek a genuine change in their country."
SOME ot Hugo Blanco's codefendants at the trial in Tacna, Peru, in September. Second from right is Tiburcio Bolafios. A landowner, after raping Bolanos' wife and daughter, tried to have the humble peasant imprisoned. Bolanos went to Hugo Blanco for help. This was the beginning of the specific series of events that led to the death of three policemen, the eventual arrest of Hugo Blanco, his trial and condemnation to 25 years in prison. When Hugo Blanco appealed the savage sentence, the prosecution demanded the death penalty. This is now being weighed by the Supreme Council of Military Justice. At the end of the Tacna trial, the court freed Bolanos. He had spent three years in prison under brutal conditions waiting to be tried. Bolanos set out for the Cuzco region not knowing whether he still had a home or even if his wife and family were still alive.