WOULD PREVENT MORE VIETNAMS ..." -- SIDNEY LENS |.
(The following. statement by Sidney Lens, the well-known union official and writer, was sent to a meeting held in solidarity with Hugo Blanco at the Friday Night: Socialist _ Forum in Chicago February 24. J
The crime for which Hugo Blanco has been imprisoned is that he fought to win land for landless peasants, he fought to retrieve plots that were stolen from the poor Indians in the first place.
In our topsy-turvy world this struggle for social justice is adjudged a crime ,° but
the robbery and exploitation by. the landlord classes of Peru, aided and abetted by the American State Department, is considered "responsible" behavior. Despite all the Alliance for Progress talk of social reform and despite President Belatinde's talk of land reform everyone knows that this is empty rhetoric.
Huga Blanco tried to make that empty rhetoric a reality for the injured and oppressed. Far from being a criminal he has associated himself with Man's noblest ideals. I salute him and I condemn the men who have imprisoned him as the true criminals.
Peru may seem a long way off to most of us, but it is a shorter distance from Chicago to Lima than from Chicago to Saigon; and the struggle of the peasant in Peru is not much different from the struggle of the peasant in Vietnam. In both cases the myopia of American policy leads the common man, in self-defense, to take extreme measures. Hugo Blanco in Peru was an expression of that sense of desperation, just as was the resistance of the poor peasant in Vietnam to Diem, Kahn and now Ky.
If we would prevent more Vietnams it is incumbent that we defend the native leaders like Hugo Blanco who have already sacrificed so much for the cause of the common man.