GENERAL STRIKE IN AREQUIPA MAY MARK NEW TURN IN PERU
Although the Belafinde regime seened to have established a kind of graveyard peace in Peru, following several years of savage repression of land-hungry peasants and restless workers, that peace may now be on the verge of being shattered by a new rise in the class struggle.
The basic reason for the turn is the grave inflation and economic stagnation affecting the country.
The price of fish meal, which accounted for 27 percent of export earnings in 1966, suddenly dropped late last year from US$143 to $107 a ton.
The cost to produce a ton of fish meal in Peru is about $130. The manufacturers decided to stockpile the product pending a more favorable price. Thus an important source of foreign exchange declined precipitately.
At the same time, military expenditures for the "gorillas" in charge of keeping down the peasants and workers, rose to new heights, further dislocating the budget.
On September 1, Belatinde met this situation in the customary fashion of dictatorial regimes like his. He devalued Peru's money, reducing the sol from 26.80 to the dollar to 40.
Belainde's finance minister, Tulio de Andrea, said that Peru could look forward to a “shining future" so long as a sound budget was maintained. "If the situation now is difficult," he said, "it is also easy to overcome because basically our economy is sound and continues to be sound."
A newspaper columnist in lima was less optimistic. Noting that the government wanted to cut imports by 50 percent in 1968 to check the outflow of dollars and to curb inflation, he commented: "This will happen because 50 percent of our people will be dead of starvation."
In Arequipa, Lima's second city (160,000 inhabitants), the workers were unwilling to die of starvation for the sake of balancing Balatinde's budget and keeping the military supplied with U.S. armaments. They demanded a 30 percent increase in wages to make up for the 35 percent devaluation of the sol and its immediate reflection in soaring prices for basic necessities.
When they got no satisfaction, they decided to call a general strike. This went into effect on October 19. The city of Arequipa, some 700 miles south of Lima, was sewed up tight.
The strike began with militant demonstrations. The strikers sought to block the railway line. They sent rocks sailing through the windows of some of the stores.
The police responded in the typical way of the police of Peru. They moved brutally against the demonstrators. Twenty were injured and about 100 arrested. But this did not have the expected effect. It did not halt the strike.
The government decided to follow up with more serious action. It suspended the sectors of the constitution guaranteeing civil rights and civil liberties. But the strikers refused to give up their struggle and the entire city remained paralyzed.
On October 23 the Confederation of Workers went into action in Lima, staging a demonstration at the government palace.
Fighting flared as the police again resorted to their favorite tactic: raw violence.
The general strike lasted in Arequipa for a solid eight days before it came to an end.
Details were not indicated in the papers outside Peru, but the government apparently made a significant concession to the workers in both Arequipa and Lima.
The Belatinde regime proclaimed that the ending of the strike action indicated that things were again well in hand.
However, it was also clear that Belainde feared a grave social and political crisis was in the making, for he held secret meetings with Victor Ral Haya de la Torre, who stands more or less for the liberal bourgeois opposition, and Manuel A. Odria, the retired general who was dictator of Peru from 1948 to 1956 and is
still a powerful figure among the most reactionary circles.
It remains to be seen whether this tentative coalition can be cemented into something durable. That it could block a fresh upsurge in the class struggle seems highly dubious.
An average per capita income of only $267 a year is clearly far below what is needed to keep body and soul together among the workers and peasants upon whom the entire society rests.