Long Live the Peruvian People’s War!
May 17 is the 43rd anniversary of the people's war in Peru. This revolution was extremely influential for the International Communist Movement (ICM), for its leading party, the Communist Party of Peru, synthesized Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; they took the theory of Mao Zedong Thought, and with the experience of its implementation in various people's wars the world over, they were able to develop Marxism-Leninism into its current stage. Now, we must detail how the Peruvian people were very close to seizing complete state power, how they lost a lot of their power because of imperialist reaction and revisionist betrayal, and what the situation is today.
Like all of the countries with ongoing people’s wars, Peru is a bureaucratic-comprador capitalist country. The PCP analyzed Peruvian society in its book, General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru; specifically, it did this in “The Character of Contemporary Peruvian Society”, which is Section Two of Chapter Three (all emphasis is the author’s):
Later, in characterizing contemporary Peruvian society, Chairman Gonzalo says: “… contemporary Peru is a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society in which bureaucratic capitalism develops.” Although Mariátegui had defined this well in Point Three of the Program of the Constitution of the Party, it is in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally of Maoism, that Chairman Gonzalo has demonstrated how this semi-feudal and semi-colonial character maintains itself and develops new modalities, and in particular how bureaucratic capitalism has developed on this foundation throughout the entire process of contemporary society. This a question of transcendent importance in order to understand the character of society and of the Peruvian revolution. …
Why is Peru semi-feudal? Chairman Gonzalo states: “The decrepit semi-feudal system continues subsisting and marks the country from its deepest foundations to its most elaborate ideas. In essence, it persistently maintains the land question unresolved, which is the motor of the class struggle of the peasantry, especially of the poor peasants that are the immense majority.” He stresses that the land question continues subsisting because the semi-feudal relationships of exploitation allow semi-feudalism to evolve, and it is the basic problem of society that is expressed in land, servitude, and gamonalismo.(1) We must see these conditions in all their aspects, economic, political, and ideological, in both the base and superstructure. The peasantry constitutes about 60% of the population, which for centuries has worked the land, but it is tied to big property and to servitude. He teaches us that a great concentration of land exists in a few hands, with both associative and non-associative forms, and that the immense majority of the peasantry are the poor peasants who do not have land, or if they have it they are very few, thus giving rise to the minifundio [small landowners] submitted to the voracity of the latifundio [large landowners].
…Why is it semi-colonial? Chairman Gonzalo teaches us that the modern Peruvian economy was born subjugated to imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, which was masterfully characterized as monopolistic, parasitical and moribund. Imperialism, even though it consents to our political independence as long as it serves its interests, still controls the entire economic process of Peru: our natural wealth, export products, industry, banking and finances. In synthesis, it sucks the blood of our people, devours our energies of a nation in formation, and most strikingly today it exploits us and other oppressed nations with external debt.
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Peru’s economy is semi-feudal, so it has capitalist production in industry, but agriculture is still feudal, with landlords dominating and subjugating peasants. Peru is semi-colonial, meaning that it is only independent in form; in essence, imperialists are able to extract superprofits from the country, impoverishing the proletariat and the Peruvian people as a whole. Therefore, the PCP confirmed that its revolution would have to be a New-Democratic revolution, just like the revolutions in China, India, the Philippines, and Turkey were/are.
The Peruvian communists were responsible for synthesizing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Led by Chairman Gonzalo, and with their alliance with the people, they were able to take control of 70% of Peru after starting their people’s war in 1980. They were also able to fight off the large fascist state of Peru, and they resisted its genocides against indigenous people. The PCP even had to fight rival “leftist” groups in Peru, like the “Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement” (MRTA, abbreviated in Spanish) which was a revisionist, pro-Soviet-imperialist organization that ended up having its cadres join the Peruvian government to fight the PCP.
Chairman Gonzalo reconstituted the Communist Party of Peru in 1969, around the time of the start of the Indian and Philippine people’s wars. Having been in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he learned about Mao Zedong Thought and sought to try practicing it in Peru. The old PCP—which had been around since 1928, founded by José Carlos Mariátegui—had turned revisionist, and the Chinese faction of that party became the “Communist Party of Peru—Red Flag” (PCP-BR), later renamed to the “PCP (Marxist-Leninist)” (PCP (ML)); that party itself was also revisionist, so two more parties came about: the “Communist Party of Peru—Red Fatherland” (PCP-PR, a party that would engage in electoralism and Dengite revisionism), and the actual Communist Party of Peru (PCP), the latter of whom was the anti-revisionist party that Gonzalo founded. By reconstituting the PCP, Gonzalo revived the party’s anti-revisionist past. He created a Marxist-Leninist, pro-Mao Zedong Thought party.
The people’s war in Peru began in 1980, when PCP cadres burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi, in the Ayacucho region of Peru, a region that is in the Andean mountains; this region was, and still is, poor compared to other regions of Peru. For a long time, Peru was a military dictatorship, and 1980 was the first year of elections in a long time; many so-called “communist” parties supported involvement in the elections to attempt to take state power. Only the new PCP and some other parties had a correct line on the issue; Gonzalo explained this in his interview, saying:
In Peru it can be seen that there is a crisis every 10 years in the second half of the decade and each crisis is worse than the one before. We also analyzed bureaucrat capitalism, which makes conditions more ripe for revolution. In 1980, the government was to change hands through elections, which meant that the new government would need a year and a half to two years to fully put in place the operations of its State. So we concluded that bureaucrat capitalism had ripened the conditions for revolution, and that the difficult decade of the '80s approached—with crisis, an elected government, etc. All this provided a very favorable conjuncture for initiating the people's war and refuted the position that armed struggle, or in our case people's war, cannot be initiated when there’s a new government events have demonstrated the incorrectness of that position. Such was our evaluation, and such was the situation as the new government took over, that is, the military, having left the government after ruling for 12 years, could not easily take up the struggle against us right away, nor could they immediately take the helm of state again because they were worn down and had become discredited. These were the concrete facts, the reality.
Prior to that time, we had already put forward that participation in the Constituent Assembly was incorrect, that the only thing to do was to boycott it, because to participate in the Constituent Assembly was simply to serve the restructuring of the Peruvian State and to produce a constitution like the one we have. All this was foreseeable, there was nothing that could not be foreseen in this case. Therefore, we had planned for some time to lay the basis to initiate the people's war, to make our move before the new government took office, which is what we did. We began the armed struggle on May 17, the day before the elections.
We thought that under these conditions we could initiate our actions and even unfold them broadly and advance to the greatest extent possible—and that is exactly what we did.
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As said at the beginning, the PCP, through its theoretical studies as well as practical applications of its theory, was able to synthesize Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the third and (so far) highest development of Marxism. By applying the theory of protracted people’s war to Peru, they were able to prove that it is a universal theory that, like all universal ideas and strategies, must be applied with attention to the particular conditions surrounding it in an area. The Peruvian communists did this by focusing on the nature that bureaucratic-comprador capitalism took in Peru, much like the Indian, Filipino, and Turkish comrades did. The Peruvian people’s three weapons were constructed appropriately, i.e. by concentric construction. This allowed it to organize in such a way that the masses would protect the party, supervise it from revisionist takeover, and democratically control the army; it also allowed the party to lead the masses, and it allowed the army to lead the people’s war. That is why we consider the concentric construction to be a universal tactic.
The PCP had to fight the police in its initial struggle; it was not big enough to become a serious military threat, despite being a militarized party. In late 1982 or early 1983, the Peruvian military was called in to suppress this people’s war. In response to that, the Peruvian comrades founded the People’s Guerrilla Army (PGA), the people’s army, with all of the people’s militias combined; the militias were groups of the armed people, and uniting them into an army allowed for the people’s war to develop. The PGA is “organized into squads, companies and battalions in the countryside and in special detachments and people’s militias in the cities [Source],” and the countryside troops are divided into main, local, and base forces, presumably with squads, companies, and battalions within each force. There are support bases, guerrilla zones, operational zones, and points of action, all of which “constitute the environment in which the new State develops and are key to maintaining the strategic course [Source]”. The united front is the new state and its allies: the People’s Committees, which were government bodies of the workers, peasants, etc., the Revolutionary Front for the Defense of the People in the countryside, and the Revolutionary Movement for the Defense of the People in the cities. All of these bodies within the base areas created the New-Democratic People’s Republic of Peru.
Like the other revolutions, the Peruvian revolution had a large involvement of women. 40% of the soldiers and 50% of the leaders were women. While the reactionary state’s soldiers and police took liberties with women, the PCP empowered them to fight the patriarchy and sexism they faced.
The PCP grew with an aim to fight against what they saw as an unjust class society. …
These four aspects, the poverty problem that were in Peru, the change in women’s status in Peruvian society, the expansion of university education and the impact that the Cuban revolution had in the Peruvian society was the background for the cultivation of the PCP. These historical factors are not all the factors that influenced the rise of the PCP, but it is vital to understand the role of women in the party. These four aspects are important in relation to my focus, how to understand why these women joined the party and what they fought for in the PCP. …
The representation of female fighters often comes as a shocking image to society as a whole. …
The PCP opened up a space for female participation and had a political discourse of wanting to change the old system of discrimination towards women. These two factors appealed to women from different sectors in society and especially to women that did not have their professional expectations met in the job market because of gender discrimination (Portugal 2008:37-38). Professional women were encouraged by the PCP to enter the party and to break with traditional societal gender norms. …
In the PCP there was a high percentage of female fighters. The estimated percentage differs among academics, Starn (1995) estimated the number to be about one third of the total members in 1990, higher than any other legal left party in Peru at the time. It is also known that women filled positions at all levels, holding eight out of 19 slots in the Central Committee (Starn 1995) and at the same time almost always had a woman as their second leader in rank. The first woman to hold this position was Augusta la Torre and now the second leader in rank is Elena Iparraguirre. Giving women opportunities to participate in the PCP appealed to young educated women at the time; women who thought that by joining the PCP they could transform society and their success was almost guaranteed (Starn 1995).
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The PCP advanced in its struggle for state power. The Peruvian people were already building New Democracy within the liberated areas, and 70% of the country had guerilla activities. The Peruvian state, noticing the crisis they experienced due to the PCP and the MRTA, used genocidal tactics against the indigenous people and against the Peruvian people. The 1980s was characterized by the PCP’s major growth; fascistic repression began in 1981, and the Peruvian people opposed this, boosting their support of the PCP. The PCP was really close to winning by the early 1990s, with most people in the liberated areas supporting them and with an urban armed strike in Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1991. The Peruvian state was losing support really fast, and having lost most of the countryside and even many of its urban proletariat to the PCP, it had to act fast.
The state, under the new Alberto Fujimori, drastically increased repression, causing much violence and suffering for the Peruvian people to combat the PCP and the MRTA. In 1992, Chairman Gonzalo, two thirds of the Politburo, and 19 of the 22 members of the Central Committee of the PCP were captured [Source]. The state gave life imprisonment to Chairman Gonzalo without proper trial. After his capture, the state lied, claiming that Gonzalo called for surrender in two letters that he “wrote”; analysts and scientists who studied these situations were suspicious of these claims, and they accused the fascist state of forgery and torture techniques. Either Gonzalo was tortured into writing these letters, or such “letters” were forged altogether. Either way, bourgeois media claimed that there was a two-line struggle over these letters, and it claimed that Gonzalo took the rightist line; this was not true.
In the 22nd issue of A World to Win, a magazine unofficially affiliated with the RIM, there is an article called, “For Your Reference: A Response to the 'Investigators' of RIM”. This article explains the supposed two-line struggle that Gonzalo “started” with his “capitulation”. It says:
In history we can find many cases of revolutionaries having to face frauds concocted by experts in anti-insurgency struggle. The most elementary manual of counter-insurgency procedures shows the two main methods for destroying a communist organization or a revolutionary process. The first method is to use violence and outright repression. This method makes use of the military superiority and the ample resources of the state. The second method uses the system of psychological warfare. It makes use of the enormous publicity machine in the hands of the reactionary state. This method aims at weakening and undermining the ideological and organizational capacity of the party leading the revolution. Its objectives are: Dividing, disorganizing and slandering the revolutionary organization, isolating it from the masses while generating capitulationism. Usually, psychological warfare makes use of infiltrated agents within the party, or renegades and turncoats that have gone over to the ranks of the enemy. Both methods are generally used in combination within a single counter-insurgency strategy.
It is an ideological and political error not to differentiate between a police plot and a two-line struggle. What is the gist of the “peace letters”? Where and how were these concocted? The “peace letters” were fabricated in the offices of the Intelligence Service of the Peruvian state (SIN). These letters did not originate in any Party organism, nor are these the product of any internal process of debate within the Communist Party of Peru.
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In short, the “letters” and the “line struggle” from said letters were a reactionary plot designed to weaken the PCP and the people’s war. They were made to divide, disorganize, slander, and isolate the PCP and other people’s organizations.
This does not mean that there was no line struggle at all. The plot allowed for an actual two-line struggle to develop; rightists, who support what is called the Right-Opportunist Line (ROL), within the Peruvian revolutionary movement actually believed the state’s claims, so they gave up on the revolution, becoming capitulationists. The primary organization responsible for this is the “Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights” (MOVADEF). By spreading the lie that Gonzalo sought an end to the people’s war, they helped the Peruvian state discourage the masses from continuing their struggle. This tactic worked against the PCP, with cadres giving up on the people’s war and listening to MOVADEF’s calls for capitulation. Unlike what bourgeois media said, though, Gonzalo did not call for surrender, so he stood with the left line in the PCP.
In addition to that rightist line, there were certain groups that nominally claimed to be continuing the people’s war to justify their deviations and criminal, reactionary practices. The most notable of these is the so-called “Militarized Communist Party of Peru” (MPCP), formerly known as the “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party of Peru” (PCP-MLM). MPCP is a criminal gang founded in 1999. It denies the role of the proletariat in leading the party (revealing its true class character of being a bourgeois party) and has been explicitly homophobic. Contrary to its name, it is not a “Communist Party”, and the PCP has condemned it. It is just another right-opportunist line. The MPCP is by no means a militarized party; it is much like the MRTA that the PCP dealt with before. Still, this rightist party claims to be a successor to the PCP.
The MPCP has “self-criticized” by attacking Chairman Gonzalo and Gonzalo Thought. They did not do this in a proletarian manner; rather than pointing out faults in Gonzalo’s leadership, they repeated the same imperialist lies against the PCP’s actions that revisionists and reactionaries of all stripes have spread since before the revolution. They labeled Gonzalo and his thought “ultra-leftist”, just as many modern slanderers of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism do. They liquidated its section of the People’s Guerrilla Army by converting all forces within into “main forces”. They even engage in reformist behavior, as they often work with authorities in Peru, in their own words; they do not smash the state of the enemy, but they ally with it! This is evidence of their right-opportunism.
In a document called “For the General Reorganization of the Communist Party of Peru as Part of the Development of the People’s War to Conquer Power in the Whole Country!” by Association New Democracy (an organization of the Peru People’s Movement (PPM), the movement of Peruvian revolutionaries abroad), the authors explain the MPCP (at the time, PCP-MLM) and its revisionism:
It is necessary to see what the ROL [Right Opportunist Line] of José and his cronies puts forward accurately to be able to demolish and sweep away all the convergences with this ROL. Its content is feudal-imperialist, it is against the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo, it is against Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, it is against the Party and against the People’s War. …
On the ideological level José and his brood doesn’t do anything more than repeat what comes from the bourgeoisie in their attacks on Marxism, they don’t “contribute” anything new. They attack Gonzalo Thought as “dogmatic”, “sectarian”, “ultra leftist” like revisionists of all kinds have done since even before the initiation of the People’s War. They put themselves also, in tune with their bastard father, the agent of Yankee-CIA, Gustavo Gorriti and the hoaxes of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (CVR), trying to blame the Party for the genocide committed by Yankee-imperialism and the old landowner-bureaucratic state against our people and the Party. …
They have liquidated the special detachments, detachments and militias in the city, in the countryside they have liquidated the local forces and base forces transforming all into “main forces” –their “roaming gangs”- and in their actions an extreme conservatism are being expressed, reducing it to guerrilla combats not carrying out the other four forms of actions, expressing a roaming militarism. Concerning the Front/New State they have liquidated the generated organizations, using the pretext that “those who are for the Peace Agreement” have “usurped their names” (while saying that “the ROL has not taken even one Party apparatus”), but in reality because of their opposition to the mass line of the Party, and mainly to its proletarian military line, they follow a bourgeois military line and they have liquidated the support bases to replace them with their nefarious concept of “Mobile People's Committees”; fiercely they oppose the joint dictatorship and leave the gamonal power intact, in the cities where they oppose the sixth form of new power, the People's Struggle Committees, saying that they were an expression of “adventurism”, and “leftism” and whereas they don’t construct power in the cities, they don’t construct anything there.
This ROL, that the rat José heads, denies the role of leading class of the proletariat in the democratic revolution. Even when they speak of “the broad popular masses”, they talk about everyone (“the bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie, merchants, transporters, builders, students, intellectuals, foreign industrialists that are being oppressed and constrained”), but not mentioning the proletariat…, and they reach the extreme of putting forward “we respect the big bourgeoisie and the feudal landowners that are pro-northamerican but do not fight against the revolution”. These confessions by the miserable ones themselves show that they do not have a trace of proletarian vanguard, no trace of Communist Party which leads the People's War to realize the democratic revolution, but they are a group that is militaristic, a band of mercenaries. Its feudal-imperialist character is also very clearly expressed in its arch-reactionary conception of the role of women in the revolution, for these rats the female comrades are second-class fighters, the servants of men and this conception they have tried to impose in a Party which had the highest percentage of feminine participation in history, the Party that generated the largest percentage number of female leaders, cadres, party members, combatants and masses of women in the history of international communist movement, they wanted to impose this in the party which generated Comrade Norah, the greatest heroine of the Party and the revolution, a great communist leader and relentless anti-revisionist fighter. …
The seriousness of the situation in the two line struggle has led to a situation where organizational problems have become absolutely subordinate. The main thing at this point in the struggle must be the ideological, because what is at stake is the color of the Party as a whole. Without unity of understanding, without unity in ideology, there is no basis for party unity. It is more necessary than ever to grasp Gonzalo Thought to solve new problems.
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While the document above refers to the MPCP’s line as right-opportunist, later documents would say the opposite, accusing it of “left”-opportunism; in truth, the opportunism of the MPCP appears to go both ways, as it combines ultra-“left” errors with clearly rightist ones:
The arrest suffered by our leadership and the central leadership is an objective fact, just as objective was later the artful and sinister capitulation of that right opportunist line that structures in prisons, policy of revision and 4 erasure of our general political line, the basis of party unity, the program and all the events, plenums, and agreements that emanated from the I Marxist Congress, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Congress, Gonzalo Thought. It is just as revisionist as the renegade of some leaders and the filthy mercenary of Jos´e and company. What ideological and political foundations have they developed? None, they have only raised a ragged flag of left opportunist line (LOL), anti-Maoist, anti-Party and anti-Gonzalo thought.
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The MPCP raises funds by engaging in drug trafficking and the exploitation of indigenous and peasant labor in drug production. It sides with the big landlords and bourgeoisie who own and control drugs that are produced for sale. This gang is a way for the state to further demonize the actual PCP and its people’s war. While bourgeois media in Peru and abroad does not distinguish between these two, blurring the line between the party of the proletariat and the party of (a section of) the bourgeoisie, the people can clearly tell the differences between the two.
The PCP operates in secluded regions of Peru. Currently, it is working to reorganize itself, as the various revisionists and state elements have been able to weaken the party. We must not be pessimistic regarding the PCP’s future; all of the other communist parties engaging in revolution had their shortcomings as the comprador bourgeoisie—through their representatives, namely opportunists of all stripes—attempted to weaken the people’s war, but none of those parties surrendered. Instead, the communists in India, the Philippines, and Turkey were able to reorganize and continue the people’s war. The Peruvian comrades are doing the same. In "We are Advocates of the Theory of the Omnipotence of Revolutionary War", Association New Democracy explains:
... [W]e have a main form of struggle, the People's War, and a main form of organization, the Army, and the mass work is carried out through the Army, all this is developed through the military plans of the People's War which are embodied in campaigns and armed actions with which the great mobilization of the masses is generated which then have to be incorporated into the Party, the Army, and the Front/New Power. The People's War is carried out throughout the breadth and length of our geography, without excluding any geographical region... [A]ctions are carried out not only in the countryside, but also in the city. ...
[W]hat corresponds is to continue the task of the general reorganization of the [PCP] in the midst of the People's War to carry it forward victoriously until the conquest of power in the entire country and culminate the democratic revolution, under the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo and Gonzalo Thought, which is the center of Party unification and the guarantee of triumph that leads us to Communism. For us in particular to continue with the construction at all levels, today focusing on the reorganization of the PPM, fulfilling our three established tasks and the two campaigns, mainly the defense of our Great Leadership as the key link that allows us to pull everything.
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The reorganization of the PCP required Peruvian communists’ struggle against the right-opportunist lines in Peru today. While the reformist line is the stronger and more-dangerous one right now, the “militarized” revisionists are also threatening. However, the Peruvian communists never gave up armed struggle. In the Interview with Comrade Laura, Laura of the PCP says:
The imperialists and the revisionists, in holy alliance, shout to the wind, the supposed defeat of the Party, the defeat of socialism, the expiration of Marxism. We warn you, no matter how many cannons fire, no matter how much they unload devastating blows, prepare the most cunning genocide against the people, they will not be able to prevail. We are ready to cross the river of blood that the revolution demands, to achieve our unalterable goal, communism. The universal validity of Maoism is for us the highest science of the revolution and a thunderous wake-up call for the imperialists, revisionists and opportunists of all kinds. The truth of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, is irresistible. The popular masses will invariably rise up in revolution. The world revolution will triumph inexorably. This is demanded by Maoism and we will comply.
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We wish for all the best for the PCP in its reorganization and the expansion of the people’s war in the new future! Because the party represents the people, it cannot fail, even if it has setbacks like it has right now. If you have the typical objections thrown at the PCP and the Peruvian people's war, please read our previous text defending the party.