What is happening in Peru that is so alarming to the imperialists, especially the chiefs of Yankee imperialism? Why are the peoples of the world following the development of the class struggle in that country with such interest and great hope? It is because the People's War that continues to advances. It is because of the strategic equilibrium that has been reached. It is because of the brilliant perspective for the proletariat and people of Peru to seize power throughout the entire country!
I. THE BEGINNINGS
On May 17, 1980, the People's War was launched, led by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) under the leadership of President Gonzalo and the Central Committee. The objectives of the PCP were and are clear and precise: demolish the old reactionary state, build a state of New Democracy, seize power nationwide, continue without interruption to the socialist revolution, and follow through with cultural revolutions until Communism. Since then, 17 years have passed, and today the political landscape in Peru has changed radically. The Peruvian people have created and are defending with arms a new power, the People's Republic of New Democracy, materialized through hundreds of People's Committees, today in open People's Committees, defiant in the light of the sun. The surrounding of the cities by the People's Army from the countryside grows rapidly, and the day is not far off when the seizure of power will lead to the creation of the People's Republic of Peru.
The red flag with hammer and sickle flutters proud and triumphant, calling the Peruvian people to develop the People's War even more. This is what fill the imperialists and all reactionaries with dread and hatred. This is what inflames the revolutionary passions of the Peruvian people and the peoples' of the world!
Since the beginning the People's War has developed through guerrilla warfare. After the eighth year, with the celebration of the historic First Congress of the PCP (1988), the People's War took a qualitative leap by introducing mobile warfare. Today this superior form of People's War has gained unprecedented strength.
II. STRATEGIC EQUILIBRIUM
At the launching of the People's War, the enemy, the landlord-bureaucratic state and their reactionary armed forces, backed-up mainly by Yankee imperialism, was much stronger than the forces of the revolution. The People's War had to fight through ten years of constant combat in the strategic defensive stage in order to reach the strategic equilibrium. Today in Peru with the strategic equilibrium, the reactionaries are desperately trying to recover positions to maintain their rotten system. For the people, the equilibrium is the stage for preparing the strategic offensive toward the building of the seizure of power; when mobile warfare is developed and the preparations for insurrection are pushed forward, the base areas are building a relative stability. In a civil war like Peru's, the strategic defensive is the longest stage, then comes the stage of strategic equilibrium, while the offensive is the shortest stage. Thus, in Peru the revolution so far has passed through the longest part of the road, and the end is in sight: the seizure of power nationwide.
In 1991, the simple phrase greeted by the PCP on reaching the strategic equilibrium was enough to cause the reactionaries to tremble in fear and make the revisionists' teeth chatter. The reactionaries led by Fujimori and his armed forces have shouted, have screamed and even carried out bloody military operations, gorging themselves as always on the unarmed masses, massacring hundreds of prisoners of war, destroying and burning entire villages in the countryside, invading homes and killing defenseless people in the shanty towns, trampling on their own bourgeois laws and dissolving Congress and the judiciary with a military coup, in order to engender through fire and blood a new Constitution for swine, creating a reactionary legislative power overnight, the so-called Constituent Congress (CCD) which is totally submissive to the dictatorship. Finally, in order to "legitimize" themselves they carry out the presidential elections of 1995; which resulted in high absenteeism (30.8%) plus null and voided votes (41.2%); an unprecedented high level of absenteeism for Peru. The tyrant, aided by a scandalous fraud and with forged votes, where even the dead voted, only obtained 18% of the registered voters. Thus, the presidential elections, controlled by the government and their armed forces and police, have totally and completely made illegitimate the genocidal Fujimori, showing from another side the unstoppable advance of the People's War that called for a nationwide boycott through powerful armed strikes.
As is foreseen in all genuine revolutions, the leaders can fall at any moment but the revolution and the People's War cannot be stopped. It generates new leaders that continue carrying out what the people and their vanguard prepare, because the masses make history. In 1992, with the aid of the intelligence agencies of imperialism, especially the CIA, the enemy succeeded in capturing President Gonzalo in order to "prove" that there was no such equilibrium. They invented thousands of "repentants", "surrenders" (that for the most part were shows acted out by members of their own armed forces) as part of their psychological warfare campaign. In a vain attempt to bring investments to save their moribund economy, they try to fool the uninformed that "the country is pacified," that "Sendero is defeated and direction less," they fabricated the "peace accords" scam, and for the naive a "modernized Peru" and a "victory over Ecuador." Why so many lies and counterrevolutionary hoaxes? Because they know that their days are numbered, the old will die and be buried, to be replaced by the new.
In order to develop mobile warfare, the PCP is building as a whole the principal form of organization of the masses, the People's Liberation Army, and especially strengthening the principal forces which begin to resemble regular forces. Mobile warfare also implies the superiority of forces in campaigns and in combat and highlights the offensive and mobile character of these forces.
This excellent situation of development without stopping the People's War is due to the magnificent leadership of the PCP, materialized in six military plans that have been applied in these 17 years of victorious revolution.
The first plan was to Initiate the Armed Struggle. It lasted seven months in 1980 and gave origin to the first detachments and squads.
The second plan was the Deployment of Guerrilla Warfare, which covered the period from 1981 to 1982. This saw the creation of the first forms of the New Power, the People's Committees, thus beginning the materialization of the State of New Democracy. In December 1982, with the defeat of the police forces, the reactionary armed forces intervened to directly combat the PCP and the genocidal monsters were unleashed in the years 1983 and 1984.
The third plan was to Seize Base Areas, from May 1983 to September 1986. The reactionary armed forces were sharply checked. The People's War was widely extended throughout Peru, centered in the sierra but extending to the jungle and coast. Base areas were begun and are the marrows of the People's War, and a complete system of base areas, guerrilla zones, operational zones and points of action were created.
The fourth plan was the Great Plan to Develop Base Areas, from December 1986 to May 1989. This plan implied, in its final phase, that the development of mobile warfare has begun. It was during the application of this military plan that the PCP victoriously celebrated its First Congress. The Congress sanctioned the basis of Party unity: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought; the General Political Line and Program; it made an evaluation of all the history of the Party and of the People's War; it dealt with the questions of construction and leadership and established solid bases for the seizure of power.
The fifth plan, which developed from August 1989 to the beginning of 1991, was the Great Plan to Develop Base Areas To Seize Power. In February of 1991 the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the PCP was celebrated, which evaluated the Second Campaign to push forward the development of base areas as a great victory for the Party and people and a milestone of the People's War for having reached the strategic equilibrium. It approved the Strategic Plan of Construction and started the Third Campaign within the new fifth military plan with the objective of finishing the plan to push forward and prepare the strategic offensive, developing this as the greatest escalation of the People's War. The PCP leads the People's War through plans that cover actions and their construction, which are always longer and at a higher level that shows how the People's War has been growing for the last 17 years. These plans are strategically centralized and tactically decentralized, they are divided into sub-plans and campaigns, all of them pushed forward in the uncompromising principles of People's War and as a function of seizing power for the proletariat and Peruvian people, as well as serving the world revolution. The culmination of each plan has signified a new qualitative and quantitative leap forward in the development of the People's War, in the construction of the Communist Party, of the People's Liberation Army and the New Power, as well as the organized incorporation of the masses into the People's War. Weapons are wrenched from the hands of the enemy, and an increasing number of weapons have been produced in addition to modern weapons.
The PCP started out quite small. The existence of a Party with a just and correct line, the problem was how to begin, not "how many are there." It was, do we want to start or not? As Chairman Mao teaches us, it was a decision to dare to make the revolution.
The PCP leads the People's War and commands absolutely the People's Liberation Army which is guided by the Maoist principle that the Party commands the gun and the gun never command the Party. The PCP also follows the teaching of Chairman Mao that war is guided by politics and what the great Lenin established: that war is the continuation of politics by warlike means.
III. NATIONAL POLITICS
In May 1990, after ten years of People's War, more than 150,000 armed actions in all forms of combat had been carried out. Considering the progressive growth of the People's War as well as the big leaps, today, after 17 years of war the total number of armed actions is estimated to be more than 500,000. The large majority of these are guerrilla actions against military and economic targets of the old state.Propaganda is the spreading of ideas that aim toward the objective, and agitation is the utilization of concrete problems that the masses are struggling against. These are actions that, like the other forms, sow revolution, people's war, politics and ideology; today they sow the necessity of seizing power nationwide.
Propaganda and agitation are carried out by the PCP with guns in hand, through armed actions to confront the armed enemy. As Marxism teaches us, driving home ideas into the minds of people through deeds is a question of principle, it is the material act that generates understanding. In this manner, the People's War forms and wins public opinion and generates a spirit of transformation, without which the seizure of power is impossible. Special importance is attached to the word of mouth technique to transfer information as well as the use of available means of public communication.
Sabotage hits hard at the economy of the old Peruvian society which is in the worst crisis of its history. The old state and its plans are struck directly and are received with joy by the dispossessed masses.
With the selective annihilation of proven enemies of the people, the People's War cripples the functioning of the state apparatus, paralyzing it and creating a power vacuum which is immediately filled by the New Power. The top political and military leaders responsible for the counterrevolutionary war are targeted, as well as known torturers, mass murderers and the mesnadas (paramilitaries or rondas), created by the reactionary armed forces to spread terror in the countryside. Through the people's tribunals, the masses apply well-deserved punishments to the exploiters hated by the people, mass murderers, rapists, etc.
The reactionaries spread lies against the PCP and the New Power, accusing them of "killing innocent peasants," while the revisionists and opportunists repeat this, saying that "the peasants are caught between two fires," etc. But the irrefutable fact is that the principal force in the Peruvian revolution is the peasantry, especially the poor peasants; the fact that the masses are increasingly incorporated into the People's War is enough to expose such lies. It is worth noting that the revisionists attack our form of struggle to defend the old order while they hypocritically praise Vietnam, forgetting that in their civil war the Vietnamese people annihilated some 13,000 reactionary authorities.
Guerrilla actions, principal among all forms of action and growing more powerful and numerous every day, are carried out in two principal forms: ambushes and assaults, which directly destroy the enemy's armed forces. This has enormous repercussions; it undermines the morale of the armed forces, requests for discharge grew so numerous so that they had to prohibit them, while desertion in the enemy ranks increases steadily.
Armed strikes are a new form of the struggle that combines the four previously mentioned forms and at the same time mobilizes large masses and isolates zones, showing that Lima is the most vulnerable capital city in Latin America. The armed strikes contribute toward the preparations for the future insurrection, causing desperation among the remaining revisionists, the union bureaucrats and those who ride on the backs of the masses.
Along with the progress of the People's War led by the PCP, the reactionary dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and feudal landlords today represented by the genocidal Fujimori, is being demolished. The democratic revolution is advancing. The domination of semi-feudalism, bureaucratic capitalism and imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism, is drawing to a close.
IV. THE NEW POWER
Of all the gains of the People's War, the principal one is the New Power. The PCP has among its ranks the best of the proletariat and peasantry in arms and is molding a joint dictatorship of the workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie under the hegemony of the proletariat, respecting the interests of the middle bourgeoisie, while destroying three centuries of reactionary state power. This dictatorship is being applied today in the People's Committees, expressions of the new state that exercise power through the People's Assemblies in which everyone voices their opinions, elects, judges or sanctions, applying true democracy to maintain power and defending it from the exploiting classes, oppressors, gamonales and lackeys. Thus new politics is formed, an advance toward the seizure of power from below.Semi-feudalism, the basis of the old society, is being destroyed, and new social relations of production are being introduced to build a new economy. The agrarian program of "land to the tiller" is being applied through confiscation and individual donation, while targeting the power of the gamonales with armed actions. Collective plantings and harvests are being carried out, with all the peasants working everyone's land, collectively favoring the poor peasants and in cases of surplus a form of tax is imposed in which seeds and produce is distributed among the most poor and middle peasants. The lands of the rich peasants are not touched unless there are shortages, but conditions are imposed.
This policy has had very positive results: the poorest benefit, the quality of production is raised and above all the conquests are defended better. Particularly in new peasant zones, there have been land seizures and individual distribution, igniting the struggle in the countryside and disturbing the plans of the old state while organizing an armed defense. Today the land seizures have been carried out nationwide. Furthermore the organized production of an entire people is being achieved, with exchange of products and seeds, collection of wood, raising of pigs, communal stores, commerce, mule herding, etc.
The urban actions against bourgeois-democratic or corporate-fascistic organizations, state banks or imperialist properties, important centers of counterinsurgency (non-governmental organizations, "research" centers) of the superpowers or powers, workshops, and factories of bureaucrat capitalism, etc. all serve the process in the countryside. The selective annihilations and agitation-propaganda campaigns all serve this purpose also.
On the basis of this new politics and economy, a new culture is being built, mainly among the poorest peasants. Coeducation, education and work, with a basic program for children, adults and the masses in general is being developed. The health and recreation problems of the masses are also of vital importance. In the People's Committees the Front is materialized. The secretarial commission guarantees the leadership of the proletariat. The security commission organizes the safety of the people, plans vigilance, carries out the tasks of organizing the people's police, the arrests of suspected infiltrators, the watching of the families of reactionaries who have been annihilated, and sees to the coordination of the principal forces, both locally and of the bases of the People's Liberation Army. The production commission organizes production, harvests, and collective plantings. It looks after the welfare of widows, orphans, the aged, organizes commerce, and communal fairs to exchange goods with other People's Committees, administer the economy, taxes, etc. The commission of community affairs resolves the problems of justice. It carries out the "commission of sanctions" in rotation where justice is applied. For example, in the countryside if a one peasant's cow damages the crops of another, the first action is to bring this to the first peasant's attention and to help him repair the damage; the second time the cow is retained, repairs are helped with, and he is warned that if it happens again the cow will be slaughtered; if this happens a third time he must again repair the damages, the cow is slaughtered and the funds go to the People's Committee. This commission also organizes education through the basic schools where four subjects are covered: Spanish, mathematics, natural science (from a dialectical materialistic viewpoint) and social sciences (from a historical materialistic viewpoint). Education links theory with practice and serves to introduce the masses to Gonzalo Thought. Herbalism and popular first aid with supplies taken from police medical posts are administered, marriages performed, family disputes are solved by means of criticism and self-criticism, birth registration, and popular recreation are all covered by this commission. The commission of People's Organizations is charged with the functioning of the mass organizations generated by the PCP.
Through these organizations the masses express their demands in popular assemblies. The construction of the New State is a basic and central question, but the main thing is the People's War, without which the New Power could not be maintained or developed. The People's Committees, the organizing committees of the base areas and the organizing committee of the People's Republic of New Democracy have all been created. Today the PCP is beginning to form a government at a national level and is developing the state apparatus as part of the process of building the seizure of power nationwide. In Peru and internationally, a broad, extensive and profound campaigns of support for the New Power are being developed with the goal of spreading its reality, gaining support for its needs and forming public opinion for the seizure of power in all Peru.
In the face of the new state which is expanding vigorously in Peru and which represents the rising strength of the Peruvian people, the old state is tired and decrepit, grows weaker and contracts every day. The head of state, Fujimori, is the representative of the big bourgeoisie, principally the comprador bourgeoisie, representative of the landlords and is the most obsequious lackey of Yankee imperialism today. In synthesis, he is a genocidal traitor propped up by the bloody bayonets of the military.
He tries to justify his brutal anti-people measures, laying the blame on his similar genocidal predecessor, the thief Alan Garcia Perez. Furthermore, he tries to hide his failures by blaming the ruin of the country on the People's War, when the reality is that the crisis of Peruvian society is structural and part of the general crisis and collapse of bureaucrat capitalism. Fujimori is the most loyal follower of the starvation policies and measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund, fixed in three year programs set by them.
Despite his military coup and the trampling of his own laws, Fujimori wants to present his government to the world as "legitimate," but he cannot do so. Based on the bourgeoisie's own electoral results for the last presidential election in 1995, the percentage of absenteeism combined with null and blank votes are more than 75% (Fujimori got 18% of the eligible votes), thus proving the correctness and success of the boycott tactic of the elections applied by the PCP. The Peruvian people feel there is no reason or right for such iniquity and oppression and that the People's War is the just reaction of the people.
The systematic violations of the most elemental "human rights," the genocidal politics he pursues, are more intense than under his predecessors Belaunde and Garcia. He will never be able to deny these crimes. The people feel them. They live them: the mass graves in the countryside, the massacre of the children of the people, vile assassinations with impunity of the captured combatants and their families in the prisons of Cantogrande, Lurigancho, Santa Monica, Ica, the war without prisoners. Furthermore, the cruel and heinous crimes against students and professors in the universities of Cantuta, Huancayo and Huanuco; the crimes in the slums where entire families were decapitated by Fujimori's death squads; can the genocidal Fujimori deny these crimes? What about the military raids in the shantytowns, the examples of the slum dwellers of Huaycan and Raucana who faced the tanks and bullets: remembered by the peoples of the world.
The mobilizations of teachers, students, public workers and part time workers that in town squares, streets and neighborhoods march against hunger, armed only with banners and slogans, who are frequently met with bullets and toxic gases by the troops? Can they be silenced? Can Fujimori deny his praise and promotions for the soldiers that committed these acts? The protest over the killing of a university student and the poor youths for the simple act of carrying knapsacks, can this be silenced and the killers protected yet again? The genocide against native communities, the transformation of peasants into cannon fodder for the armed forces, the carte blanche given to the mesnadas for every crime they commit, can this legitimize Fujimori's government? These facts cannot be hidden from the people. Finally, we must denounce the indiscriminate bombings and raking operations against the Ashaninka people, a base of the open people's committees and a bastion of resistance of the New State.
Fujimori's counterinsurgency troops entered the Ashaninka lands, burning and killing 150 civilians, women, children and the elderly, then he cynically tries to blame these crimes of his own armed forces witnessed by an entire village, on the PCP. The brutal reductions in wages to workers and the criminal neglect and abandonment of public health and education. Fujimori represents the government of cholera, the one that denies the most basic rights and benefits conquered by the proletariat and the people, the unceasing and growing repression of the masses, the increase of mortgage rates, usury and the new concentration of lands under the power of gamonales at the expense of the poorest peasants, the profound recession of Peru's economy that consumes decades of the income of the masses, the destruction of the national system of production, and the biggest selling of the nation to imperialism. In Peru, with an economically active population of 15,100,000 people, approximately 12,080,000 (80%) are unemployed or underemployed; the number of homeless which grows yearly is around 183,000 (according to the regime's statistics -INEI, El Comercio, April 30, 1995), etc.
Does all this legitimize Fujimori's government? No, it simply exposes him totally and completely. The primary goal of Fujimori's government is to reinvigorate bureaucratic capitalism. They seek new accumulation, carrying the market economy forward in the most unchecked manner possible under the aegis of imperialism and serving the financial needs of the IMF, World Bank, etc. As expected, the needs of the people are nowhere in the agenda of this obsequious servant of imperialism; Fujimori recently said: "... we will use the weaknesses of our country to contract more private enterprises. By gaining economic stability and social peace, the economic take off will be based mainly on private businesses." (Daily Brecha, Montevideo, April 13, 1995). Since 1995 the dictator has been waging a propaganda campaign on TV brazenly lying and twisting his own statistics, he states: "I am investing 45 million dollars per month to combat poverty," "poverty has decreased in 9%," "2.7 million dollars will be invested from 1995 to the year 2,000" [El Comercio, June 20, 1997] However, the reality is different. While according to independent economists the number of people living in poverty has been increasing steadily in about 660,000 per year since 1990 (O'Brien&Sierra, 1995) this number represents an unprecedent increase in poverty from 54% in 1990 to 69% in 1995 (14%!) In reality, what worries Fujimori the most is how to comply fully with his masters; for example, how to punctually pay the external debt that climbs to more than $25 billion.
V. SOCIAL WELFARE
Fujimori, under the advice and finance of the imperialist organizations has launched the so-called "Emergency Social Plan," (ESP) with the political goal of trying to contain the explosive unrest of the masses. North American imperialism is pushing a plan of survival, demagogically using the very same products of the capitalist system. For example, the fact that 15 million children die each year of hunger and preventable diseases worldwide is used as an instrument of propaganda to mobilize philanthropy, the NGOs and churches as the "defenders of children." The PCP rejects this sinister campaign by imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism, which is applied to the letter by the Peruvian reactionaries. The PCP is absolutely opposed to reducing the masses to the status of beggars. Nevertheless, the PCP respects and protects the activities initiated by the masses themselves when these are integrated on their own terms into the glass of milk programs and community kitchens.The government also pushes for plans of free labor and more "aid" with the direct ideological, political and organizational participation of the reactionary Catholic Church, which is playing a counterrevolutionary role in the People's War. In some regions of the jungle and in Ayacucho, for example, there are priests that train and lead the Army's paramilitary rondas. Among these paramilitary priests the most notorious is the archbishop of Huamanga "Cristiani" of Opus Dei, and the infamous U.S. born killer-priest known as "father Mariano." Nevertheless, the "Emergency Social Plan" has thoroughly failed, accomplishing nothing. Their dream of "economic stabilization" and "social pacification" has NOT been realized, nor can it be. Hunger incites more class struggle, while the margin of explosiveness of the masses grows every day and the whole caravan of labor fakers have less power to hold back the masses. The PCP's slogan of "Combat and resist serving the People's War" is the order of the day, the masses march toward the People's War and the whole social process is oriented toward the revolutionary crisis.
VI. THE "LOW INTENSITY WARFARE"
The second need of Fujimori is the annihilation of the People's War. They have planned a new strategy to develop a wider counterinsurgency war, centered around the nonmilitary, that encompasses all the fields as demanded by the U.S. Department of Defense, following the imperialist plan of the so-called "low intensity war."The top military leaders of Peru, politicians, national and international analysts of every reed, including the mercenary "senderologists," are constantly admitting that there isn't the faintest sign of an integrated, coherent strategy to fight the People's War. This is not because imperialism and Peruvian reaction are short of people who can think, the problem is that there is no strategy, nor can there be one, capable of defeating the strategy of the proletariat, the all-powerful theory and practice of people's war, completely applied by a Maoist party such as the PCP.
Due to the skillful leadership of the Party, the reactionaries have seen themselves reduced to confronting the People's War on a purely military level, a serious disadvantage for them. Conforming with his class character, all of Fujimori's strategies are no more than the bloody practice of genocide, frequently presented in their progovernment yellow press (and repeated abroad) as the work of the PCP. They also spread, as part of the psychological war, a cloud of lies, alleged "defeats," "strategic failures," "stalemates," "peace letters and videos," "splits," "surrenders," "thousands of repentants," countless "captures of top leaders," "two-line struggle on peace talks," etc., etc. But the crushing advance of the People's War sweeps away these ridiculous and vulgar lies day after day.
VII. THE PERUVIAN NARCO-STATE
Linked to the reactionaries need to annihilate the People's War is the problem of drug trafficking. We begin by pointing out that drug addiction is the product of social degeneration. It occurs more in the heartland of imperialism and less in the oppressed nations. It is a consequence of the putrefaction of the imperialist system, of fatuous and empty lives they seek to fill with drugs. The imperialist banks that launder the drug money induce and facilitate drug addiction.The PCP is totally opposed to this. The drug problem is a social problem and it will be resolved through revolution. The New Power that the PCP is building has not only totally eliminated drug addiction, but as even the reactionary Peruvian magazine Si recognizes, in the base areas in the Huallaga region the politics of the People's Committees is achieving crop diversification, reducing the cultivation of coca and given priority to the basic nutritional crops, thus accomplishing what no government has done.
Under the rule of oppression and exploitation of the big bourgeoisie, feudal landlords and imperialism, in the midst of the crisis and general collapse of bureaucratic capitalism in Peru, broad and growing sectors of the peasantry are forces to grow coca. In the old order, trampled by the old reactionary state, it is easy to explain the necessity peasants have to grow coca in order to survive, because they have no other viable crops. For example, on the edge of the jungle it is more expensive and less sufficient to grow hard corn than it is to get government imports, since there are no roads to ship it on, the prices paid are not high enough and it rots. The same happens with fruit. Because of this, the PCP is opposed to the eradication of coca, since it is a source of survival for the peasants. It is important to realize that neither Yankee imperialism nor the Peruvian reactionaries are opposed to the drug trafficking. Quite the opposite, it is their reactionary domination that generates and maintains it. The blatant proof of the armed forces' deep involvement as an institution of the old state, published in Peru and abroad, is widely known by the public. It is the height of hypocrisy for the promoters and appropriators of the drug trade to twist the truth for their goal of isolating and slandering the PCP, saying that the revolutionaries are allied with the drug traffickers. They cynically fabricate an excuse and find a moral basis for frontally attacking the People's War with a strategy they have not had before, legalizing their aggression against the Peruvian people.
The reactionaries in Peru have had to recognize that the economy of the old state grows ever more dependent on the currency provided by the drug trade and that all policies to eradicate it have failed. More than 200,000 rural families, which represent around 1.5 million people, live off the cultivation of coca and Fujimori and his armed forces are afraid of attacking them to avoid "converting them into soldiers of the People's Liberation Army" as they say. With this excuse the government and armed forces extract large sums of money from the drug traffickers (the recent denunciations by military personnel on several narco-generals and of close advisors to Fujimori is the clearest proof). There is nothing strange in this assertion. The drug experts of the United States, like U.S. Army Lt. Col. Smallwood, admit that the problem isn't the production of coca in Latin America but the demand in the U.S. that drives the drug trade. The efforts by the police and military to eradicate coca are doomed to failure, despite the use of the most modern technology such as the spraying of toxic pesticides from airplanes, because of the danger the peasants will be won over by the People's War. It is apparent that there are contradictions between the Department of Defense and the DEA of the State Department.
According to these criteria, Fujimori kneels before Yankee imperialism, begging for a total solution to the problem, not just an anti-narcotic one. Fujimori seeks to facilitate the participation of the U.S. in counterinsurgency actions and in the entire process of capitalist restructuring. Linked to the problem of the foreign debt, the selling of Peruvian goods in the U.S. as part of the "initiative of the Americas," (started by Bush and implemented) by Clinton, that consists of dropping all barriers to investment, make all of America a free market for the U.S. and solve the problem of national production. In essence, Fujimori's plan is to use the problem of the People's War to receive strong economic "aid" as a weapon against the People's War.
Using the excuse of the drug trade, the U.S. Congress has had various meetings to debate the People's War in Peru. This shows how the People's War reverberates even in the lair of world reaction. The temporary suspension of U.S. "aid" to Fujimori after the military coup of 1992, with the pretext that human rights should be respected, was after Bernard Aronson, Assistant Secretary of Latin American Affairs was with Fujimori during the military coup. Meanwhile, the PCP becomes more strongly united to the struggles of the peasantry and leads them, incorporating them in higher levels of the People's War.
Yankee imperialism has been intervening for a long time in Peru, since the government of Belaunde. In 1983 in Ayacucho and Apurimac they were linked to an attack by marines when they dropped napalm on the village of Espite from A-37s. Later, during the government of Garcia, they continued their aggressions in 1986 in the Upper Huallaga region, then in July 1989 they committed a massacre of inhabitants of the towns of Madre Mia and Santa Lucia, before and after the complete destruction of the army barracks at the locality of Madre Mia by the People's War.
Now they are maneuvering to increase the intervention which can lead to direct aggression. The Yankees are investing millions of dollars in military aid to the government of Fujimori and are reinforcing their advising, training and shipments of arms, communications gear and vehicles. They wish to create a force of 5-6,000 men in Peruvian territory for the counterinsurgency war. They have created the U.S. military base of Santa Lucia in the Peruvian jungle, under the pretext that they only have four members of the DEA. In reality it is the biggest military base they have in South America. It is worth highlighting that this base, inaugurated in February 1989, was hit hard by the People's War two months later, several helicopters and planes were destroyed in this operation. The U.S. has plans to build new military bases in the coming years; a new one is being built in the area around Satipo, with dreams of strategically controlling the center of the country. Finally, Yankee imperialism is promoting, financing and leading the intelligence group of the political police, GEIN.
The third necessity of Fujimori's government is the restructuring of the reactionary state. Uncounted analysts in Peru and abroad, of whom no one could suspect of the least revolutionary inclinations, much less Marxism, agree in highlighting the process of destruction of the old Peruvian state and the perspectives of the PCP in seizing power throughout Peru. They say, for example, that the Peruvian state is "the least competent in Latin America," that it is a state that "barely exists," that "all is lost," and things of that nature. The RAND Corporation, the Yankee institution that advises the Department of Defense, maintains that in Peru "democracy is doomed," that "we are pessimistic with regards to the capabilities of the Peruvian state," "the state apparatus in the countryside is limited," that there is "disintegration of the political system," that "the guerrillas of Sendero are spreading rapidly," that the armed forces are not even "battle ready" and "are not prepared for counterinsurgency," and that "Sendero could seize power at any moment."
These opinions do nothing more than reaffirm the final moment of crisis and definitive destruction of bureaucratic capitalism, the decrepit reactionary state and the brilliant perspective for the proletariat and Peruvian people through the seizure of power nationwide.
With the present government of Fujimori the crisis of the state sharpens. The executive power usurps all functions of the legislative and judicial branches. Fujimori governs by decrees, violating his own Constitution and questioning his own bourgeois-democratic order by showing clear indications of fascism.
All of this shows the increasingly reactionary nature of the state and its need to be restructured, because the existing one is not sufficient to maintain their dictatorship.
We have seen how the three tasks of the Peruvian reactionaries and imperialism, especially Yankee imperialism, goes from defeat to defeat. We see how the PCP accurately foresaw that all the efforts of Fujimori's government would not achieve these, but rather stoke the class struggle and the People's War.
In these 17 glorious years, the People's War in Peru is unstoppable and is sweeping away the order of exploitation and oppression, and building the new society on the debris. The development of the People's War and the seizure of total power that looms is the proof of the invincible potential of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and of its concrete application in Peru, Gonzalo Thought.
The sinister counter-revolutionary general offensive of imperialism, revisionism and world reaction is crashing and breaking into pieces against this thunderous reality. The decrepit state of the exploiters is the representation of the dead and rotting in Peru, maintaining a semblance of life only because of the momentary support of Yankee imperialism, like an evil, senile old man that staggers at the edge of the grave. By contrast, the new state is the sap of progress, rife with energy, affirmation and historic optimism. The men and women of the new Peru have climbed on the stage and with their armed hands under the leadership of the Communist Party are emancipating labor from the chains of exploitation.
Yankee imperialism is now intervening more directly in Peru and has contingency plans for a military assault on Peru. The Peruvian people, with the PCP at their head and with the support of the people of the world, are ready for them. The People's War will convert them to dust and ashes. Let them not cry afterwards that they weren't warned!
The revolutionary situation in Peru is found in a state of growth and tends toward materializing into a revolutionary crisis. Today in Peru, due to the heroic efforts of the Peruvian people and the just and correct leadership of the PCP, events show the truth to those beautiful phrases of Chairman Mao Tse-tung: The revolutionary summit is like a ship at sea, of which only the point of the mast can be seen from the shore; it is like the rising sun, whose luminous rays are seen in the distant East from the mountain tops; it is like a child awaiting birth that kicks impatiently in the womb of its mother.
VIII. INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
Today, in the face of the counterrevolutionary offensive on a worldwide scale against Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the campaigns in Peru against the Party and the People's War, the PCP is grasping principles more firmly, following the goal it marches forward: Communism. This is even more important today when revisionists and opportunists, like the loyal offspring of their Russian friends Khrushchev/Gorbachev and the Chinese revisionist Deng, spread the ideas that war is no longer the continuation of politics and that war will cause the extinction of humanity. At the same time imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism, promotes, finances and implements the capitulation of the armed movements, crushing with fire and blood those peoples who resist. The cases of Central America, the Middle East and others are clear examples. This imperialist offensive counts on the support of the revisionists and opportunists that call for dialogue, peace accords, elections and conventions under the control of the United Nations, thus selling out protracted revolutionary processes such as Angola, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa, Palestine, Ireland, etc.How can we explain the success of the People's War in Peru? What is the spirit that animates the Peruvian revolution? These great victories are due to Gonzalo Thought, the application of the universal proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, to the specific conditions of Peru. These triumph proves the ideology of the proletariat, today developed into its new, third, superior stage Maoism, is invincible and lives more vigorously than ever before. As Chairman Mao taught us: "As long as there are masses and a Party all kinds of miracles will be performed."
This is decisive, especially today when the alleged "death of socialism" is proclaimed. Revisionism has followed its sinister path of restoring capitalism, and drowning in putrefaction, it has entered into complete bankruptcy. Revisionists in the USSR, from Khrushchev in 1956 to Gorbachev, and now with the pig Yeltsin, to China in 1976 with Deng Xiao-Ping and his clique until today, usurped the dictatorship of the proletariat, restored capitalism and destroyed socialism.
Today we are living in a general counterrevolutionary offensive that intends to ward off the principal historical and political tendency in the word: revolution. Imperialism and revisionism together aim against revolution, but of the two it is mainly Yankee imperialism that heads up the offensive, pretending to build itself up as the only hegemonic superpower and policeman of the world in its contention with the other superpower and other imperialist powers. They attack revolution, democratic revolution, socialist revolution; they attack revolutionary violence, the People's War; they attack the Communist Party; socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat; and they attack the goal, Communism. They say that deeds have demonstrated that socialism is obsolete that it does not exist, that it has failed. But we must remind them that in the 1950s there was a socialist camp, that the triumph of the Chinese revolution signified the change in the correlation of forces in the world, and that no system ever changed the rotten capitalist and feudal bases of society as profoundly and rapidly as the USSR and China.
We must remind them that socialism developed under Lenin and Stalin until the revisionist Khrushchev usurped power, and that in China socialism lasted until the death of Mao when Deng led the counterrevolutionary revisionist coup. We must remind them that if we count since 1917, socialism is a young thing, it has existed for only a short time, and today exists as experience, it exists in Communists, in the revolutionaries of the world, it exists as an ideology, as politics, as theory and as practice. Finally, socialism lives in the Communists and revolutionaries of Peru who develop the People's War.
The duty of the Communists, as the PCP has declared and practices, is to reaffirm ourselves in principles, in the invincibility of the ideology of the proletariat, in the urgent task of conforming and developing Communist Parties and militarizing them, to lead the revolution, whether democratic, socialist or proletarian cultural ones. We must reaffirm ourselves in that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat and to revolutionary violence specified as people's war; this is universally valid, applicable in all the world, part of reaffirming Communism.
The PCP, under the correct leadership of its Central Committee, is evolving a firm and powerful counteroffensive against this general counterrevolutionary offensive. We must be clearly convinced that the offensive by imperialism, revisionism and world reaction against Marxism is condemned to failure, will be defeated and is no more than the prologue to a new development of Marxism. As the PCP has indicated, "to be a Marxist today is to be a Marxist- Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist, and to unfurl, defend and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is decisive to develop the world proletarian revolution, destroy imperialism, international reaction and crush revisionism."
Imperialism, with the complicity of revisionism and of world reaction, pretends to present itself before the eyes of the world as a revitalized system, united, all-powerful and arrogantly proposes a New World Order. But in truth it is a parasitical monster, in pain and disarray, marked by a profound crisis and inevitably doomed. What do we see today? Unchecked desires of the imperialists to establish areas of domination and a new repartition of the world. This is what they euphemistically call "the New World Order." As long as collusion is expressed as the principal policy, this will overshadow their conflicts and in some ways things will appear easy for the imperialists. But the powers around the Yankee and Russian superpowers are the same contenders of the Second World War, Germany and Japan, who have grown into big economic powers and demand a new repartition.
This cannot be done without war, according to all historical experience. But our attention should not be centered on these hegemonic or warlike designs of the imperialists but on the factors that stimulate world revolution. In the face of imperialist wars the only complete solution is that the peoples of the world rise up in people's wars under the leadership of authentic Maoist parties, as the PCP has said and shows by example. Within five years, as we approach the year 2000, 85% of the world's population will be within the oppressed nations that are the base areas of the revolution, giant zones of concentrated misery, zones of conflict and imperialist repartition, the booty disputed by the imperialists. There is no peace nor tranquility in the world. Rather a powerful explosive force is accumulating in the world, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The principal contradiction in the world is between the oppressed nations and the superpowers and other imperialist powers, while the role of the international proletariat is and will always be to lead the world proletarian revolution through its Communist Parties.
We live in the marvelous era of 50 to 100 years foreseen by Chairman Mao in which we will have to sweep away forever all imperialist systems from the face of the Earth, and in which socialism will be imposed definitively and completely throughout the world. The conditions: Communist Parties, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and people's war. The principal tendency in the world is revolution. This is an incontrovertible proof. At its peak, as the most advanced aspect of this global tendency, is found the vigorous, growing and successful People's War in Peru. Imperialism intervenes in all wars and is invariably drawn to defeat. Peru will not be an exception. Peru is not Iraq. It is not Panama or Haiti. In Peru there exists a People's War that develops in the strategic equilibrium, there exists a New Power defended by hundreds of thousands of people, there is a People's Liberation Army with armed fighters, and what is most important and decisive, there exists a Communist Party steeled with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, capable of storming the heavens. North American imperialism is a paper tiger and will be defeated. President Gonzalo has taught us: "Whatever enemy comes to trample these lands, they will face defeat; in these circumstances the principal contradiction would become the contradiction between the nation and imperialism, and this would give us wider margins to unite our people."
V. THE MRTA AND THE UNITED LEFT
The MRTA is a revisionist organization very similar to M-19 in Colombia. It is linked to APRA, Cuba and Nicaragua, and repeats the reactionary ideas of Gorbachev. It does not fight Yankee imperialism, on the contrary, it serves it by condemning the People's War and the Communist Party that leads it. Since its inception it walks the path of capitulation, seeking amnesty and inclusion in the system, offering truces and truces to Fujimori, bending over backwards to beg for dialogue. It is an insignificant group that is eulogized by the reactionaries during PCP offensives and shamelessly inflates itself by claiming credit for actions of the PCP-led People's Army of Liberation. Yes, MRTA carried out the spectacular seizure of the Japanese Embassy taking as hostages many criminals and sworn enemies of the people. At the end, the MRTA's action benefitted Imperialism and the Peruvian regime.The self-proclaimed "United Left" is a nest of opportunists, cringing followers and revisionists of every type. It is in decomposition and total bankruptcy after having campaigned and voted for Fujimori in 1990. In the last elections of 1995, many of their leaders tailed after Perez de Cuellar, some "senderologists" in the NGOs and other "leftists" are now advisors to the Army like the "terrorism experts" (Raul Gonzalez, Carlos Ivan Degregori, Carlos Tapia, Enrique Obando, etc.). The minuscule groups like Patria Roja and PUM obtained a mere 0.4% of the vote in the rigged elections of 1995. Many of them have served in cabinet posts under Fujimori, hoping to gain stability and imperialist peace, informing on the combatants of the people, slandering and condemning the People's War and the Communist Party of Peru both inside and outside Peru. They even saluted the repressive forces after their "great capture," a pyrrhic victory that did not last long.