In Peru, as throughout Latin America, genocide against the people, their enslavement and centuries of exploitation were initiated 500 years ago when the European powers sunk their claws into the Americas.
Oppression has bred resistance. But past attempts to throw off the oppressor have failed.
All that changed on 17 May 1980 when the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), a Maoist party, opened up the road of liberation of the Peruvian people with People's War.
The PCP has fostered the armed rebellion of the wide masses, waging guerrilla warfare relying principally upon the poor peasantry and the urban proletariat. Revolutionary base areas have been set up in the countryside comprising a third of Peru's population, where People's Committees rule as an embryonic form of the emerging People's Republic of Peru administering local affairs to achieve the goal of seizing power as a part of and serving the world revolution.
Indeed Gordon McCormick, a leading "senderologist" hostile to the revolution has woefully acknowledged 25-40% of Peru is "under either open or shadow Sendero administration": U.S. House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs 12 March 1992.
Armed strikes and other militant mass actions have reached the very heart of the areas under the tightest control of the reactionary state power. The people have turned the shantytowns of Lima into training grounds for revolution.
Large numbers of the revolutionaries, including the leadership, are women.
The very success of the Peruvian revolution has set it on a collision course with U.S. imperialism. Successive Peruvian governments backed by the U.S. have tried to crush the revolution with terror and genocidal military offensives against the people living in areas where support for the People's War is strongest. Lately the U.S. government has openly sent Green Berets pilots and other armed personnel, helicopter gunships, jet bombers and river patrol boats. In ths last few years the people's war has contintued to expand in great waves across Peru. And all this while the leader of the revolution is in prison and while the reactionary regime and its propagandists are meaking special efforts to silence the war by suppressing news, twisting facts and spreading lies.
The U.S. government and the media falsely claim the PCP are isolated terrorists in league with drug lords who murder innocent civilians.
These lies are aimed at paving the way for more U.S.-led imperialist intervention and military aid. They are designed to horrify the middle classes in the West, and to justify the crimes being carried out in Peru by the U.S. and its puppet Peruvian regime. "Left" forces who once defended such "hated" revolutionary movements have joined with the U.S. State Department in attacking the PCP. Ignorant of Peruvian reality, some "leftist" hostility flows from their ideological opposition to the Maoist principles guiding the People's War. And some blindly repeat the Big Lies against the revolution in Peru.
The People's War in Peru is our fight. The revolutionary fighters in Peru are our sisters and brothers.
Here, real internationalism demands that we work wholeheartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement in Australla and wholeheartedly support the revolution in Peru.
LIE # 1 "SENDERO LUMINOSO" CARRIES OUT TERRORISM AND ATROCITIES AGAINST THE PEOPLE
Counter-insurgency specialists who advise the imperialists how best to defeat the People's War agree the PCP is not a "terrorist organisation" but a "social insurgency" (McCormick's testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 12 March 1992; David Scott Palmer, The Shining Path of Peru, 1992, p. 244). McCormick points out that "residents of Lima are not now at personal risk" from PCP sponsored attacks, which are in fact very selective. Former U.S. State Dept. functionary Palmer concedes that: "The insurgency has rarely engaged in indiscriminte violence..." Anthropologist Ronald H. Berg refers to the PCP as, "remarkably precise in their targeting of unpopular individuals and institutions". He suggests they have "a great deal of sympathy", for this.
Amnesty International has documented many instances of atrocities being carried out by the Peruvian armed forces which were made to appear the work of be PCP, to turn people against them. They allege nonetheless that the PCP has carried out atrocities as well, but fail to adduce any evidence independent of the govemment. A source of confusion is the systematic policy of the government to force poor peasants into militias, called "rondas", similar to the "civil patrols" in Guatemala. In its Autumn 1992 issue, Covert Action magazine wrote that the "military has imposed rondas on reluctant villages in the emergency zones as part of the counter-insurgency strategy ... since last November villages encompassing some 200,000 peasants have been forcibly organized into the rondas structures."
When a ronda or gang of thugs organized by local landlords, is defeated in a fight with PCP-led forces, the casualties are typically described as a "massacre by the Shining Path." Even Soldier of Fortune magazine, has been forced to admit that if the PCP carried out the kind of massacres claimed, they would not have the deep and spreading support that they do.
Gordon McCormick, in The Shining Path and the Future of Peru, 1990, p. 44, acknowledges that "Most of the civilian casualties suffered in the war thus far have been blamed on the Shining Path, but the Army has committed the majority."
The PCP does execute active agents of the old oppressive order. This is especially true of people who actively organise armed counter-revolutionary units and networks of police informants. If clerics and Church projects are centres of counter-revolutionary activities, their religious covering does not grant them immunity. The same applies to politicians form Peru's "legal left" who finger revolutionaries to the police, revolutionaries who are then killed. However, the number of clergy and phony "socialists" killed by the PCP is very small. There is not a systematic targeting of the church or the "legal left" by the PCP.
For several years the PCP has been subjected to slander that it persecutes, rounds up and executes lesbians and gays for their sexual orientation. The PCP and gay activists (not supporters of the PCP) in Peru have publicly denied this to be the case.
Activists from the Movimiento Homosexual de Lima have however indicated that the tiny focoist group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) did persecute gays: Prison Legal News (USA) March 1994.
LIE # 2: "SHINING PATH" IS A IN ALLIANCE WITH DRUG TRAFFICKERS
The overwhelming evidence is that it is the U.S. and Peruvian govemments who are up to their necks in the drug trade. Several Peruvian officials in charge of the counterinsurgency effort were photographed several years ago loading coca paste into small planes. Peruvian President Fujimori demanded his predecessor Garcia be put on trial for corruption and drug money laundering. Garcia is charged with working closely with the notorious "Bank of Credit Commerce Intemational", the world's biggest money laundering and main drug trade finance centre which was in turn an instrument of the U.S.'s CIA. But Fujimori's own General Arcinega, who formerly ran the Army in the main drug-growing areas in the jungle, was himself accused in the U.S. Congress of being a drug kingpin.
The PCP have a clearly stated policy on drugs: they are completely opposed to their production and use. They say that where the revolution has political power (red base areas) drug use is discouraged and peasants who had been forcibly "obliged" to cultivate coca for the drug barons are protected and encouraged by the PCP to plant food crops on part of their land. This crop substitution has been substantiated by many Peru watchers, and even enemies of the revolution.
LIE # 3: THE PEOPLE'S WAR IS FINISHED: "SENDERO" WANTS PEACE WITH THE GOVERNMENTT.
With the capture of the PCP's leader Abimael Guzman (also known by his nom de guerre, Presidente Gonzalo) on 12 September 1992, the reactionary Peru regime claim to have dealt the revolution a mortal blow. Presidente Gonzalo was sentenced to life imprisonment and has been held in isolation since October 1992. The Peruvin government repeatedly declared the PCP and the Maoist revolution were finished. The imperialists and reactionaries crossed their fingers hoping this was so, but the continuing roar of the People's War woke them from their foul dream.
A year later Fujimori, claimed that Presidente Gonzalo was leading the call for peace negotiations to effectively end the People's War. On 7 Oct 1993, the Central Committee of the PCP denounced the peace negotiations proposal as a counter-revolutionry hoax and an attempted manipulation by the reactionary regime, and the PCP and the genuine supporters of the People's War abroad have continued to denounce the phony "peace accords" as reactionary, liquidationist and divisive slander.
The campaign of lies against the revolution in Peru should be opposed and rejected.
When so many other struggles are lying down their arms and telling the people they have no choice but to compromise and accept life under imperialist rule, the Communist Party of Peru is leading a revolution towards victory. But massive U.S.-led intervention to stop the flow of Maoist revolution is threatened.
The frenzied lies against the People's War in Peru seeks to create public opinion in support of U.S.-led intervetion. And those in left/progressive circles who have swallowed these lies and taken to parroting them are objectively giving active assistance to Yankee schemes to defeat the Peruvian revolution.
High in the Andes and in the shantytowns of Lima the people are not waiting for people in the West to give their OK. They are making revolution anyway.
No one with a shred of conscience should tolerate assisting Yankee intervention in any way. And anyone with a vision and daring to stand with the oppressed should support the just war of liberation led by the Communist Party of Peru.