"U.S. imperialism persists in its failed counterinsurgency policy of using masses against masses, and in the countryside using the peasants as ramparts of Fujimori's genocidal armed forces." President Gonzalo
From the time the armed forces intervened to directly combat the People's War in 1983, they began to group peasant communities into settlements under their control near the military garrisons, and to organize them into paramilitary groups, in Peru called Civil Self-Defense Committees (rondas), which are reminiscent of the settlements organized by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Guatemala and elsewhere. Although the counterinsurgency tactics carried out in Vietnam and Guatemala correspond to the same U.S. doctrine of Low Intensity Warfare, the Peruvian case is more complex, and different in some aspects.
Since 1983 when the genocidal armed forces began to ravage peasant communities and villages in the Sierra and the jungle strips, they simultaneously devoted themselves to building human settlements or concentration camps (in Peru called nucleaciones) where everybody (men, women, elderly and children) are armed with crude weapons and forced to confront the Maoist guerrillas, who are better provisioned and armed with the just and correct ideology of the proletariat.
The policy of pitting masses against masses was seen initially in the southern portions of the country, in the sierra. Now that the People's War has vigorously expanded nationwide, the reactionaries have also expanded their paramilitary, for example in Northern Peru and the jungle region (e.g., Huallaga). The tactic of the genocidal army to build their anti-guerrilla bases is as follows: in a given town or community, the counter-insurgent forces gather together all the survivors from the various settlements scorched or wiped out by the armed forces. The peasants selected to prevent Maoist infiltration are forced to do tasks, including building houses for the soldiers and a series of military fortifications. The women are compelled to abandon their own families so that they can cook and feed the criminals. Women are used as servants and even as sexual objects by these butchers.
For a period of about three or four months, the peasants are trained physically, with minimal nutrition provided by the Army or by a non-governmental organization (NGO) working with the military (in many cases this causes them to contract diseases such as tuberculosis). The Army devises a watch system for the rondas. In their search for guerrillas, the genocidal armed forces deploy themselves behind the members of the rondas. For example, they force the ronderos to walk "in point," first in the column, exposing them as cannon fodder, highly vulnerable in any ambush by the Maoists. The purpose is two fold:
1) to cowardly preserve the army forces by using the rondas as a buffer,
2) if the Maoists attack the rondas, the NGOs working with the military (e.g., fake human rights groups) or the military itself, can accuse the PCP of "killing peasants."
After the training period, the military selects the most servile among the ronderos as "authorities" in the settlement. Generally, these are landowning peasants or their relatives. Crudely armed and recently with rear-loading shotguns, they are then abandoned to their fate. The counterinsurgency base the army had build in that particular town is then withdrawn and placed elsewhere, where the procedure is repeated. Although they know the terrain superbly, the poorly armed ronderos, besides defending an unjust cause, will become the target of the people's policy of reestablishing the New Power in the countryside.
After studying the problem originated among the people by the counterinsurgency forces, the PCP decided to destroy these militarized settlements. First it crushes the clandestine work of the reactionaries, and provokes the desertion of those who have been forced to remain in the rondas by the reactionary guns. Second, while taking over and destroying the settlement, the party targets the most recalcitrant and reactionary elements who consciously and deliberately support the genocidal army and the regime. The ronda chiefs, who are mostly infiltrated military elements, and their advisors are annihilated.
Many times the Maoists conduct their own infiltration into the reactionary rondas, causing serious casualties to the genocidal army. Many ambushes of military convoys have taken place inside the ronda bases themselves. For this reason, the worst fear of the army is that their ronda settlements may be destroyed from within, especially by those peasants who are forced to join the paramilitary, who are aware of the reactionary role of the rondas and how the army uses them as cannon fodder in patrols and other operations. For each concentration camp and system of counter-revolutionary rondas that imperialism builds in the country, the PCP destroys two bases of ronderos, causing the disbandment of others not yet attacked.
The counterrevolutionary experience of imperialism in the world shows us that it forces peasants to form shock groups to oppose the advance of the People's War. In Malaysia (Southeast Asia), for example, this reactionary tactic was implemented by the imperialist occupation forces, who managed to promote rampant slaughter among the population, by virtue of which the peasantry and native populations generally were used as cannon fodder, and then transformed into a human shield for the genocidal armed forces.
The strategy of "rural villages" meant for the Malaysian people the death of more than 17,000 of their children. As in Peru, the counter-insurgent forces entered the communities and towns where supposedly there was a strong guerrilla presence, to murder the suspected revolutionaries and set up concentration camps. This counter-insurgent method was applied in Malaysia in a period similar to the current period in Peru: at a time when imperialism and reaction wanted to recover territory and political presence among the population. In the case of Malaysia, rural paramilitary groups formed by the counter- revolutionary Army became relatively permanent because the Malaysian Communist Party erroneously led a revolutionary war without properly building up support bases. Finally, they fell into amateurishness and walked to their defeat.
In Peru, revisionism hasn't missed a chance to ride on the back of the struggles of the peasantry. They have bureaucratic control over the tainted Peruvian Confederation of Peasants (CCP) and the National Agrarian Confederation (CNA). The history of struggles in Peru shows that whenever the peasants are immersed in a sharp and suffocating crisis, they have launched protests against the sinister corporative and pro-imperialist plans of the reactionaries. At the same time, expert traffickers such as Hugo Blanco, Juan Rojas, Luna Vargas, Lucas Cachay and others have tried to position themselves as leaders of the mass movements, arguing falsely to the reactionary press that they represent the Peruvian peasants.
There is also a particular case worthy of ridicule, almost unbelievable in its absurdity. Ricardo Letts, a former member of Vanguardia Revolucionaria (a pseudo-Maoist group in the 70's) and a former PUM/United Left legislator, has tried many times to "lead" the peasants, which is obviously an unnatural relationship, since he is a wealthy landowner from one of the biggest exploiting families linked to the comprador bourgeoisie. Among his relatives is the banker and industrialist, Jorge Picasso Perana, a crony of Fujimori. This sneaky character, then a paleface "representative of the peasants" boasts of keeping "good relations" with the wage slaves in his own fiefdom, an olive plantation in the Department of Ica.
Taking advantage of his agro-industrial empire, Mr. Letts pretended to present himself as an example for middle and rich peasants. Fanning his social tendency to individualism, this revisionist tried to show that the peasants support gradual evolution out of semi-feudalism in the countryside, so that they can attain a higher economic status, while the poor peasants, who are the overwhelming majority in the Andes, languish in the shadow of exploitation and semi- feudalism, plowing infertile lands in the best of cases. He attempted to brush off the class differences, which in this case, would clearly show who has possession of the means of production, and who must sell his labor power below its true worth so as to feed himself and his family.
These traffickers and traitors have no position with regard to the reactionary decrees issued by the regime. They are spread out on the field, fulfilling the revisionist programme. Others, like the left-overs of the defunct pro-Albanian Party of Labor, claim that the PCP does not destroy landowning property but "nourishes it," "vigorizes it" and "creates capitalism." They uphold the worn out Trotskite theory that distributing land to poor peasants promotes individual property in the countryside instead of collective property.
What these revisionists will never be able to understand, is that in a semi-feudal country like Peru, where there are no longer whip-brandishing feudal lords, yet the feudal exploitation and serfdom of colonial times persist, the peasantry, mainly the poor peasants, still have not liberated themselves from feudal ties. They haven't managed to attain individual property in the capitalist system, which is a necessary first step for the rural economy to be socialized. The peasants would never be able to liberate themselves while they still carry all those chains and infrastructural disadvantages which are preserved by semi-feudal conditions. For this reason, they must go through a State of New Democracy, and from there progress to socialism.
The problem of land ownership is vital in the current stage of the Democratic Revolution. The PCP solves this problem brilliantly. First by confiscating the land of the big landowner, and second by distributing this land among the poor peasants, constructing new forms of agricultural and commercial relations, of individual and collective ownership of the land, and collective planting of crops. Thus, they are preparing the peasants for the next stage, the socialization of the countryside in the State of New Democracy. At the same time, the PCP sustains and increasingly fuses the poor peasants into the worker-peasant alliance that is indispensable for the conquest of power by the proletariat and the people in general.