After the western invasion, that "infamous blow" that Peruvian historian Pablo Macera talks about, was when the Spanish colonialist uprooted all remnants of agrarian collectivism, and by blood and fire imposed a feudal system strongly influenced by slavery. It is on this basis that bureaucratic capitalism develops until now.Since then, millions of peasants have passed under the humiliating yoke of Spanish and mestizo landlords. The genocide of the native people in the farming fields and mines is an open scar that only through a revolutionary process, led by the Party of the Proletariat, the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), will be able to heal. Furthermore, the real and definitive emancipation of the poor tilling the land will be achieved with the destruction of the semi feudal order. It is the semi feudal order that has kept in power a handful of families "owners of Peru" who have monopolized the wealth of the country.
Peasants, especially the poor peasants, those who possess no land nor agricultural tools, are the ones who massively answered the call of the People's War since May of 1980, to the present. The People's War in the countryside is specified as a peasant's war. This is because the peasants are aware that without destroying the current semi feudal order, which guarantees the economic basis of the landlord bureaucratic state, the people cannot conquer Power and constitute the People's Republic of Peru.
MASSIVE INCORPORATION OF THE PEASANTS TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR Throughout the 17 years of the People's War, peasants have been systematically destroying the power of the big landowners (a.k.a. gamonales) with powerful and continuous blows. By implementing the principle "land to the tiller, "(La tierra es para qui‚n la trabaja!) they are developing the new production relations in the countryside. As a result, they are preventing the landlords from reestablishing the semi feudal order.
The PCP has distributed thousands of hectares of arable land to the peasants' communities, therefore, it has undermined the power of the old serfdom, of the gamonal and petty gamonal. Mariategui, founder of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) established that semi feudal power was based on "land serfdom and gamonalism."
The ancient problem of land ownership is the motor of the class struggle in the countryside and has always been there. The only solution to this problem was to wage a People's War initiated by the Armed Struggle in 1980 (ILA-80).
Since the 1960's, three so-called "agrarian reform" laws have been passed that only helped maintain the concentration of land by big landowners and reinforce the bureaucratic State. Between 1963 and 1979 the old State, to avoid social explosions in the countryside, distributed lands under cooperative forms (CAPS, SAIS, EPS) to only 1.8 million of the 6.245 million peasants according to the 1981 census.
THE EVOLUTION OF FEUDALISM The Department of Puno is where the objective of the so-called "agrarian reforms" is seen more clearly. The laws of the old State have reinforced semi feudalism there with the subsisting trilogy of land, serfdom, and gamonalism, but under another disguise.
The December 1983 statistical table published by the Bureau of General Agrarian Reform, Ministry of Agriculture, showed that 23 Agrarian Societies of Social Interest (SAIS) benefitted with 52.20% of lands adjudicated, representing only 20.87% of peasant families. More than 48 percent (48.59%) of families grouped in 74 peasant communities only received 2.3% of the land.
On the other hand, associative enterprises, grouping together 45.64% of families, received 87.76% of distributed land, while peasant groups and communities representing 53.46% of families only got 9.10% of land. There have been other laws during the subsequent regimes of the APRA government (1985-1990) as well as under the current one (1990-present) that substantially reflect the objectives of the previous ones with respect to the distribution of land. For instance, Decree 26505 signed by Fujimori in July of 1995 and another one drafted in 1997. The objective of reaction, with the collusion of revisionism, is to turn the peasantry in an active subject to reinvigorate bureaucratic capitalism in the agro.
The old recipes of the liberal script described in these laws have been already implemented several times in our country in the past and they failed. Today, the same ideas are being reintroduced under the label of "modernization," "free market," and "competition," which are formulations that had a real base in countries such as England in the 18th Century, including the United States until the 19th Century. Those countries applied the liberal laws and prevailed, and most of them became industrially developed or simply imperialist countries.
However, the situation in Peru is completely different. This is not a society, which due to the development of its productive forces, has transformed itself from its feudal stage to capitalism. What is most important, Peru is not a society that by action of its anti-feudal bourgeoisie carried out a democratic revolution. To the contrary, from the beginning of the republic to the present time, the Peruvian big bourgeoisie and big landowners have been compromised to their bones with imperialism.
The farce of the imperialist recipe in the agro formulated by Fujimori's agrarian laws is synthesized as follows:
* It assumes that all peasants are "proprietors" or make them theoretically so by their laws (in paper only). That's the purpose of the distribution of "land titles," just like they did with the informal sector in Lima. This relationship "between proprietors" demands the existence and recognition of a State "above the classes," a mere regulator of its citizens. In reality, such relationship "among proprietors" corresponds only to the minuscule number of big landowners, who are the ones who make the laws tailored to their needs, through the State, even against the small and middle property owners. The "regulators" of the dictatorship are the reactionary armed forces who keep the "necessary principle of authority" in the countryside.The "competition" and "free market" preached by liberalism are only the "legal" mechanism and policy for the cannibalism between proprietors and against the peasants. In theory this is done with the purpose of making possible the control and monopoly of the so touted "market of free competition," as it happened in the most liberal countries in world history. With respect to the peasants, the reactionaries seek three objectives:
1) the disintegration of the peasants' communities,
2) the deposition of their lands, and
3) the dismantling of their organizations (e.g., people's committees).The solution to the land problem is not by counterpoising the bourgeois theory of "State protectionism" to "liberalism" of bureaucratic capitalism. That is a revisionist thesis. The proper answer to the land question is Democratic Revolution, whose concrete expression is the action of the peasants to seize the land, under proletarian leadership, following the agrarian policy of the Party Program. The Programma of the PCP calls for the destruction of semi feudalism. Thus, solves the fundamental problems in the agro: First, the character and ownership of the land, and then, the other aspects of the social relations of production and exchange in the agro.
THE ALTERNATIVE OF REVISIONISM What does revisionism propose? The revisionists encrusted in some peasant guild organization's limit their cry to "prices," "credits" and "productivity." All of these serve the landlords' goal of reinvigorating bureaucratic capitalism, because while the main problem remains unsolved, those vindications are a mere thermometer and lever to measure the profits of the landlords, bankers and in general of capitalists investing in the agro. In no case has an improvement of this indicators bore any effect in the solution of problems of masses of people or in particular of the peasantry.
Based on the undeniable advances of the People's War in these seventeen years, the elements of the New Power have been emerging and solidifying. Thousands of open and clandestine people's committees, which sustain the Support Bases in the countryside, are flourishing in all of the territory.
THE PEASANTS AND THE NEW POWER The peasants, especially the poor, led by the proletariat, have materialized the workers-peasants alliance, managing the organizations of the emerging New State and building their own destiny. As far as the peasants' masses are concerned, the PCP has managed to solve their problems by applying its proletarian ideology and military line to that end. The peasants themselves are destroying the semi feudalism that oppressed them and are building a New Order. Unlike the revisionists who favor peaceful work stoppages and strikes (or at best occupy idle lands and strengthen the SAIS and associated enterprises) the PCP supported by the People's Army of Liberation (EPL) carries out invasions of lands in Puno, La Libertad, Cusco, Ayacucho, Ancash, Apurimac, Lima and other areas; it destroys all remnants of gamonalism and latifundia (feudal concentration of land in few hands) and is constructing new forms of production, such as collective planting and cropping.
To counter the massive incorporation of poor peasants to the People's War, the representatives of the old reactionary State and its backbone, the Armed forces and Police Forces, have been conducting a dark counterinsurgent policy. They prioritize vile and cowardly genocide of unarmed peasants guided by the slogan of "dry the fish in the water." However, these massive crimes against peasants, children and the elderly, were systematically blamed on the PCP, in order to hide the genocidal acts of the armed forces and discredit the Maoist Forces.
THE OLD STATE APPLIES GENOCIDE Thousands of men and women in the countryside have fell victims of the reactionary hyenas, but that has not weakened the people's morale at all. On the contrary, in seventeen years of hard military struggle between the people's masses and the genocidal armed forces, only the revolutionary classes make significant advances. These are the construction of the New Power reflected in the people's committees and the support bases in the countryside.
Not only Mariategui foresaw organizing the proletariat as a leading force of the Peruvian Revolution. He also discovered the fundamental role the peasants had to fulfill. They had to be organized in peasant leagues or some sort of worker-peasant alliances. That's the basis why the PCP has armed the peasants as the principal force of the People's War.
ORGANIZATION OF THE PEASANTRY IN FUNCTION OF THE CONQUEST OF POWER Mariategui established that the emancipation of the peasants is the principal task because upon them fall centuries of exploitation. He said: "Feudalism or semi feudalism survives in the structure of our agrarian economy." This reality was hidden until the armed struggle began in 1980. There were new forms of the semi feudal character such as free labor, family obligations and deferred salaries, which maintained the fusion of the old latifundia with the role of gamonalism.
When the People's War began, all these forms of exploitation, hypocritically hidden under new disguises were exposed in the open by the blows of the PCP against the gamonal power.
The peasants played a very significant role in the region comprising the Departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurimac, an area that was the cradle of PCP activity for decades. In addition, this is the area where the armed actions began.
They were peasants, mainly the poor, from the beginning of the armed struggle until now, who have shown how their organization and endurance are capable of confronting cruelest and bloodiest counterrevolutionary onslaughts carried out by the reactionary armed forces and police.
It was the peasant of this main guerrilla zone who spilt and continues to spill his/her generous blood to light the flames of the People's War and to maintain and develop it. It was against these peasants that the vicious genocides of the regimes were more sinister and insatiable, and it was this courageous population who showed the world that, "blood does not drown the revolution but irrigates it." In response to the bloody campaign of reaction, the peasant's forces have been fighting heroically against the genocidal armed forces and their paramilitary thugs (rondas or civil defense committees) by delivering on them demolishing military and political blows. As a result, the peasants have organized hundreds of people's committees, conquered new support bases and began to solidly build the conquest of power.
In the PCP Document "Bases of Discussion," in the Section addressing the Democratic Revolution, President Gonzalo clearly points out that a genuine agrarian transformation consists of destroying the feudal landlords' property and giving each individual peasant a tract of land under the slogan "land to the tiller!"That could only be achieved by constructing the New Power, with hundreds of open and clandestine people's committees that exercise their power in people's assemblies. This is where all participate, provide their opinions, elect, judge or sanction, apply people's democracy and do not hesitate to impose dictatorship, and specify new politics to conquer power from below.
A TRUE AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATION The People's War is destroying the semi feudal base of the old society. It applies a new form of production and economy based on the agrarian policy of "fighting the evolution of semi feudalism." It aims at associative property and conjures the non-associative, neutralizes the rich peasantry, and wins over the middle peasantry. Therefore, its main core of support is the poor peasantry. The PCP having the People's Army as a tool, has led land invasions and distributes them to each individual poor peasant. The planting and crop raising are done collectively.
The old State has tried land distribution to rich peasants, those linked to SAIS and CAPS (state-controlled agrarian cooperatives) or it has returned to the landlords. For this reason, the PCP applies wisely and decisively the armed defense to safeguard the conquests achieved by the revolution in the countryside.
In the early 1990's, the greatest achievement of the Campaign "Impulse the Development of Support Bases!" led by the PCP yielded as its most important result the establishing of multiple open people's committees. The New Power in open daylight is defended by the People's War. They are strong and vibrant because of the presence of poor peasants, who are the majority in the countryside and are the backbone of the People's Army itself.
JOINT DICTATORSHIP AND THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF PERU Since 1980, the regimes have shown deep hatred, viciously slandering the agrarian policies of the PCP and President Gonzalo. The vile psychological warfare campaigns launched by the reactionaries to derail, twist and hide the victorious advance of the People's War, failed in the face of the victorious and powerful peasant's war.
Against the irresistible advance of the People's Army of Liberation (EPL) in the countryside, the reactionaries tried to oppose it with a "base" of mesnadas or paramilitary groups made up of former soldiers and black heads (cabezas negras) disguised as peasants who are being used as cannon fodders against the People's War. They can barely show their "repented ones" and farces about "peace agreements" and "capture of terrorists," and when attacked and smashed by the People's Army, reaction claims that "Sendero kills peasants." All of the paramilitary and the reactionary armed forces are trained in counterinsurgency in their barracks by Yankee advisors. Their only answer is to perpetuate the genocide against the people, and pave the road for the arrival of more Yankee "green berets."
What do the oppressed nations and peoples of the world recognize in the People's War? The New Power. The People's Committees with the People's Assembly constitutes the new system of government and the new function of the State. It has commissaries of production, security, communal affairs, people's organizations, sports and new arts, that are all backed by the People's Army of Liberation, having their own territorial and demographic environment and space. This is something that the old hacks and backward petty leaders at the service of imperialism cannot understand because these organizations generated by the People's War clearly expose their defeat.
WHAT IS THE REALITY? The New Power is building the new relations of production, the new education, and the new culture. All of them are created and supported by the masses, led by the PCP. Thus, the peasants with the precious blood of their best children are the principal force in the destruction of the old order and the construction of the New Power, the People's Republic of New Democracy.
Peru People's Movement (MPP).