Since the early 1990's, the United States government has increased considerably the supply of funds and resources to the reactionary Peruvian armed forces and police for their countersubversive campaigns. At the same time, through their figurehead in government (Fujimori) the armed forces have signed at least four anti-drug agreements with the U.S., which initially involved military aid (mostly in training, and logistical support) to combat the Peruvian revolution led by the PCP. After the military coup of April 1992, the regime's antidrug plan call for the armed forces submit themselves to the leadership of the Yankee Green Berets in the anti-guerrilla operatives, which was preceded by revelations in the press about the collaboration of several generals and officers with narcotrafficking. This transfer of leadership wiped out any sign of legal opposition to the direct military intervention by imperialism. The plans of Yankee imperialism also call for the construction of more military bases similar to those already in place in Santa Lucia (Huallaga) and Nanay (Department of Iquitos), and a large influx of advisors and military supplies. That's why Clinton has appointed Barry McCaffrey, a Yankee general with expertise in low intensity warfare as the "drug Czar." McCaffrey was formerly in charge of the U.S. Southern Command. But in reality this gentleman, who is an old puppeteer of Noriega and Montesinos, does not have a background on fighting narcotrafficking, but is rather an expert on warfare matters, specifically in counterinsurgency warfare. He is one of the Yankee officers who was defeated by the heroic people of Vietnam in the war of Indochina in the 1970's.The New Flag MagazineThe U.S. aid increased in 1990 with the Bush Administration's "Andean Strategy," a five year, 2.2 billion dollar plan. This plan was widely publicized as the best mechanism "to try to stop the cocaine plague at its source," but in reality it was for the purpose of fighting the Peruvian revolution. One of the authors of this failed plan was Mr. R. Rand Beers, now chief of the State Department Anti-narcotics Branch under the Clinton Administration. The plan failed not only because of the strong bonds between the high officials of the regime, the armed forces and the police with the narcotraffickers, but because of the widespread support of the people for the People's War led by the PCP. There is no evidence of any significant change in the Fujimori regime's relationship with the narcotraffickers today.
TRAINING THE BUTCHERS A large number of Peruvian intelligence agents of the Army (SIE), Navy, Air Force, and Police have been trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia, the CIA training centers in Virginia and North Carolina (NC), and U.S. bases in Panama. Also, the Pentagon's efforts to overhaul the demoralized Peruvian armed forces have been conducted on Peruvian soil, by regular sized specialized teams. The U.S. teams teach them basic anti-guerrilla skills, marksmanship, and jungle maneuvers. The curriculum consists of heavy doses of counterinsurgency with negligible anti-drug tactics. Most of the time the training has nothing to do with drug interdiction, except for a minor course known as "counter-drug" (only in appearance), but in reality, the materials used are those U.S. army training materials drawn largely from the Seventh Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., and often led by the Pentagon's Joint Combined Exchange Training. At the end of the of a course, the trainers will typically plan a "graduation" attack on the guerrillas and then wait at the base while the students carry it out. This attack on the PCP "guerrillas" generally consists of occupying a village or hamlet where unarmed humble peasants live (marked as a "red zone") where they put in practice their skills of raping, torturing and terrorizing the civilian population.
Another program, Joint Planning Assistance and Training, often involves the preparation of psychological operations against the people who support the guerrillas. Still other teams analyze military intelligence information to help the Peruvian armed forces and police plan its operations. The reactionary Peruvian police is also involved in the "drug interdiction" program under a new U.S.-financed program to intercept the river boats and canoes people use to access their own communities, under the assumption that these people are "transporting coca paste into and around Colombia". The Pentagon does admit that many of the units of the armed forces that they train are to battle against the rebels. So there are no troops dedicated exclusively to "drug interdiction", but to the insurgency. By 1994, both the Yankee State Department and the General Accounting Office had found, that the light-infantry skills taught in anti-drug trainings were easily adapted to fighting the People's Army of Liberation led by the PCP. In addition, the so-called "anti-drug aid" goes to the brigades and battalions that had been implicated in genocide or linked to the murders perpetrated by the paramilitaries. The countless crimes committed by imperialism and its servant Fujimori in the Haullaga and others, have already been denounced to the OAS Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.
Yankee military officials know that their "war on drugs" is a disguise for military intervention in the Latin American countries where their puppet governments are being challenged by popular insurrections. Thus, lacking any other legal cover for intervention in Peru, imperialism has no choice but to insist on its already discredited "drug interdiction" policy. Their own public opinion, including some in the Yankee Congress are already questioning that the charade of "war on drugs" is a disguise to combat the people's insurrection.
The statements of General Wilhelm, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Southern Command, clearly expose the charade of "war on drugs." He said, "drug profits and other income are financing the guerrillas," and "we are seeing, basically, an undermining of governance at the grass root level. In a sense, I see a nation divided." This comment was made in reference to the "war on drugs" in Colombia and published in the NY Times on 6/2/1998. This is a more vivid testimony than the DEA's and CIA's unsubstantiated claim that the coca plantations in Peru (allegedly suppliers of cocaine raw paste to the Colombians) have decreased 27 percent in 1997.
Indeed, there is a New Power in Peru engaged in a bloody military confrontation with the old State. Here is an example: "On October 12, 1997, at 8:00 P.M. a contingent of more than 100 Maoist combatants clashed and defeated the combined police and armed forces stationed in the military post of San Miguel, the capital of the province of La Mar, Ayacucho. Four policemen were annihilated in combat, and dozens were captured or surrendered. The military garrison was dynamited. After this successful action, the population greeted the victorious guerrillas who addressed them from the balconies of the government offices. Then the people led by members of the PCP began to distribute food, medicines and other goods to the local population, expropriated from the military warehouses, and supermarkets owned by the local landlords. Reuters reported this action on October 12, 1997, `Shining Path Returns: A column of 100 Maoist guerrillas of the Communist Party of Peru (official name of the Shining Path) took over the city of San Miguel . . . the bold attack was one in a series of operations nationwide that have shocked the country. Peruvian officials reported that it was probably the most serious defeat of the government forces, but only one of a series of battles that the armed forces had lost in the last 5 years.
Mililitary analysts stated that the Peruvian Army was probably weaker than it looked. One example is their shameful defeat in the short clash they had with Ecuador in 1995. Most of the soldiers are deployed to protect cities, oil pipelines, mining centers and other fixed targets. In 1992, a report by the Rand Corporation, working as a contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed that if the military trend of the PCP would continue, the defeat of the armed forces was assured. Many Yankee analysts and senderologists dreamt that with the capture of Chairman Gonzalo this situation was going to change. The reality however, is completely different: After 18 years, the People's War goes on.
Because the revolution has a strong presence in the Huallaga zone, most importantly, liberated territories or People's Committees who for the most part, have eradicated the coca cultivation. The U.S. military strategists are directing the Peruvian armed forces and police to focus on these targets. So far, the anti-guerrilla plans of the U.S. military, the Peruvian Air Force, and the police have been defeated by the People's Army of Liberation led by the PCP.
The Yankee military provides night-vision equipment for Peruvian planes so that they can track the movements of the People's Army of Liberation at night. But the Maoists have been adapting their military tactics so successfully to elude the attacks from the air, as well as to directly attack the Yankee bases on Peruvian soil. In retaliation, the Peruvian Air Force has bombed several civilian targets in the Huallaga Zone.
The Peruvian armed forces has purchased several Russian warplanes during the regimes of Garcia and Fujimori. In the late 1980's the Sandinista army of Nicaragua sold the Peruvian Air Force several helicopters they have used during the contra war in that country, and the U.S. has also replaced and updated several helicopters. Some newspapers in Lima have recently reported that the Pentagon plans to provide the Peruvian armed forces with armored attack MH-1 Cobra helicopters to be used in regions of strong guerrilla presence.
According to a report in the New York Times (June 2, 1998), General Wilhelm, the Chief of the Southern Command, admitted that Yankee imperialism is in charge of the military intervention in Colombia against FARC and ELN, which in military and strategic terms is less important and has less risk of threatening the interests of imperialism than is the People's War in Peru led by the PCP : "The United States is not sending the sort of advisors that it once stationed with military units in countries like El Salvador and Vietnam. But he also made it clear that he himself, has become a crucial advisor of the high command." The last sentence is very important. It clearly reveals that the U.S. control on the Peruvian military is only an extension of their political control, in which the U.S. Embassy and the CIA have become the "crucial advisors" of General Hermoza Rios, and his "democratic" figurehead Fujimori.
The Times also reported that "there is a small group of Southern Command analysts embarked on a side-by-side comparison of Colombia's experience to that of Peru, where leftist guerrillas protected coca growers for years." Probably, they are referring to the almost extinct revisionist clique MRTA. Attempting to portray the "defeat of the PCP," the Times tries to imply that the PCP no longer protects the hundreds of thousands of peasants whose livelihoods depend on the plantation of coca. That'ss not true because no one doubts that the Huallaga and the Ayacucho jungles are strongholds of the PCP guerrillas, and are the scenarios of the crucial battlefields with the reactionary armed forces. And this is possible only with the support of the masses.
This interesting piece in the Times was apparently approved for publication by the State Department in order to embarrass the Presidential candidate Horacio Serpa in the recent election in Colombia (Serpa was the hand picked candidate of narco President Samper who has contradictions with the Clinton Administration). The U.S. supported the candidacy of the winner, the conservative Pastrana. Another lackey, the former Colombian cocaine President Cesar Gavidia, was implanted as head of the OAS, and is now a delivery boy of the interests of Yankee imperialism in Latin America.
"Will the U.S. Be Drawn into War on Rebels?" hypocritically asks the imperialist mouthpiece, The New York Times, revealing the disinformation methods the Pentagon uses to manipulate public opinion in the U.S. Furthermore, it says that the Yankee military intervention has "safeguards" such as "keeping aid going to human rights abuses," review the "training manuals", and "joint combined exchange training." All of these imperialist "safeguards" are old ingredients of the killing fields in Vietnam and Cambodia, which have been seasoned today in Peru with the double talk of "war on drugs" and "human rights." There is one interesting promise that Yankee political strategists in the White House offer today, but they will swallow it as soon as the People's War pushes the insurrections in the cities : "U.S. aid can be used only in a designated region where the ties between drug traffickers and guerrillas are held so closely that any rebel unit could fairly be considered the trafficker's ally." But this policy is strongly contradicted by the Pentagon, which states that the U.S. military has no limits in terms of territory. Therefore, they can go wherever they want in Peru, Colombia or any country even in those regions regions not involved with coca plantations. General Wilhelm said: "In terms of geography and the use of the resources, I'm personally unaware of any restrictions." Gen. Wilhelm's statement helps us to completely unmask the guise that the U.S. military is fighting against drug trafficking. In reality, the "war on drugs" is a guise to containing the revolutionary storm in Peru led by the PCP that continues undefeated for 18th Years of the Glorious People's War.
Even the same Yankee intelligence analysts, according to the same piece in the NY Times, are questioning the existence of such rebel-drug trafficker alliances that have been at the core of policy makers' concerns. In describing the Colombian situation, the Times reported that the U.S. intelligence agencies draft two types of reports, one public for propaganda and misinformation purposes, and another "classified" or "secret" with some factual information for actual field military operations: "According to a 1996 report by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the Colombian rebels' ties to the drug trade are extensive. But a declassified summary of the report says that while guerrilla fronts sell protection `in virtually all departments where traffickers operate, ' only a few rebel fronts are PROBABLY more directly involved in localized, small-scale drug cultivation and processing." So, Yankee imperialism admits that it has no evidence of the Colombian rebels involvement with drug trafficking! Even much less on Peru, where the PCP promotes substitution of coca planting in the liberated territories or People's Committees.
Then, who is involved with narco traffickers in Peru? There is mounting evidence that the reactionary armed forces, the police, and the Fujimori regime are involved up to the neck in cocaine trafficking. As indicated before, several Peruvian generals, most of them working closely with the U.S. military have been indicted for drug trafficking. Vladimiro Montesinos, a key advisor of Fujimori and reputed CIA mole, has been paid $ 50,000 per month for protection and information by one of the leaders of the Peruvian drug cartel "El Vaticano." In retaliation, "El Vaticano" was jailed, tortured and forced to retract his charge from jail before a TV camera monitored by the intelligence services (SIN) whose head is also Montesinos. Several generals were linked to the cocaine trafficking, and many of them have been questioning the Yankee command in the counterinsurgency war (e.g., General Arceniagas) . Large quantities of drugs were also found in Peruvian Navy ships caught in Canada, and on an Air Force Aircraft with Fujimori on board, that was detained in the United States with a suitcase full of cocaine, etc. There is ample evidence of institutionalized corruption in the old rotten Peruvian State, including high officials of the police, the armed forces and the government. And this corruption is not only at the top, such as the Fujimori family and cronies with Santiago Fujimori ( the brother of the tyrant) who owns many drug-related businesses in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, but in lower government levels as well. The low salaries paid to government workers, the police and the armed forces, relative to the high cost of living, result in widespread institutionalized corruption. Do we need more evidence than that?
In summary, the "war on drugs" is a ruse employed by imperialism to combat the People''s War, and the unblemished moral authority of the Communist Party of Perú cannot be compared with the narco-State of Fujimori and its corrupt and rotten Yankee master.