From: mim@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Date: 28 Dec 92 20:59 PST
Subject: Maoist View of Guzman's Life Senten
Nf-ID: #N:NV1iwB9w165w@nyxfer.uucp:-1557847476:000:8210
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!mim    Dec 28 20:59:00 1992


Subject: Maoist View of Guzman's Life Sentence
From: nyxfer!mim (Maoist Intl'ist Mvmnt)

 
Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)
 
MIM Notes, Issue 70: November, 1992


         Peruvian "President" Sentenced to Life in Prison

                             by MC121

On October 7 a secret military court sentenced Abimael Guzman, or
Chairperson Gonzalo, of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Peru (PCP), to life imprisonment for treason. Also
sentenced to life imprisonment were Elena Iparraguire, Walter
Vargas and eight other PCP cadre who were captured with Gonzalo at
a house in Lima on September 12.(1)

Gonzalo's trial took place in a navy base on the coastal island of
San Lorenzo. His lawyer, Alfredo Crespo, was not allowed to
present a defense -- the verdict came as no surprise. Although
Peruvian law does not contain a death penalty, the Peruvian state
does have a practice of murdering captured revolutionaries.

The capture of Chairperson Gonzalo has not stopped the advance of
the people's war in Peru. At least two-thirds of the countryside
has been self-liberated and turned into socialist base-areas by
the masses and the PCP. Forty-seven percent of Peru's 22.6 million
people, including the 6.4 million residents of capital city Lima,
live under direct fascist military rule by a decrepit
Amerikan-backed regime desperate to crush the most successful
revolution in the world today.(2) Lima is on the brink of
explosion.

Imperialism bleeds too

International finance capital is addicted to the narco-dollars --
gathered by the Peruvian state apparatus -- to service the
never-ending interest on a growing debt of $20 billion.(3)

Three days after Gonzalo's capture the transnational Southern Peru
Copper Corporation announced cash dividends to its shareholders of
$60 million for the previous six months.(4) Ten days after
Gonzalo's capture the Inter-American Development Bank loaned Peru
$221.83 million to "help" Peru pay interest due on the revolving
door of debt-extortion.(5) Imperialism continues to prop up the
Peruvian banking system in order to keep the cash flow of coca and
copper dollars pumping into foreign accounts.

But despite short-term profit-taking, the transnationals can never
"stabilize" Peru -- or the rest of revolutionary Latin America.

Bankers cannot buy off the revolution in Peru; nor can the
incarceration of Comrade Gonzalo stem the development of the
People's War.

"Just two days after Guzman's arrest, Shining Path detachments
were back strutting with rifles and painting graffiti -- no
security forces in sight -- in shanty-towns just ten miles from
[Peruvian President] Fujimori's government palace."(6)

On the day of Gonzalo's sentencing a PCP communique stated, in
part, "We will freeze your laughter. Death to the civilian and
military judges and district attorneys, anonymous or not."(1) On
this day five powerful bombs exploded in government buildings as
police and soldiers were cut down by communists who then seized
their weapons and escaped.(7)

Armed PCP actions continue to paralyze capitalist institutions all
over Peru (8) and even the bourgeois media is forced to admit that
Gonzalo's capture is but one chapter in the People's War.

"Some analysts now argue that with Guzman in jail, his movement is
beheaded -- doomed to disintegrate. But others point to the highly
compartmentalized and clandestine structure of [the PCP]
organization, noting that probably not more than a few dozen
guerilla fighters have ever met Guzman and that they can and will
keep on fighting just fine without him."(6)

The bourgeois media played up Gonzalo's capture and practically
ignored the kangaroo trial. In this, the international bourgeoisie
is simply abiding by its increasingly vital dictate to try and
keep under wraps the most explosive secret of our times: Maoism
works!

Most of the capitalist media slanders the PCP as
"narco-terrorists" and baby-butchers. These flacks claim, with no
substantiation, that the PCP has murdered 25,000 Peruvians. The
Peruvian government's own current figures for total deaths during
the revolutionary war that began in 1980 are:

 presumed "subversives"  11,872
 civilians               10,286
 soldiers and police      2,095
 narcotics traffickers      264 (9)

This is a ratio of 10 peasants and PCP cadre killed for every
well-equipped pig. Even Amnesty International admits that the
Peruvian government slaughters the peasant population on a daily
basis. And yet the people's revolution continues to triumph step
by step in the face of organized state terrorism.

The magazine _Covert Action_ (no particular friend to
revolutionary Maoism) comments:

"To characterize Sendero as narcoterrorist is to misread the
movement. Sendero's involvement in the traffic is only a means to
an end: the destruction of capitalism in Peru and its replacement
with a Cultural Revolution-vintage Maoist state . [Actually, the
PCP protects peasants from the narcotrafficking state regime,
Amerikan Drug Enforcement Administration troops and drug-dealing
Green Berets -- as well as from the Colombian drug warlords.]

"To achieve its vision, Sendero has embarked on a patient,
methodical, and ruthless 'prolonged people's war,' combining
careful political work with extreme but calculated violence. The
party possesses a chilling 'rationality' . With cold calculation,
ideological coherence, superb organization, and fierce
determination, Sendero has become the world's most effective
revolutionary movement . [W]ithin the confines of its [Maoist]
orthodoxy *the party displays a most undogmatic tactical
acuity and flexibility, even brilliance.*

"In 12 years of armed struggle, the insurgency has grown from
making isolated attacks on remote Andean villages to a
self-proclaimed, but undisputed 'strategic equilibrium' with the
Peruvian military in large reaches of the country. At present,
conservative analysts estimate that 25 to 40 percent of the
country is under Sendero control. Sendero is equally adept at
administering its 'New Power;' its structures are complex,
extensive, and redundant. As [a U.S. government study] noted,
'targeting such a parallel political infrastructure, under ideal
conditions, is a difficult task. In view of Shining Path's current
level of institutional development . the task may now be
impossible, with or without U.S. military assistance.'"(10)

Thank you, _Covert Action_, for spelling out the situation so
clearly. The Amerikan left has lagged far behind the imperialists
in recognizing the effective power of a people's revolutionary
movement guided by the scientific lessons of Maoism.  The PCP has
led the international communist movement by example in recognizing
and acting upon the fact that the principal revolutionary movement
in our world is that of the oppressed nations against imperialism.

Maoists in Amerika know that the only real internationalism is to
make revolution in your own country. Today, working with MIM's
concrete analysis of the economic, political and cultural
parasitism of the Amerikan white working-class, it has become
possible for the people to create revolutionary organizations
inside Amerika's oppressed nations. Through building independent
power of the oppressed, our organizations will become capable of
truly cementing the identity of the international proletariat.

Notes:

 1. Los Angeles Times 10/8/92.
 2. UPI 9/24/92.
 3. El Diario Internacional Oct/Nov 1991, p. 15-16.
 4. Business Wire 9/15/92.
 5. Xinhua 9/25/92.
 6. Village Voice 9/29/92, p. 23
 7. UPI 10/7/92.
 8. UPI 9/12/92 -10/9/92
 9. El Pais 9/20/92.
10. Covert Action Information Bulletin, Fall 1992, p. 60;
    emphasis added.

 
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