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/* Written  1:51 am  Jan 27, 1993 by pnews@igc.apc.org in igc:p.news */
/* ---------- "BIDOM on SENDERO (1)" ---------- */
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{From IN DEFENSE OF MARXISM (BIDOM), #102, January 1993}
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID TRUJILLO:
THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PERU AND THE ACTIVITY OF SENDERO 
LUMINOSO
 
[There are several things happening here on the nets that have 
been overly devisive. While there has been an attempt to carry on 
a debate, one dealing with censorship and banning MIM from M.A.P, 
there is also the intractable position taken by MIM that says 
there can be no accomodation with others on the left. That simply 
is not true. We often come together in coalitions to work for 
peace and justice because individually as independents or as 
members of separate organizations we are simply not strong enough 
to be viable and only when we come together, as we do here on 
Peacenet, to coalesce and work as a movement in this struggle, 
only then can we be effective. 
 
And when we lose our sense of humanity, when we lose sight of why 
we fight the good fight, we lose the confidence and support of 
those who would join us in that struggle and we no longer 
hold the moral high ground. 
 
And as Trujillo points out about SL, when we believe there is no 
other path to socialism or economic and social justice except 
that which we are on, we are also overly sectarian and that is 
counter-productive and self-defeating. We need to learn and study 
together and to be morally courageous. Put another way, though 
perhaps not quite as strongly as Harel tends to make his point, 
we should NOT retreat from condemning those who would perpetrate 
dispictable, and heinous acts of cruelty even in revolution, 
whether on the right or the left.----Hank Roth] 
**************************************************************** 
(David Trujillo, a leader of the left in Peru and a member of the 
PUM, was interviewed by Marty Goodman and wrote out his responses 
in Spanish in November 1992. They were translated by F.Mailman.) 
 
THE APRIL 6, 1992, MILITARY COUP LED BY PERU'S PRESIDENT ALBERTO 
K. FUJIMORI HAS ACHIEVED AN ELUSIVE GOAL OF THE PERUVIAN RULING 
CLASS---THE CAPTURE AND SUBSEQUENT LIFE PRISON TERM OF CHAIRMAN 
ABIMAEL GUZMAN REYNOSO OF SENDERO LUMINOSO (SL). GUZMAN HAS BEEN 
DESCRIBED BY HIS FOLLOWERS AS "THE RED SUN," WHOSE POLITICAL 
THEORIES CONSTITUTE "THE FOURTH SWORD OF MARXISM," THAT IS 
MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, GONZALO THOUGHT. NEVER BEFORE HAS SUCH A 
PERSONAL CULT EMBRACED A STALINIST POLTICAL FIGURE BEFORE SEIZURE 
OF POWER. WHAT IMPACT WILL HIS IMPRISONMENT HAVE ON SL'S 
GUERRILLA WAR?
 
In the first place, it must be pointed out that the social and 
historical conditions in the Andean region, in which the city of 
Ayacucho is located, have made it possible for a mediocre leftist 
intellectual to become "the fourth sword of Marxism-Leninism-
Maoism," "the red sun of world revolution," the arrogant 
"Chairman Gonzalo."
 
This cult of personality, which is sui generis [unique] even in 
the history of Stalinism and which in an early phase signified an 
acknowledgement of leadership based on a specific link between 
Sendero Luminoso and a sector of the Quechua nation, also became 
a factor in the decline of Guzman's leadership and his ultimate 
capture.
 
AFTER GUZMAN'S CAPTURE
 
What happens with Sendero Luminoso after the capture of Gonzalo 
will no doubt be another story. Without the vertical and 
totalitarian authority of its leader and his chief lieutenants, 
the main directors, this organization will have to go on to a new 
process in which struggles for leadership will inevitably have 
very violent features. Centrifugal forces will assert themselves, 
going in different directions, including the utilization of SL's 
military resources for other ends. 
 
At the same time, Peru, militarized by Fujimori's "auto-coup" on 
April 5, 1992, paradoxically is becoming more and more the model 
pictured in the fantasy of "Gonzalo thought": a Third World 
fascist regime, with or without Fijimori, backed exclusively by 
the army and, alternately, by different factions of the 
bourgeoisie, which will try to construct a "national unity" based 
on the defeat of Andean and Aymara societies and on the defeat of 
organized mass movements. 
 
CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE REPRESSION UNDER THE COUP? HOW HAS FUJIMORI 
USED MARTIAL LAW TO REPRESS NOT ONLY SL BUT THE ENTIRE LEFT?
 
In Peru those who determine the strategy for the antisubversive 
struggle have for years been the armed forces. Only with 
Fujimori's coup d'etat, for the first time the military and 
repressive institutions are acting under a common leadership, 
although this has not yet succeeded in becoming a definitive 
leadership. Therefore, a sector of the repressive forces has 
acted autonomously, prioritizing the intelligence services. That 
and the support of the the CIA permitted them to find Guzman's 
hideout and to capture him. According  to the magazine CARETAS it 
was Bush, and not Fujimori, who first received the news of the 
capture of "Gonzalo."
 
In regard to the left, and the people in general, they are caught 
between two fires. This past year, to date, Sendero Luminoso has 
killed more than 150 left-wing leaders, among them many women. 
The most serious murder was that of Maria Elena Moyano, president 
of the Peruvian Women's Federation and a popular leader in the 
Villa El Salvador neighborhood. According to a recent report, 
Guzman's capture has been followed by "the disappearance of more 
than 500 people. 
 
WHAT IS SL'S CURRENT STRENGTH IN THE RURAL AREAS? ALSO, WHAT HAS 
BEEN ITS SUCCESS IN THE URBAN CENTERS IT HAS TURNED TO IN THE 
LAST FEW YEARS?
 
The highly publicized success of SL in the Peruvian countryside 
is in reality less than what has been made public. Its center of 
origin, Ayacucho, represents only 4 percent of the total 
population of Peru and contributes barely 0.8 percent to the 
gross national product. Additionally, it is interesting that, 
while this area is characterized by the Sendero Maaoists as 
"semi-feudal," the Ayacucho peasants underscored in their 1969 
rebellion not the struggle for the land, as happened more or less 
in other regions in that epoch, but for free education!
 
That is why other left groups --- which have an even larger 
foothold than SL among the peasants --- have not had the boom 
which SL had, owing to the fact that then (at the end of the 
'60s), Guzman's group was above all an exclusively student 
organization at the university and in the high schools of the 
city of Huamanaga. 
 
It was the brutal repression provoked by SL that resulted in the 
so-called self-defense "rounds" [government-organized anti-
Sendero peasant units], confrontations between villages, and the 
subsequent de-population of the countryside. The Guzman 
leadership then made the decision to move to Lima and initiate 
the stage which they describe as "strategic balance," in which 
they presumed themselves to be equal in military strength to the 
army and the aim of which was to seize power. 
 
This decision to move to Lima was not unanimous. It is known that 
Guzman's wife, Augusta La Torre, who died (she was executed or 
committed suicide), and the imprisoned Osman Morote formed the 
"Grupo Negro (Black Group) opposed to this change of "line," 
denouncing those positions as "Hoxhist" (referring to Enver 
Hoxha, former president of Albania). They fought to maintain the 
Maoist strategy which prioritized the struggle in the 
countryside. It must also be reiterated that other than the 
relative success of achieving a foothold in some neighborhoods, 
fundamentally SL has achieved no significant success in the labor 
movements and the grassroots organizations. That is why they have 
turned to the intimidation or killing of popular leaders, as was 
the case with labor leader and Trotskyist militant Roberto 
Chiara. They killed him in order to capture the shoemakers union, 
which they ended up destroying with their ultra-left and 
sectarian provocations. 
 
TODAY PERU IS IN A STATE OF UTTER COLLAPSE. IN LATIN AMERICA, 
ONLY BOLIVIA AND HAITI ARE IN WORSE CONDITION. IN ORDER TO PAY 
THE COUNTRY'S ENORMOUS DEBT TO THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND 
(IMF) FUJIMORI---REVERSING HIS CAMPAIGN STAND AGAINST IMF'S 
"SHOCK THERAPY" --- SLASHED STATE SUPPORT TO PUBLIC PROGRAMS, 
FIRED WORKERS, AND LOWERED CUSTOMS DUTIES ON IMPORTS, BRINGING 
PERUVIAN PRODUCTS IN DIRECT COMPETITION WITH FOREIGN GOODS. AS A 
RESULT INFLATION REACHED AN ALMOST INCOMPREHENSIBLE 7,650 PERCENT 
IN 1990 UNDER FUJIMORI. MORE THAN HALF THE PEOPLE OF PERU ARE NOW 
IN A CONDITION DESCRIBED AS "CRITICAL POVERTY." IN JANUARY 1991 
AN OUTBREAK OF CHOLERA, A TREATABLE DISEASE LONG ASSOCIATED WITH 
POVERTY, QUICKLY SPREAD THROUGH THE CONSUMPTION OF UNSANITARY 
WATER. CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN YOUR OWN WORDS THE CONDTIION OF THE 
WORKER AND PEASANT MASSES?
 
Peru is a country in a state of bankruptcy, in which the 
recession is the main problem. In this country the productive 
forces have not only stopped growing but those which survive 
simply have become incompetent because of the mediocrity of the 
Peruvian bourgeoisie as well as its backwardness in light of the 
colossal development of contemporary technology. 
 
The traditional raw materials for export have been devalued, 
either because of the decline of prices in the world market, or 
simply because of the disinterest, ineptitude, and perfidy of the 
governing classes, as is the case with cotton, formerly a very 
important source of income, whose quality, because of poor 
control and exposure to differnt pests, has been significantly 
reduced. Industry uses barely 30 percent of installed capacity, 
and there is an agonizing situation because of the [price] 
reduction and ancillary rates which favor importation of all 
sorts of better-qualtiy and in some cases cheaper consumer 
articles rather than national products.
 
Agriculture is in the process of extinction. Years ago Peru was 
an eminently agricultural country and the population was made up 
primarily of peasants. Today the percentage of the population is 
reversed: almost 70 percent live in the cities and 30 percent of 
thos elive in the capital city of Lima, surviving as street 
vendors in the "informal market" (not integrated into the 
official economy) and undergoing an extended "lumpenization."
 
A $25 BILLION FOREIGN DEBT
 
As for imperialism, if before it was seen as "the gringo who 
carried away our wealth," today it is the usurer who is charging 
us enormous interest rates on a foreign debt (more than $25 
billion) that is impossible to pay off. The payments on this debt 
dramatically increase the misery of the people when added to the 
poverty that already exists. Under Fujimori the level of critical 
poverty which, under Alan Garcia, had surpased 50 percent of the 
population, has now reached almost 70 percent. At the same time, 
it is also said that Peru no longer has strategic wealth and that 
its only profitable business comes from drug-trafficking, in 
which an important part of the ruling classes and the armed 
forces are involved. Even if this is true, Peru is hardly more 
than a producer of a cheap raw material, the coca leaf, used for 
making cocaine, an alkaloid separated from the coca leaf by a 
German chemist in 1860. Following the tradiitonal path of its 
history since it was conquered by Spain, Peru barely receives a 
few crumbs of this "illicit" business. Former president Alan 
Garcia, currently accused of illicit self-aggrandizement and a 
fugitive from Peruvian justice, mentions some figures which can 
illustrate this situation. In round numbers he said that the 
cocaine business produces an economic movement of $100 billion; 
of this amount 5 percent reaches Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia (in 
that order). Ninety-five percent of the business is in the hands 
of North Americans and people in other First World countries.
 
SOME POLITICAL OBSERVERS SAW THE 1990 VICTORY OF FUJIMORI'S 
FRAGILE ELECTORAL COALITION, "CAMBIO '90," NOT ONLY AS A BLOW TO 
THE FAR RIGHT CANDIDACY OF WRITER MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, BUT ALSO A 
REPUDIATION OF SL AND PERHAPS EVEN THE ENTIRE LEFT AS WELL (VOTES 
FOR THE LEFT WERE VERY LOW IN STRONGHOLDS SUCH AS CUZCO, PUNO, 
ETC.). WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS VIEW?
 
That's true. the Peruvian people are tired of traditional 
political organizations as much of the right as of the left 
because in the last 12 years of representative democracy, after 
11 years of military dictatorship, following 170 years of being 
an "independent republic" and 500 years under conquest, there is 
no light at the end of the tunnel. We continue to see a conquered 
people who have not been able to recover the standard of living 
and autonomy we had before the European invasion, a people dying 
of hunger, to whom even the right to their own culture has been 
denied and who are obligated to pay a foreign debt of $25 billion 
while nobody knows how, why, or for what it was spent. 
 
But what is different from the past is that now we are not so 
pessimistic, although it may seem so. In the course of the last 
ten years and in the struggle against misery and daily hunger, as 
well as illness, such as plague, which have come to dramatize our 
tragedy even more, innumerable popular organizations have been 
crated, many of them independent of political parties but 
searching for the political means to put an end to this 
situation. A little less than six years ago a call for the 
formation of a Popular Assembly was enough to get delegations of 
representatives of workers, peasants, women, young people, etc., 
from all corners of the country together, and although 
unfortunatley this organization did not prosper because at that 
time the left was more interested in its internal confrontation 
with a view toward the elections and the choosing of a candidate, 
nonetheless it was a demonstration of what could happen when some 
organization has the will to put out a call based on an authentic 
popular alternative. 
 
SL'S POLITICAL GURU ABIMAEL GUZMAN HAS HAD A RATHER REMARKABLE 
POLITICAL LIFE SINCE FOUNDING SL IN THE EARLY 70S, WHILE A 
PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HUAMANGA IN THE RURAL 
PROVINCE OF AYACAUCO. YET GUZMANS VIEWS REMIND ONE OF THE MIND-
NUMBING RHETORIC OF MAOIST SECTS THAT ARE HERE TODAY AND GONE 
TOMORROW. 
 
HOWEVER, SENDERO HAS NOT ONLY SURVIVED BUT SINCE INITIATING ARMED 
STRUGGLE IN 1980 --- CURIOUSLY AT A TIME WHEN BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY 
ENJOYED A REVIVAL --- IT NOW CONTROLS MUCH OF THE COUNTRY. HOW DO 
YOU EXPLAIN GUZMAN'S AND SL'S SUCCESS? 
 
Although Guzman, and with him the SL, describe themselves as 
Maoists, it must be pointed out that the relative foothold 
achieved by this organization in a sector of the masses of the 
Ayacuchan people is due less to its Maoism than to the fact that 
SL, at a given moment, represented the hope of the masses to rise 
above the factor which they considered above all else the cause 
of their misfortunes: the lack of education. 
 
A BOOK UNDER HIS ARM
 
It is revealing that the idealized figure of Guzman is that of an 
intellectual with a book under his arm, as opposed to the '60s in 
which the partisans of the guerrillas attacked the "coffeeshop 
revolutionaries," as the intellectuals of the left then tended to 
be. In any case, SL has not achieved the explicit support of some 
important sectors of the population and if it has had some 
success in its "armed strikes," it has been because "persuasion 
with dynamite" has been more than sufficient to neutralize the 
chaotic and minimal public transportation system. Still, if we 
consider the fact that the majority of those who use the public 
transporation system are independent workers in the street 
markets, we note that this only affects those who SL claims to 
represent.
 
SL, on the other hand, is no longer what it was at the beginning. 
Today it has become a bloodthirsty, provocative, antidemocratic, 
authoritarian organization and, just like the fascism which it 
says it struggles against, it also practices a special cult of 
death. In 19890, when it declared its intention of achieving 
"strategic balance," it began to speak of millions of dead and of 
the convenience of "genocide" in order to achieve that balance. 
 
IT HAS BEEN SAID (IN NACLA, VOL XXIV, pg34) THAT SL BELIEVES THE 
CURRENT STAGE OF THE PERUVIAN REVOLUTION IS "DEMOCRATIC" AND 
HENCE REFRAINS FROM SOCIALIST MEASURES IN RURAL AREAS. DOES SL 
EMPOWER PEASANTS IN AREAS IT CONTROLS?
 
SL and the so-called "Gonzalo thought" have nothing new: it is 
the same Stalinism as the "third period" in the early '30s [after 
Stalin announced that world capitalism had entered its third and 
final period,] when the Comintern launched the line of struggle of 
"class against class" and when the spokesman for this line in 
Peru was Eudocio Ravinez. 
 
Ravinez headed a clandestine faction opposed to Jose Carlos 
Mariategui, founder of Peruvian Marxism and the Socialist Party.
After Mariategui's death, Ravinez revised the ideas of the 
Socialist Party in its early period, forced its submission to the 
Stalinist-dominated Third International, changed the party's name 
to Communist Party, and changed its program, twisting 
Mariategui's analysis.