As of this writing, the MRTA continues to hold 73 hostages, among them three top ministers; five generals and a dozen colonels and majors; the head of the supreme court, several supreme court members and assorted judges. These are the hooded "faceless judges" that sent almost 4,000 people to prison for "terrorism" and "treason to the fatherland" after phony "trials" lasting only a few minutes. Several ambassadors and prominent businessmen were also seized.
The MRTA made four demands: the release of more than 400 prisoners who are accused of being members of their organization; safe passage to the jungle for the prisoners and those carrying out this action; the payment by the government of a "war tax"; and "that the government commit itself to changing its economic course in favour of a model which aims for the well-being of the great majority."
At this time it is impossible to predict how this situation will develop. The Fujimori government has repeatedly declared that it will not five in to these demands and it not willing to negotiate anything but the release of the hostages in exchange for the safe-conduct of the MRTA commando out of the country. The MRTA has so far refused to accept this offer.
Here a number of points must be made about the class character of both sides in this confrontation:
The Fujimori regime is a terrorist, murderous, criminal gang running Peru at the behest of the U.S. In 1980, the Communist Party of Peru, a founding participant of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, began a People's War that has aroused and armed above all the peasants and other poor people to throw off the system squeezing the life out of them. This system is run by despotic landlords, capitalists in league with them and with foreign capital, and imperialism. In seeking to drown a righteous rebellion in blood, three Peruvian governments in succession napalmed villages and sent the Armed Forces into suspected "subversive zones" to rampage, rape and kill. The vast majority of the 30,000 people dead in the last 17 years of this war were killed by government forces. A great many of them were unarmed civilians.
The Fujimori regime brought this brutality to new depths. In the U.S.-backed coup d'etat in 1992, Fujimori sent the Armed Forces to shut down the Congress and other sources of opposition from within the ruling classes. The best example of how he has run the country since then is his 1995 "law of amnesty", which decreed that no government official, civilian or military, could be punished for any crimes committed in the course of the war. Specifically, this was meant to close down investigations and pending trials and free those already convicted in notorious cases. Some of these included the Barrios Altos murder, in which the "Colina Group", a secret Army death squad, machine-gunned 15 people attending a suspected pro-PCP fundraising barbecue in a Lima slum; the Cantuta case, in which the Colina Group kidnapped and murdered nine students and a professor suspected of being PCP sympathizers; and Operation Aries, an Armed Forces offensive in May 1994 that Fujimori bragged was a "mini-Vietnam". Though the Armed Forces blocked efforts by the Red Cross and legal human rights groups, the latter later collected evidence that the military indiscriminately murdered captured peasants and carried out massive rocket attacks against Upper Huallaga villages suspected of being PCP base areas.
In street roundups during the last year, the regime detained about half a million people, about 2 percent of the country's population. In addition to the almost 4,000 people the Fujimori regime sentenced to 30 years of life for "terrorism", there are several thousand more political prisoners. The conditions in the cold dungeons where they are held and tortured have been condemned by a number of international bodies as among the world's most brutal.
The demand that political prisoners be freed is just. We demand that all political prisoners and prisoners of war be freed, without regard to what organization they are accused of supporting. We also reject the calls being made especially now that a spotlight is being cast on these injustices for a "systematic review of trials" in order to distinguish between the "guilty" and the "innocent." The Fujimori regime has no right to make such distinctions. Most of all, it is right to rebel against oppression. The regime and the U.S. may seek to reduce some of the political pressure that exposures of Fujimori's repression have brought on them by letting out a few people, so that those considered real revolutionaries can be kept locked up or killed.
What are the immediate and broader aims of the MRTA in this action? First, the MRTA has made it very clear that its demands are to favour their own members and supporters and no one else. In their communiques the MRTA has strongly distinguished itself from the PCP, not only in term of the political line and programme but also in terms that imply that the regime should distinguish between "good" revolutionaries such as them and "bad" revolutionaries such as the PCP. For instance, in its communique No. 3 after the embassy takeover, the MRTA said, "We reject being compared to Shining Path [PCP], which we have repeatedly condemned for the use of an irrational violence that affects the people itself." This is not a new attitude. In a 1991 interview with an MRTA leader published in Sandinista Internacional magazine in Nicaragua, they claimed, "Sendero is characterized by cruelty, which is strongly repudiated. The Peruvian people understand the need for revolution, but don't support that kind of struggle, that kind of inhumanity."
The MRTA and PCP are two very different kinds of organizations, and this will be gone into further shortly. But the MRTA has tactical as well as overall political reasons for insisting on this demarcation right now. One of the fist hostages they released was Javier Diez Canseco, a member of Congress long associated with "legal Marxism". Immediately afterwards he delivered a joint declaration by a broad spectrum of the legal opposition to Fujimori. This declaration calls for the regime to not use force against the MRTA and to seek "a peace that can only be achieved through a broad national dialogue." The aim of such a dialogue, it says, would be the country's "pacification". In Peru, "pacification" is the official word used to describe the fight against so-called "terrorism". In other words, these people feel that military means have not proved powerful enough and that more sophisticated political efforts must be applied to isolating and crushing the People's War.
Such a dialogue is exactly what the MRTA itself is seeking through this action. In a 30 December communique, it proclaimed, "We confirm that the only possible solution is through listening to our requests and proceeding to free all our detained comrades. We think that a gesture of this nature would help give the first steps to an overall solution to the problem of political violence through the path of dialogue and a more permanent peace accord."
Fujimori's minions have reacted to all this by screaming that MRTA had "inside help" in the takeover. They are investigating possible links and aid provided by the opposition, including Diez Canseco. But the coalition that signed this statement goes far beyond self-proclaimed "leftists". It also involves all the main traditional political parties, among them the APRA, and Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former UN head who is trying to get the U.S. to let him replace Fujimori. Suspicion has been cast even among elements of the police and Armed Forces themselves. Most of the charges against the "Colina Group" mentioned above were in fact first brought to light by a dissident general who has become a leading figure in this opposition coalition.
In some of its communiques, the MRTA has taken an apparent hard stance, proclaiming that if the government is not willing to discuss the freedom of the MRTA prisoners, then there is nothing to negotiate. Other declarations have been more ambiguous. The point is this: the MRTA seeds to come to an agreement with various elements in the ruling class, no matter whether they can achieve this right now or whether first they have to return to the jungle to fight. They fight in order to negotiate. If they are entertaining the idea that more fighting may be necessary and thus that they must rescue their prisoners, who are said to make up the bulk of their forces, that is because the government has not yet shown a willingness to enter into the negotiations the MRTA wants. They may or may not seek a change in regime, but they most definitely do not seek to overthrow the regime by defeating its armed forces. Even the choice of the Japanese embassy may have been more a question of expediency. The MRTA has tried to avoid directly confronting the U.S., by far the main political and economic power in Peru. (The mid-level U.S. embassy personnel seized in the takeover were among the earliest hostages released by the MRTA.) Some forces in the legal opposition look not unfavorably towards the MRTA because they believe that it is too dangerous for the masses to be offered nothing but the PCP-led armed struggle. In addition to wanting some of the prestige of taking up the gun, they themselves sometimes find armed actions useful in pressuring the government.
The MRTA communique complains that the PCP called them "armed reformists." But this label is accurate. The MRTA was formed in 1984 by a number of groups that had opposed the PCP-led People's War. Historically it is rooted in the APRA, a member party of the Second International that preached an "anti-imperialist revolutions". Though early on the APRA claimed to be modeled on the Mexican revolution or Sun Yat-sen's KMT in China, it behaved like an ordinary reactionary political party. The MRTA started when APRA was out of power. Its first actions involved a number of attacks on police stations, as well as bombings and many kidnappings of businessmen. There was never any attempt to lead an uprising of the revolutionary forces among the masses themselves, and above all not the peasants, characteristics that have been the signature of the PCP since the beginning of the people's war.
When APRA's Alan Garcia was elected president in 1985, the MRTA called a suspension of its military activities. As they put it, they were offering the new government a chance to prove whether it was for or against the people. This suspension continued even after Garcia unleashed the Armed Forces to storm into the prisons and murder more than 250 PCP prisoners in cold blood in June 1986. When Fujimori first became president in 1990, the MRTA greeted him in a similar fashion.
The MRTA tried to set up a guerrilla movement in the northern part of the Upper Huallaga River Valley in the latter part of the 1980s. The fact that the PCP has been able to maintain its forces there, while the MRTA could not, can only be explained by the fact that they have carried out two diametrically opposite political and military lines. The PCP has linked the war with the building of revolutionary base areas where the peasants and other poor people exercise political power and have begun to create a new type of society. These base areas are the "secret" behind the PCP's ability to resist the regime militarily. It is truly absurd for the MRTA to repeat the imperialist and reactionary lies that attribute the PCP's success to some alleged "cruelty", as if revolutionaries, even if they wanted to, could ever hope to equal the reaction's ability to terrorize people with helicopters, bombers, thousands of troops, etc.
The MRTA's antagonism to the PCP is not just a matter of words. In newspaper interviews, MRTA head Victor Polay has bragged about the number of PCP members and supporters they killed when they were in the countryside.
The MRTA claims they have "no predefined ideology" but they do -- bourgeois ideology. The "socialism...but a Peruvian model" that they seek is impossible, because no real change in Peru's situation can come without the revolutionary overthrow of the present system by the workers and peasants themselves and the establishment of their own political power in a New Democratic revolution that would open the door to a real socialism. Nothing in Peru can change without taking up the battle against imperialism. Yet this is what the MRTA wants the most to avoid.
There are many examples in history of opposition groups that take up arms against a government and then end up making their peace with the system. The most recent is Guatemala. Since 1954, when the U.S. overthrew the Arbenz government in that country to prevent some land reform, the military killed more than 100,000 peasants. Recently an agreement was signed that allows former guerrilla groups to become a legal opposition. The MRTA has referred to this as a model and called for Guatemala to take part in a commission to oversee negotiations between the MRTA and Fujimori. Although what will become of that agreement remains to be seen, at best it may be like Nicaragua, another MRTA model. There the surrender of the Sandinistas to U.S. demands resulted in an entrenchment of the most bitter oppression of the peasants -- and continuing murderous persecution of the opposition anyway.
Another example is Colombia. The MRTA considers Colombia's M-19 group as a fraternal party; it shared fighters with them. After pulling off its own spectacular embassy takeover in that country, the M-19 signed as a peace accord with the government, entered parliament and got rewarded with as a ministry. Nevertheless some of its leaders (including its minister) and countless members and supporters were slaughtered by the reactionaries anyway. Since then, nothing has changed for the better in Colombia.
All this makes it clear that, as Mao Tsetung said, the reactionaries and their imperialist backers will never lay down their butcher knives and the people of the world must act accordingly.
It is impossible to know right now what the U.S. will tell Fujimori to do, or how events themselves may unfold despite the intentions of either side. One possibility is that no matter how much the MRTA may want to put down the arms it has taken up against the government, they may not be given that chance. The U.S. and the regime may be planning to end this crisis through as a bloodbath. There is every reason to be concerned that Fujimori is preparing to commit as a terrible crime. Since the beginning of this situation, the government has stopped the Red Cross from visiting MRTA members and supporters in the prisons. Recently it took measures to hinder Red Cross access to the Embassy, and, even more ominously, cleared the press out of the area. The latest news reports speak of provocative military maneuvers outside the compound. We must condemn the regime, expose its backers and mobilize public opinion against as a massacre.
But it is also important to take the MRTA's military line and politics it serves as teachers by negative example in terms of the life-and-death importance of the question of what line must be followed by the revolution in Peru and everywhere. As the embassy takeover shows, this is as a living and urgent question.
29 January 1997