News of the People's War in Peru
November 6, 2000From Peru Action and News, Fall 2000
For a long time the government and reactionary media in Peru have been trying to minimize the importance of the continued armed actions of the Maoist combatants— repeatedly claiming that the People’s War is on the verge of defeat. Yet reports keep leaking out that give a different picture. One of resilience and perseverance in organizing the masses to carry forward the armed revolution in the face of the difficulties the revolution has faced since the capture of Chairman Gonzalo and other leaders. The following are a few reports about the People’s War that have leaked into the reactionary Peruvian press.
Lima’s El Comercio daily newspaper reported an October 27, 2000 battle between Peruvian army soldiers of a new “counter-subversive” base in the jungle of Satipo, in the Ene River Valley, and PCP rebels. According to the article, one soldier lost his right leg in the firefight – no rebel casualties were claimed. This new base was established in order to deal with PCP activities along the local river ways – often the area’s only means of travel and communications due to the dense jungle.
El Comercio reports on October 7 that the Maoist insurgents used saws to take down a high-tension electrical tower in the region of Tarapoto of San Martin Department. Red Flags were reportedly found planted at the base of the downed tower. Just before this action, local residents had carried out a protest, blocking the highway that runs through this rural area. The newspaper says only that the local residents were protesting how a television station was reporting on the news and claims that there was no relation between the downing of the electrical tower and the protest earlier. Power to the people of the immediate locality was not affected, according to the report.
Peruvian newspapers reported that on the afternoon of October 2 a column of Maoist guerrilla fighters “led by a young woman” went into the neighborhood of Pacae in the town of Tingo Maria (Upper Huallaga Valley) and organized a rally at the central square, “proceeding to detain all the cars that passed along the Carretera Marginal [which is the main road that connects different cities in this region]”. According to the article, one of the people in a car they stopped was an “arrepentido” (which is what the guerrillas call people who become informants and turn other people in to the Army). The informant was killed when he tried to run away.
On July 5, 2000 El Comercio, another bourgeois newspaper in Peru, reports that the Maoist fighters continue to use riverboats to launch attacks on pro-government forces in the Satipo River region, Junin. In one incident the guerrilla fighters captured almost a ton of food, medicine, and other provisions from a riverboat transport.
An article in the June 28, 2000 La Republica describes an action of the People’s War in the Satipo region where the Maoist fighters use boats to approach and launch a rifle assault against an Army outpost. The article says: “in broad daylight, a column of 50 [fighters] of Sendero Luminoso attacked with rounds of riflefire, an Army post” (manned by 30 government troops), situated in a zone called Llanco, in the region of Martin de Pangoa, in the province of Satipo, Junin. One government soldier was reported injured and the government claims to have killed some of the Maoist fighters.
During the period of the July Presidential elections several stories in El Comercio and other dailies reported that Peruvian Army General Hector Jhon Caro, former chief of the secret police (DINCOTE), was claiming that the demonstrations in the streets against Fujimori were being “infiltrated” by Maoist revolutionaries of the Communist Party of Peru, “because,” said the General, “they are professional agitators and always prepared to act.” Whether his allegations are true or not, the General Caro’s statements reflect how much the rulers in Peru fear the Maoist People’s War in these times of crisis for the Fujimori regime.
The bourgeois newspaper La Republica, which opposes the People’s War, published an extensive and very revealing article, on June 16, 2000, based on information from Peruvian Army intelligence. The report provides evidence that the PCP has been organizing and mobilizing the peasants in this area of the countryside. The strategy of the revolution has been to organize Revolutionary Base Areas, places where peasants, workers and allies from the middle classes organize a new revolutionary political power. They grow their own food, and enforce a whole new system of justice in the interests of the people. These communities are what the PCP has called “the embryo” of the future People’s Republic. It is from these Base Areas that new fighters are recruited and trained.
La Republica, being a bourgeois newspaper, does not call what they are reporting on “a revolutionary Base Area” but it does describe an area called “Valle Nuevo, near the upper part of the Tsomaveni River, in the Ene Valley” where the Army has failed in its repeated attempts to penetrate it. The article claims the government has not been able to take on the revolutionaries of this area because of mainly geographic barriers, but later it has to admit that the Maoist revolutionaries aren’t just sitting still and defending an enclave but that they have continued to launch military operations from this area called Valle Nuevo.
It gives as an example the April 14 action, where the Maoist guerrillas “assaulted an MI-17 helicopter that was trying to evacuate [government] soldiers” who had been ambushed by the revolutionary forces the day before near the government’s counterinsurgency base of Corazon Pata, Ayacucho.
The article says that “according to calculations by military intelligence, [Valle Nuevo] has some 200 armed combatants under the command of Comrade Alipio, among which are those who, on October 2, 1999, attacked the Army Helicopter that carried ex Chief of Operations of the SIN, General Eduardo Fournier—” killing 5 Army officers and injuring the General.
It says that “the last time that [government] troops tried to penetrate” the base was last November [1999] when elite Army “lancers” and Ashaninka “ronderos” (government-led paramilitary) made a futile attempt to attack the zone as part of the government’s operation “annihilation”, that was supposed to capture those responsible for the October 2 attack on General Fournier.
The article interviews a reactionary pro-government paramilitary who describes how the Maoist forces ambushed his Army patrol in that November operation. “At around five in the morning the subversives, under cover of darkness, unleashed an infernal barrage of fire.” Five soldiers and one paramilitary were injured. The guerrilla fighters surrounded them. According to the interview, the Army lancers were able to repel the attack but the Maoist fighters “did not retreat,” “on the contrary,” said the paramilitary who was interviewed, “at eleven in the morning, when the [Army] helicopter arrived, they tried to bring it down.”
Apart from the military actions of the People’s War, the other thing that comes out in this article is evidence that the PCP is apparently organizing the peasants of the area to create a new, self-sufficient economy. It says, “the Army found extensive fields planted with Yuca” that, according to the article was well protected by barriers built so wild animals could not eat their harvest. [Yuca is a very nutritious tuber, like potatoes]. It then describes how the Army captured 30 peasants from this area and forcibly relocated them to another part of the countryside where the People’s War does not have this kind of organization. The article says that the peasants were moved from the area near Valle Nuevo, where they apparently had been cultivating these Yuca fields and had been self-sufficient and moved them to an area where they are now facing terrible hardship. This strategy of relocating people away from areas where the revolutionaries are strong is a counter-insurgency strategy that the US used in Vietnam—it is called “strategic hamletting”— in the parlance of the US military. This US strategy failed in Vietnam.
According to this La Republica article, the 30 peasants were presented to the press as people who the Peruvian Army claimed it had “rescued,” but the Army never let ANY of these supposedly “rescued” peasants talk to the press. According to this report, the Army even refused to let them talk to the International Red Cross, which suggests that the government feared the truth might come out—that the peasants might say they had been forcibly abducted from a revolutionary base area where they had been joining others in building a new liberating kind of society.
Even though the writer of the June 16 article tries to paint Valle Nuevo as “a last bastion” of the People’s War, news articles have continued to appear that report revolutionary armed actions in several other parts of the country. For example, the same La Republica newspaper, on June 20, 2000 lists the following: On April 24 Maoist fighters enter a school in Chongos, Ayacucho and take teaching supplies. On April 29 they ambush a police patrol in Tingo Maria (Upper Huallaga Region), killing one and injuring three. On May 28 the Maoist fighters kill five paramilitary “ronderos” in the town of Yananyac, in the province of Huancayo. On June 4 they ambush an Army truck in the sector of Rio Frio, Huanuco. After an intense firefight one government soldier was killed.
Illustrations above by a CSRP member in Alabama.
