Recently, two such articles attacking the Communist Party of Peru appeared in publications within the women's movement in the U.S. "Peru: The Government, the Rebels, And the Women in Between" by Corinne Schmidt appeared in the July-August issue of Ms. Magazine. And the May-June issue of New Directions for Women carried an article by Jennifer Wells titled "Unrest in Peru Sparks Murder of Grassroots Activist."
Both these articles put forward M.E. Moyano in a heroic light--as a supposedly independent activist who ran charity programs that helped the poor in the shantytown and in the process had to confront not only the government but also the communist rebels.
The article in New Directions for Women claims, "The women's organization started by Maria Elena Moyano came together in their struggle for autonomy for all kinds of political manipulation and evolved into a powerful and independent women's Federation." It also says, "In the context of Peru's acute economic crisis, Moyano was instrumental in devising a response based on women's community efforts rather than on the State or outside agencies."
The Ms. article purports that "As for Shining Path, it's 'revolution' consists mostly of attacks on civilians" and accuses guerrillas of killing "thousands of peasants." The article also states, "Despite women's participation, Shining Path--with its emphasis on the infallibility of its leader, Guzmán [Chairman Gonzalo--RW]--remains a patriarchal, indeed totalitarian, organization."
The two articles are incredibly shallow attempts to glorify M.E. Moyano and to discredit the Communist Party of Peru. There is no discussion of Moyano's political connections and her relations with the government and its military. And the revolutionaries are dealt with by hurling a few anti-communist buzzwords like "terrorist," "doctrinaire" and "totalitarian."
Such shallowness is not surprising. Any real analysis of Moyano's background and ties would show that she was associated with a political party that is part of the ruling establishment in Peru and that her charity programs in Villa El Salvador were conscious counterrevolutionary activity carried out with financial backing from sources like the U.S. government. And any serious examination of the people's war led by the Communist Party of Peru would make it clear it is the Maoist revolution--not charity programs run by those like Moyano--that is bringing real hope of freedom from the horrors of the present system.
Clearly, the writers of the two articles had no intention of bringing such truths out. So let's dig out the real story of M.E. Moyano and uncover who truly stands for the liberation of the poor, the women and other oppressed in Peru.
The Ms. article mentions the IMF-approved economic "shock" that Peruvian President Fujimori slammed on the people after his election in 1990. The price of basic foods doubled overnight, making life even more miserable and desperate for millions of poor. What the Ms. article does not mention is the fact that MAS--Moyano's party--together with other members of IU supported Fujimori in the election! Gloria Helfer, a member of MAS, was Fujimori's first minister of education. Moyano herself became the vice mayor of Villa El Salvador in 1989. In short, Moyano was part of the ruling political system which is waging a desperate and brutal war against the advancing revolution.
These charity programs are set up and directed by the various mainstream parties--from the right to the official left--as well as the Catholic Church, the government and even the military (which calls their programs "civic action"). The official parties often operate these programs through so-called "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs). Despite their name, these NGOs are part of the state machinery--they control millions of dollars and have close links to local as well as foreign governments.
An article in the April 1992 issue of El Diario Internacional (English and Spanish editions distributed in the U.S. by the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru) points out: "The People's Cafeterias and Glass of Milk programs receive financing from the governments of the United States, Holland, Spain, Germany, Canada and other countries. Many times the money arrives directly through the NGOs and also through Caritas (Catholic Church), Ofasa (Adventist Church), AID (Division of Food for Development, directed by the U.S. embassy in Lima), the World Bank (WB) and other institutions of imperialism and the rest of the powers. The U.S. administration has been the most active in developing 'assistance programs' in the poor neighborhoods of Peru."
The U.S. is the main backer of the reactionary regime in Peru. In recent years the U.S. powers have become extremely worried abut the gains made by the Maoist people's war against the Peruvian regime. The U.S. government has greatly stepped up intervention against the Peruvian revolution. The millions of dollars in U.S. aid to support programs like "Glass of Milk" in the shantytowns and the millions of dollars to prop up the Peruvian military are two sides of the same counter-insurgency coin. While the charity programs attempt to cool off social upheavals and discontent among the poor, the direct military aid goes for more guns for the Peruvian military, known as one of the most brutal in all of Latin America.
M.E. Moyano was definitely not a naïve dupe in these insidious schemes of the U.S.--she was perfectly aware of the real aims of the charity programs she headed. She told the reactionary Peruvian magazine Caretas, "This country would have exploded long ago if it had not been for the solidarity work of the popular organizations."
The Ms. article quotes with approval another woman shantytown leader who talked about how effective the programs are in chilling out protest: "When the second shock [the IMF economic shock after Fujimori's election--RW] hit, the people 'could have taken to the street,' said Coral, 'but they didn't. The people's kitchens were feeding everyone who came to them.'" Meanwhile, the system continues to crush the masses. More and more children in the shantytowns and the countryside die of hunger and malnutrition each week.
The government's arm forces have been forming rondas in the countryside by forcing peasants to join--those that refuse are suspected of being "Senderistas" and are liable to be shot or "disappeared." In a cowardly tactic, the troops use the rondas as shields in fighting the guerrillas. Then when the rondas are killed in battle, the government claims ordinary peasants have been "massacred" by the guerrillas. So when the author of the Ms. article writes that the Peruvian revolution "consists mostly of attacks on civilians" and that "thousands of peasants" have been killed by guerrillas, she is repeating the lies of the murdering oppressors in Peru.
The ronda tactic is now beginning to be used in Lima's shantytowns as well--and the phony "left," the right-wing parties and the Fujimori regime all support this. In an interview with the reactionary paper La Republica last September, Moyano was asked if she was organizing rondas. Her answer: "Yes, we are organizing neighborhood patrols. We are also acting in our other organizations--we know each other, we know who we are... If the people organize themselves and centralize their efforts, we can defeat Sendero."
Moyano's last public activity before she was killed was a pitiful attempt to mobilize the shantytown against the February 14 armed strike called by the revolutionaries. The armed strike was aimed at Fujimori's politics of hunger, misery and repression, and it successfully paralyzed the capital city. Moyano's call for a "march for peace" was a failure--only a few dozen people showed up, most of them officials like Moyano.
Another pig activity by Moyano was acting as a snitch. On February 9 this year, a ticket supported by IU and Moyano decisively lost an election in the Small Business Association of Villa El Salvador. Moyano used the official media to denounce the election winners as "Senderistas." According to El Diario International, dozens of activists were jailed, kidnapped and assassinated by the police or government death squads after these accusations. The IU also threatened to invalidate the election and cut off funding to the business association. This incident exposed the low-down tactics Moyano was capable of. But it also showed that there was significant opposition to Moyano--contrary to the false picture of overwhelming mass support for her that is painted by the Peruvian and international press.
The Maoists in Peru have a clear and principled stand on the shantytown charity programs and their leaders. A Communist Party of Peru document published in the revolutionary Peruvian newspaper El Diario last December stated: "The Communist Party of Peru is not against organizations such as the Glass of Milk, Mother's Club, People's Cafeterias, etc., because there are masses within them. We are against those leaders who manipulate, rob, and lie to the people and who collude with the government in not demanding that the state carry out its obligations: to provide food, health, housing, education, etc... We are against the snitches, informers and collaborators of the Armed Forces and the police; against those the Party and the people deliver the appropriate punishment. We will continue to do so."
None of the articles praising Moyano and slandering the Maoists have bothered to quote this or other statements by the Communist Party of Peru and do an honest analysis of why the Maoists oppose false leaders like Moyano. The journalist who write such articles may call themselves "objective," but in fact they are taking a class stand on the side of the oppressors and against the oppressed.
Many of the fighters and commanders in the people's army are women. One of the best known was Edith Logos, a teenage woman who was an inspiration to peasants in the south-central sierra. When she was murdered by the army in 1982, 20,000 people came to her funeral in the town of Ayacucho (with a population of about 70,000), in the face of the bloody terror of the government troops. Compare this to Moyano's funeral in Villa El Salvador (population 300,000) which was attended by 3,000 people, including soldiers, politicians, ministers, ex-officials and intelligence agents.
Through the people's war, the old oppressive, patriarchal relations are being overthrown and a new political power is being built in the revolutionary base areas in the countryside. Those who have never had any power in their whole lives--the workers and peasants--along with progressive forces from the middle classes, runs the People's Committees in the base areas under the leadership of the Communist Party in Peru.
The People's Committees are building up a new economy based on a new kind of relations among the people. The land which had been monopolized by big landlords is divided up among peasants who have little or no land. It is given to the family as a whole, no just the fathers or men in general, so that women have an equal role in production and an equal share in distribution. The growing of food crops is encouraged, in order to cut dependence on export crops (including coca) and build up the self-sufficiency of the base areas. While the land is owned individually, collective planting and harvesting is organized--- seed of the future, socialist stage of the revolution.
A revolutionary transformation of social relations is also taking place in the base areas, and overthrowing male domination is a key part of this. For example, the community affairs commissioner tries to help settle family disputes--between a couple or between parents and children--through a process of criticism and self-criticism. If a partner in a marriage demands a divorce, it is granted instantly without condition. A woman who wants to join the People's Guerrilla Army is free to do so, even if the husband or parents are opposed.
This is just a very brief description, but it gives a glimpse of the tremendous transformations that the revolution is bringing abut in the lives of the people. Compare this to those like Moyano who want to keep people politically passive and dependent on the state for survival. Just who is the defender of patriarchy and the old order, and who really stands for the liberation of women and all the oppressed?
There is a civil war going on in Peru, and the lines are drawn clearly. On one side are the workers, peasants and progressive middle class people, led by the proletariat's party. They are waging a just war of liberation. On the other side are the capitalist exploiters, big landlords and those who want to protect their privileged position even at the cost of immense suffering among the poor. Their response to the people's war is a vicious counter-revolution, backed by U.S. money and guns, that has killed tens of thousands of people. And they are spreading a poison gas cloud to cover up their bloody crimes.
For us in the belly of the beast here in the U.S.--proletarians, oppressed people and others who stand on the side of justice--the situation demands that we build solidarity wit the struggling people of Peru and support their revolution. And we must oppose the growing U.S. intervention in Peru.
The enemies of the people's war uphold Moyano as their hero and model. But we have our own heroes and models--the fearless women and men of Peru who are fighting and sacrificing for the cause of liberation.
Dear RW Readers and Dear Fighting Comrades in Peru:
The naming of the deputy mayor of Villa El Salvador in Peru, the woman dubbed "Mother Courage" by the APRA-linked magazine Caretas in an attempt to portray her as a "heroine" of the poor," contains a sharp and amusing irony apparently completely hidden from the phony "leftists" bemoaning her death. The name is taken from a very famous play written and rewritten throughout World War II by the communist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.
The story of Mother Courage and her Children takes place during the Thirty Years War in Germany. It is a complex, profound exploration of reactionary wars as the continuation of business, exploitation and politics by other means. With bitter humor it criticizes pragmatism and bourgeois ideology within the ranks of the people (and, I believe, shortsightedness and revisionism in the ranks of the communists of his day). The title character is the furthest thing from a heroine of the people: Mother Courage is a small merchant determined to profit from war, a woman who swindles the peasants, capitulates to the higher-ups (and teaches and promotes capitulation). This is a woman who participates in a reactionary war and loses her three children and all "human" virtues by trying to turn the war into a source of personal profit.
Brecht wrote that Mother Courage, a strong-willed, hard working woman, was depraved, that her depravity was "not so much that of her person as that of her class." He said she was "a merchant, a strong crafty woman who loses her children to the war one after another and still goes on believing in the profit to be derived from war." In a 1954 note called "Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher," Brecht wrote about the difficulty audiences (and directors and performers) had had in grasping the meaning of his play. He wrote, "The audiences in 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. And what was their view of Hitler's war in which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suffering." Living in East Germany in 1954, at the height of the so-called Cold War, he wrote of a certain tendency among the people, a tendency he identified with the petty bourgeoisie: "Today a new war is threatening with all its horrors. No one speaks of it, but everyone knows. The masses are not in favor of war. But life is so full of hardships. Mightn't war do away with these? Didn't people make a very good living in the last war, at any rate till just before the end? And aren't there such things as successful wars?"
Lest anyone think that Brecht was simply a pacifist, or this a pacifist play (though the text does leave room to be interpreted as such), it might be important to note that the play Mother Courage has a genuine heroine. It is Courage's daughter Kattrin, a mute and scarred young woman who finds herself quite fully in the position of one who has "nothing to lose." With the love of children in her heart, she exhibits true courage by using a drum as her voice. She sounds the drum to alert a peasant village to an impending massacre by a reactionary army. She knowingly gives her life to sound this alarm, to rouse the people in their own interests in a situation some would describe as hopeless.
Given this actual history of the name "Mother Courage," its use by APRA and company to memorialize M.E. Moyano -- a woman with deep ties to reaction whose "charity" was aimed at hiding the true sources of misery for millions of Peruvians, and aimed at undermining the fighting spirit of the oppressed by encouraging them to think no "higher than the next plate of food to be dispensed" -- is incredibly apt. It made me laugh out loud.
I hope this smidgen of literary history can provide some small bit of ideological ammunition for all of us who are struggling to grasp the highest interests of our class, the international proletariat, and to lead the people toward the seizure of power and the eventual realization of a society unfettered by the chains of class distinction or the ideology of exploiting classes.
A Comrade
The Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru (USA)
PO Box 1246, Berkeley, California 94701
415-252-5786 * Fax: 415-252-7414