One particularly suspicious paragraph appeared in the initial Reuters article by Mary Powers. It said: "'The subversives pretended to be members of anti-guerrilla militias. They took people into a room and scolded them for not having done militia work,' Morobeni Castro said in an interview with Radio Programas Del Peru."
These reports appear to be a deliberate government and media campaign to cause hatred for the revolutionaries of Peru--particularly among the many people around the world who support the Amazon Indians in their struggle against genocide.
The International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Dr. Abimael Guzmán (IEC) points out: "The Ashaninka incident occurred only a day after it was reported that gold miners in Brazil killed more than 200 Yanomani Indians... These unrelated stories were consistently linked in press accounts, and the world media used the public opinion created by the Yanomami story to...imply the PCP is against the Indian people when, in fact, the PCP is made up mainly of indigenous people." (Emergency Bulletin #36)
The world media campaign continued for a week. It was said that survivors of the attacks were being protected in a Mazamari base of the National Peruvian Police's "Sinchi" units and their Green Beret advisers. The United Press International announced that the Peruvian military was sending helicopters and speedboats on a major offensive in the central jungle region to track down "a column of Shining Path guerrillas accused of massacring 63 Ashaninka Indians who escaped from forced rebel recruitment." On August 24, the Pope said these massacres were "new acts of terrorism" by the Maoist guerrillas. On August 25, Reuters said "Peru Troops Free 78 Indians from Guerrillas" This article claimed that as government troops pursued guerrillas through the jungle they had discovered and "rescued" 23 women, 19 men and 29 Ashaninka children "held captive by guerrillas."
Although we do not yet have full information about what happened
in these Indian villages last month, the official government and
media story started to unravel right from the beginning.
Holes in the Official Story
In the original Reuters report on the Mazamari massacre, journalist
Mary Powers claimed that the killers "pretended to be members
of anti-guerrilla militias" and scolded people for not supporting
the militias right before hacking them up. In the last ten years,
the Peruvian government has forced peasants to join armed militias
called rondas and ordered them to fight against the revolutionaries.
Those who refuse are often accused of being "terrorists"
and have been killed by government forces.
Why does Powers and Reuters claim that it was the "subversives" of the Communist Party of Peru who killed the villages and not "members of the anti-guerrilla militias" as the killers allegedly claimed? The answer is simple: Because Peruvian and U.S. authorities told the press to say that it was the Maoists who did the killing.
Why would Maoist guerrillas march into a series of villages, accuse the inhabitants of not forming anti-guerrilla militia and then kill people for not being active enough in the counter-insurgency?
IEC wrote: "Something even pro-U.S. 'experts' (so-called 'Senderologists') admit is that PCP always takes responsibility for its actions--however controversial--and that it does not pretend to be something other than what it is, and that their military actions always have a political purpose. What political purpose would be served by killing people for refusing to cooperate with the Peruvian military?
All the communities allegedly attacked were within 10 and 20 kilometers of the helicopter base at Mazamari, where 400 militarized police called Sinchis have been led and trained by U.S. Green Beret commandos. In addition, the villages involved, including Santa Isabel, Santa Rosa, Sol de Oro, Monterrico, Tawantinsuyo and Chiriari, are along a 10-mile stretch of road surrounded by three other military bases at Satipo, San Matin de Pangoa and Puerto Ocopa, which altogether include 500 soldiers. In other words, these events happened in villages directly around this region's main concentration of counterinsurgency troops.
If 15 villages were being massacred right around these bases, the military must have known. Even the Peruvian magazine Caretas (September 26, 1993)--which repeated the story blaming Shining Path--said they could not understand why the government troops "did not act promptly." So the killings in these villages were most likely approved by the military.
In other words, the official story blaming the Maoists makes no sense.
Caretas writes: "Many of the residents were dragged out of their homes, their doors kicked open. Terrified, some...ran to ask help from the 48th counterinsurgency command of the National Police (the 'Sinchis' of Mazamari). The police guards on duty said there was nothing they could do since these were actions by army soldiers. From the balcony of the city hall, a military officer who identified himself as Lieutenant 'Poison' called on the people to organize themselves into rondas to wipe out subversives. According to this officer, self-defense committees were urgently needed because he had word that terrorists had infiltrated the community. City officials, among them Father Joaguin Ferrer Beniel, argued that such measures were unnecessary since the town was so close to the police base. Nevertheless, Lieutenant 'Poison' gave the city officials 15 days to create those organizations, and before leaving, he warned: 'As of today, I want you to tie up your mares, because my studs are on the loose. Also a curfew has been ordered and everybody must be in their home after 10 p.m."
Three days after this incident, says Reuters, military attacks were launched on 15 nearby villages, and people were killed by armed men accusing them of not forming rondas.
Even after telling this story about Lieutenant Poison, Caretas still repeats the official story that the killings were the work of Maoist guerrillas--which is not surprising since Caretas is a reactionary magazine.
But why should anyone else in the world believe that the killings were the actions of revolutionaries, and not Lieutenant Poison's soldiers acting with Sinchi and U.S. approval?
The fragmentary evidence now available suggests that military units decided to launch an offensive against revolutionary forces in the villages directly surrounding their own bases. They staged a raid on the largest town, Mazamari, and demanded that the people actively participate in fighting the guerrillas. Then a few days later, they staged a series of new raids--this time killing dozens of people to drive their point home.
The military then seems to have launched a series of "search and destroy" missions up and down the nearby jungle valleys--using helicopters and gunboats to search for revolutionaries and perhaps to hunt down Ashaninkas fleeing from the massacres.
It appears that the Sinchi police then brought some survivors of the army's massacre into their Mazamari base to cut them off from contact with the revolutionary movement--and told the world they were "protecting" the Indians. Mao teaches that revolutionaries must swim among the masses like fish swim in the sea--and it is classic U.S. tactics to try to "dry up the sea" by forcing peasants into armed "strategic hamlets" surrounded by guards.
And finally, to confuse people throughout the world about these events, the Peruvian military announced that the Maoists had carried out a series of atrocities against Ashaninka people. And then they put some local collaborators on the radio to say (again!) that the Ashaninka and other villagers needed to form rondas and cooperate more closely with the "anti-subversive" campaign.
Over the last century, the jungle has been increasingly invaded as various capitalist interests reached out for valuable raw materials, like rubber and gold. Armed company guards took Indians captive and forced them to work as slaves. Thousands were literally worked to death in mines and riverside plantations, by the forced labor system called "enganche" or "the hook." Indians were repeated hunted down and killed. Native women and children were often forced into sexual slavery around settler camps and key trading posts.
Throughout the 1970s, various Peruvian governments relocated landless peasants into the eastern jungle lands where many started growing coca. Conflicts arose between the new settlers and the Ashaninka over land.
In upper class Peruvian society, it was said the destruction of these forest people was "tragic but inevitable." But that destruction is not inevitable. In 1980 the Communist Party of Peru launched the people's war. And from the beginning, this revolution made deep links with the Ashaninka people of the central jungle regions. The PCP created a new unity between the peasant settlers and the jungle Indians--based on a common struggle against the system. As the armed Maoist influence spread, from one river camp to the next, slavery was abolished and the people rose up. Even enemies of the revolution admit that many Maoist guerrillas are recruited among the young warriors of the Ashaninka people.
The central government inserted troops into the region. The Sinchi police base was built up at Mazamari, complete with U.S. Green Beret trainers and helicopters. Army bases were created and the U.S. funded navy speedboats to patrol the rivers. The Quechua-speaking settlers were attacked under the cover of a U.S.-inspired "war on drugs." And, at the same time, there was an attempt to recruit sections of the Ashaninkas to fight for the government by playing on hostilities between the Ashaninkas and the settlers who were encroaching on their land.
This classic U.S. tactic: During the Vietnam War, Green Berets moved into the mountain villages of the Meo people and tried to inflame the contradictions between these tribal people and the agricultural peasants of the lowland Vietnamese. In many parts of Vietnam's central highlands, the Meo rebelled against the Green Berets and sided with the revolutionary forces.
In the Ene valley of Peru, a U.S. agent named Friar Mariano Gagnon tried to use this Green Beret approach. In his recent memoirs, Warriors in Eden, Mariano describes how support for the revolution grew among both the nearby settlers and among Ashaninka in his congregation, and how revolutionaries visited him, asking for his support in liberating the people. Marinano describes how he worked closely with the Sinchis and Green Berets at Mazamari and spied on the people for the US. embassy. Mariano reported who was joining the Maoist guerrillas and urged the military to attack a maze of caves near the Quimpiri River which he believed was an important revolutionary headquarters.
Between 1984 and 1987 the PCP led a series of revolutionary uprisings and military actions throughout these valleys. Six army bases were abandoned. And the government troops holed up in their remaining four camps. Mariano's camp was burned and he was forced to flee on U.S. helicopters.
Starting in 1991 the U.S./Peruvian armed forced attempted to retake this region. El Diario Internacional (December 1991) reports, "Currently in the Ene River Valley intense battles are being waged between the People's Guerrilla Army (PGA), comprising 8,000 to 10,000 Ashaninka members and the troops of the Armed Forces, which are supported by U.S. military troops."
Washington Post (September 8, 1993) writes: "The fighting here is a classic guerrilla war, said an army captain at the Satipo base, drawing frequent analogies to Vietnam War tactics. His troops are better armed than the Shining Path, he said, but the guerrillas have the advantage of terrain, laying traps and ambushes for the army and civilian patrols with rudimentary weapons." When government forces attack and seize revolutionary villages of Ashaninkas, the pro-U.S. media claims that government soldiers are "freeing" Ashaninkas who have been "kidnapped by the Shining Path."
Repeatedly, U.S. and Peruvian armed forces have tried to force the Ashaninkas to develop rondas to fight alongside the army--accusing any who refuse of being "terrorists." The eastern river valleys have been filling with displaced people, including Ashaninkas forced out of nearby areas like Ayacucho. This has increased contradictions among the people.
Some accounts say the U.S./Peruvian forces recently organized a few rondas among the Ashaninka by promising them arms they could use to drive away new settlers. The forces who carried out the Mazamari massacres may have included such rondas. The Spanish newspaper El Pais (August 21) reports from eyewitness accounts that most of the dead in the villages near Mazamari were displaced Ashaninka from the west who had recently settled in these eastern valleys as peasant farmers.
If the Peruvian military is forced to carry out massacres to pacify the villages directly around their own forts--it suggests that their offensives have not brought them control of the region.
One thing however is clear: Using mass murder to seize a contested region is completely consistent with the class nature, the military methods and history of both the Peruvian and U.S. military.
The U.S. ruling class uses disinformation to cause confusion. They want to build support for U.S. intervention and for the Fujimori dictatorship. They want to create support for the execution of the Maoist leader Chairman Gonzalo. And they want to prevent oppressed people throughout the world from seeing that our brothers and sisters in Peru have risen up in an inspiring and just struggle--an all-the-way Maoist revolutionary struggle that is rich in lessons for all the oppressed of the world.
Training the people to expose such disinformation is an important part of the class struggle within the U.S.--and it is a crucial way to support the revolution in Peru.
While we await further news from Peru, we will take a close look at the history of this strategic jungle zone, the growth of the revolutionary people's war there, and the fierce clash between supporters of the new revolutionary state and defenders of the old reactionary one. Much of the information in this story comes from a recent article by Luis Arce Borja, "The Ashaninkas and the People's War."
On September 5 the reactionary Lima daily La Republica printed interviews with pro-government Ashaninka "leaders." The article included one revealing passage: "The Ashaninka leaders said...the during the last census, the Ashaninka community of the Tambo River had 24,000 inhabitants; now it was reduced to 8,300 according to the last census. 'Where are the rest?' we asked. 'We suppose they are in the Shining Path. We have lost contact with them. Our territory has 2,231.49 kilometers; about 70 percent of this territory has been taken by the terrorist organization. The rest of the territory has been pacified.'"
In other words, the majority of the Ashaninkas have joined the revolution, and the majority of the jungle region is ruled by the political institutions of the new revolutionary state. This fact can be confirmed from may sources--including many accounts by enemies of the revolution. For example, Simon Strong's recent book Shining Path gives an anti-revolutionary description of the jungle warfare, but even he concedes that the revolutionaries "now controlled most of the Ashaninka communities and could mobilize at least a thousand people among them..."
Most of the world media deliberately hide this fact. But truth is a stubborn thing, and, as the history of the Ashaninka shows, there are millions of reasons why the Ashaninka would join the Shining Path to destroy the old order.
Over and over again, Spanish invaders were killed and driven out by the Amazon people they called 'the Campa tribe' and who called themselves the Ashaninka. Runaway African slaves and defiant Quechua Indians of the highlands fled to those jungles to escape the oppressors. They formed communities and often allied with the Ashaninka.
The oppressors never gave up trying to enslave the people of the jungle, and the Native people never stopped their resistance. Over three centuries the Ashaninkas killed more than 20 Franciscan Catholic missionaries. In 1742 a powerful uprising united the Ashaninka Indians and escaped slaves to drive the Franciscan missionaries and Spanish soldiers back into the highlands. The rebels even climbed the steep cliffs in pursuit and temporarily seized parts of the plateau around Andamarca. After that, no Catholic missionary or soldier dared enter the jungle for over a hundred years.
In the mid-1800s, feudal Peruvian ruling classes again tried to penetrate the jungle region. One historian says their Franciscan missionaries "found the Indians sullen and unwilling to cooperate." At this time, the Peruvian ruling class was joined by a new force: representatives of the new North American capitalist power. The U.S. Department of the Navy sent two agents to survey the Amazon looking for riches to rob. These agents wrote that the Ashaninka were "determined to dispute the passage of the rivers and any attempt at further conquest."
Based on the coast, the Peruvian government treated the Indian peoples of the Amazon regions like animals: aside from encouraging capitalists of all kinds to rob and enslave the Native peoples, the government completely ignored them and their interests.
The plantation owners used the "enganche" or "hook" to enslave the Ashaninka people: At trading posts, Indians were given goods like cloth, pots, machetes and hunting guns, and then told they had to work to pay off the debt. Thousands were literally worked to death, and many died of diseases. Armed agents watched the rivers to capture and brutally punish any Indians who tried to escape.
At the same time, traders gave guns, usually shotguns and Winchester repeating rifles, to any Indians corrupt enough to kidnap Indian women and children and sell them into slavery. The capitalists appointed the ringleaders of such corrupted slave bands as curacas (chiefs over the Indian peoples), and they then had these bribed curacas sign papers officially giving Indian jungle lands to land speculators. One priest wrote in 1897: "The merchant who knows how to play with his curacas grows like the foam on a whirlpool of dirty water." Even after the beginning of the 20th century, another priest said he considered his Indian slaves "a gift of Providence."
Today, still living at the margins of class society, the jungle people suffer extreme poverty and exploitation. Forced labor and the constant despoiling of their lands continues. One researcher, John Bodley, reported that 30 percent of the Indians he interviewed in the 1960s said that they or members of their families had been captured by slave raiders. Outside the plantation settlements, many Ashaninka still live a social life characterized by primitive communism--finding food by hunting, gathering and some limited cultivation. Official statistics say that 70 percent of Ashaninka children suffer from malnutrition, and over 95 percent of Ashaninka adults are illiterate.
In the jungle, so-called "anthropological investigations," "development projects" and religious missionaries pimp off of the Native peoples. They claim to be doing "humanitarian work." But they are really tied to foreign imperialist interests by a thousand threads. They try to convince the Indians to accept their misery with a "Christian" fatalism or preach that the Ashaninka should seek "progress" by selling themselves and their lands to capitalists. The missions and so-called development projects serve as covers for intense activities in support of the state and its armed forces.
Luis Arce Borja writes: "The people's war could not advance to victory if, in the course of the armed struggle, it did not resolve the historic demands of the poor. Defense of the land, the forests and the rivers has been a demand of the Ashaninkas over centuries. What's more, this Native community has justly demanded to be included as part of the Peruvian state and nation. The PCP advances along the road of class war, and along this path it is creating a New State that defends the rights of the oppressed classes and nationalities of Peru--rights which are not confined to questions of culture and language, but which also embrace the issues of land, work, education, health, nutrition, etc."
With the Maoist people's war something completely new came into being. The Ashaninka people was connected with an all-the-way revolutionary movement focused on replacing existing class society from the roots up.
A deep unity grew between the Communist Party of Peru and the masses of Ashaninka in the midst of the armed struggle and through building the beginnings of a new society. The Communist Party of Peru organized the Ashaninka, linked them with the countrywide people's war, and trained them politically to fight against all forms of exploitation. The first tasks of the guerrillas was to organize the people to defend themselves against the many abuses (like rape, land theft, unpaid labor, and robbery through unequal trade) that were carried out by "city folks" (like land speculators, slave traders, soldiers and civilian authorities). While organizing their defense, the PCP launched an intensive project of educational instruction, starting schools, and establishing new forms of production and food distribution.
Arce Borja reports that by 1986 the PCP established the first Open People's Committee among the Ashaninkas in the community of Selva de Oro, at the mouth of the Mantaro river. By 1989 the Maoist revolution had reached all of the Ashaninka communities and the Ashaninka had formed hundreds of people's committees. Democratic elections were held to elect civilian and military authorities for the New State.
At the same time, the government worked to expand its network of rondas into this region. These rondas are armed gangs that the military organizes to fight the Maoist guerrillas. The Peruvian state has a problem that even its hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police are not nearly enough to occupy and "pacify" all of Peru. Many of their soldiers are pinned down defending key towns and bases, and their officers are absorbed with criminal activities like drug-running. So from the beginning of this war the government has organized networks of armed rondas--paramilitary groups drawn from the masses of people who are press-ganged into working for the military.
In the central jungle region, the government started organizing such rondas as early as 1985. As in other places in Peru, Catholic missions were often used as the first organizing nucleus of these rondas.
The international media has widely promoted the story of one Franciscan priest, the U.S. agent Father Mariano Gagnon, based at a mission where the Cutivereni River runs into the Ene River. Father Gagnon has been promoted in the world media as a "great defender" of the Ashaninka people who was finally forced to lead Indians in battle against the Maoist guerrillas. In reality, Gagnon was just the latest of the many reactionary priests the Ashaninka had to confront over many centuries. In his own recent memoirs, Gagnon brags about his close relationship with the Green Berets and anti-subversive Peruvian police (called "Sinchis"). He describes how he gave spy reports to the U.S. embassy in Lima describing who was joining the Maoist guerrillas.
Like Franciscan missionaries before him, he used a mix of trade goods and indoctrination to gather a group of about 700 Ashaninka around his mission. He personally picked a particularly loyal believer to be the curacas over the people of Cutivereni. And as the revolution grew in strength, Gagnon attempted to organize his congregation into a ronda.
Around military bases and other missions, thousands of Native peoples have been forced to be part of the state's counterinsurgency apparatus. A harsh order was laid down: whoever didn't go along or opposed the paramilitary groups would be considered a "Senderista" and would be brutally eliminated.
Arce Borja reports that "In 1991, according to the Minister of Defense and the Special Senate Commission, in the Mantaro front alone, 192 communities had been turned into antisubversive ronda bases. Of the 90,000 peasants in these communities, around 10,000 were Ashaninka." The Mantaro front is the military's name for large parts of the Ashaninka lands, centered on the Mantaro River which runs between two Andean mountain ranges and connects with the Ene River.
The reactionary Lima daily La Republica writes (September 29, 1991): "In May 1989, the Senderistas formed a series of people's committees along the valleys of the Ene, the Tambo, and at the mouth of the Mantaro, and declared the formation of the so-called New State... The Senderistas chose from among the people their local authorities or commissars... Each local force took responsibility for an average of ten settlements, depending on the size of the population. Meanwhile, the main force mobilized the masses politically and militarily throughout the entire Ene valley and had ultimately authority."
In the late 1980s clashes between the guerrillas and the rondas escalated.
Arce Borja writes: "The PCP has carried out a firm policy toward the rondas. On the one hand, it works to persuade those people coerced into the rondas to desert and to fight against the army, to desert with their weapons and join the revolution. As for die-hard ronderos, the guerrillas deal with them on the field of battle, often killing them, mainly the leaders."
Chairman Gonzalo, the leader of the PCP, describes how to handle the situation: "Make a distinction between the diehards and the masses who have been press-ganged. Carry out a two-sided policy. Infiltrate them. Undermine them until we can overthrow them. Make the press-ganged masses see that they are being used against their own interests, that others are taking advantage of their joblessness, hunger, their basic needs--are using them as cannonfodder to make up for the shortages of regular soldiers and cops..." (From the PCP document: May Directives for Metroplitan Lima, 1991).
This was the approach taken along the Ene River. At Cutivereni, for example, Father Gagnon was increasingly exposed. Revolutionary Ashaninka called at his mission. His rape of Indian women became known. And when Gagnon started to organize his congregation into a ronda a large number of his followers deserted him--with many of them joining the revolution and others moving to new spots in the jungle. In 1989 the guerrillas burned the mission at Cutivireni. Gagnon fled to the U.S. in a Green Beret helicopter.
A string of military bases set up to pacify the Mantaro River valley were abandoned as 70 percent of the Army's 31st Division were out of action--either as casualties or deserters.
Arce Borja writes: "The government offensive ended in a fiasco. The guerrilla columns withdrew deep into the jungle. The troops of the General Document found only deserted towns. The snipers left behind by the armed rebels made things even more difficult for the army. As is customary in its military operations, the army; killed hundreds of unarmed civilians, whose bodies were then presented to the press as 'Senderistas killed in action.' This 'offensive' ended in catastrophe. The military debacle of the government had a favorable political effect on the consolidation of the Maoist guerrilla war in the jungle. The People's Committees multiplied along the Ene River. The government troops had to retreat and even abandon some of their bases."
Ambushes annihilated several army patrols.
In the middle of this offensive, the Peruvian dictator Fujimori unveiled his new "Great National Plan for Pacification": it was a decision to more fully arm the rondas and to organize them more tightly with the armed forces. To dramatize this plan, Fujimori went to "secured" areas of the Mantaro Valley. On June 23, 1991, Fujimori stood, with the U.S. ambassador and some representatives of the legal left by his side, to hand out rifles and shotguns to 2,000 ronderos of the Mantaro.
Prominent among the weapons given to ronderos were a special shipment of 825 Winchester repeating rifles supposedly sent to the Peruvian Minister of Defense by an unnamed "gun dealer" in Miami.
The international Maoist journal A World to Win (#17, 1992) reported that, following the military offensive, "The PGA (People's Guerrilla Army) has taken enormous, rapid strides along the Ene and Tambo River valleys... On September 30th 1991, 'a column hundreds of guerrillas strong,' according to the European press, rained automatic weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades for two hours on a locally pivotal Armed Forces base."
The reactionary Peruvian magazine Caretas wrote (Oct. 21, 1991): "Only four of the original ten military bases established between May and June (1991) are left in the entire Ene River basin... Meanwhile the war zone is extending to the area around the Tambo River..."
The armed struggle in this central jungle region has continued intensely. On July 27, 1993, Ashaninka ronderos marched alongside soldiers in Lima's Independence Day parade. The Cutivireni Mission has been reopened as a government counterinsurgency base. And a strip of villages around the main Peruvian military bases has been developed as a security zone of "strategic hamlets"--were peasants and Native peoples are forced into armed camps where they can be closely watched.
Such "strategic hamlets" also serve as home base for various rondas--their leaders have the permission of Peruvian government forces to terrorize and rob the people who live there, and they leave these villages for raids on the many pro-revolutionary villages throughout the surrounding river system.
Throughout history, the Peruvian government, the Peruvian military, and all the various agents of foreign imperialism have been the merciless oppressors of the Ashaninka Indians. The techniques they now use in the eastern jungle are familiar to anyone who has studied either Vietnam or the historic suppression of the Ashaninka people.
To create their rondas, the government is again appointing their own modern-day curacas and presenting them to the world as "leaders" of the Ashaninka people. The government is even offering the same U.S.-made Winchester rifles and shotguns that have historically been given to slave hunters!
The Armed Forces of the Peruvian state (including the rondas) defend the same robbery of Ashaninka land that has gone on throughout the last century. Fujimori's new Constitution specifically legalizes the privatization and sale of the Native people's communal lands. This "free marketization of the jungle" supports land speculators and drug traffickers who are actively trying to seize more Indian lands for coca cultivation.
While the government forces firmly defend everything that oppresses the people, the Communist Party of Peru has launched a historic revolution to liberate the people. And it has organized the Ashaninka people to take their place in this armed struggle to create a new society that can finally address that just demands of the oppressed people, including the demands of the Ashaninka themselves.
Arce Borja sums up: "Any discussion of the August events in the Ene River valley must start with an understanding of the government's counterinsurgency plans, which tries to use the population as its 'cannonfodder' The rondas, the 'civil defense' committees and other 'self-defense' groups which the army; has organized have become part of the armed forces which defend the state apparatus. It is only logical that the guerrillas take them on in battle. The army's 'strategic hamlets' can only be destroyed by force and through armed actions."
The fact that intense clashes have taken place in the very shadow of the Peruvian military's main bases show that their repeated "offensives" have not brought them control of this strategic region. As more information becomes available on the August clashes in Peru's central jungle region, we will make it available.
The Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru (USA)
PO Box 1246, Berkeley, California 94701
415-252-5786 * Fax: 415-252-7414