January 19, 1997 * No. 890

Lima Hostage Standoff

The Bloody Record of the U.S. and Peruvian Rulers

These official mass murderers have absolutely no right to condemn anyone for "terrorism"! For 16 years the Peruvian government, with U.S. backing, has been waging a brutal and bloody counterrevolutionary war against the people's war led by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP). In 1983 and 1984 alone, the Peruvian military killed 8,700 people, mainly poor peasants, in an effort to crush this just struggle which has drawn the active participation and support of millions of oppressed in Peru.

This revolution is aimed at liberating Peru from the grip of big-power dominators, landowners and finance capitalists. The PCP follows the Maoist strategy of protracted people's war -- building revolutionary base areas in the countryside and surrounding the center of reactionary power in the cities, with the goal of seizing nationwide political power. This is a revolution guided by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and waged as part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

(The MRTA has a different outlook and strategy. It does not carry out the Maoist line of waging people's war, building base areas in the countryside and aiming at a complete break with the system of imperialism and domestic reaction. Instead, they have tended to focus on "spectacular actions" like the current one, combined with attempts to negotiate with different ruling class parties.)

Fujimori declares that he won't talk with those who "seek a dialogue by placing an AK-47 rifle at the skull of hostages." But the Peruvian regime has not only put a gun to the head of the Peruvian people, it has pulled the trigger thousands of times. Amnesty International reports that at least 4,200 Peruvians have been "disappeared" by the security forces and thousands more killed since 1983 by government forces in extrajudicial executions, including some 500 people in 19 separate massacres.

In 1986 the Peruvian military killed 300 PCP prisoners in coordinated assaults on three prisons. And in 1992 Fujimori ordered a massacre at Canto Grande, where 40 prisoners were executed. Thousands of others have been victims of torture, rape and beatings at the hands of the Peruvian military and police. The Peruvian jails are filled with thousands of political prisoners who have been convicted without even a pretense of legal rights. In 1992 Fujimori pushed through laws that allow the police to hold suspects incommunicado for up to 15 days without charges or evidence. Many international observers point out that this step effectively legalized torture to extract "confessions."

Political prisoners in Peru face hellish conditions. In a letter published last week in the New York Times, Heriberto Ocasio, spokesperson for the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru, pointed out, "The Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru, Abimael Guzmán, has been held in an underground tomb for more than four years, with no visits allowed from his lawyers, family or doctors."

Outside the prisons, millions of poor in Peru face starvation and deadly diseases like cholera. In the poor zones of the southern highlands, peasants live on as little as 400 calories per day--one-eighth the food intake in most industrialized countries. Meanwhile, Peru's land, labor, and resources are being sold off to imperialist corporations like Mobil, Chevron, and Newmont Mining.

The Truth Behind Fujimori's "Popularity"

The U.S. government and the bourgeois media paint a false picture of Fujimori -- as a heavy-handed but "popular" and "modernizing" leader who has brought "prosperity" and "stability" to Peru. During the current crisis, articles in the bourgeois press have claimed that most Peruvians are behind Fujimori and against any armed opposition. A January 7 New York Times article--headlined "Peruvians are turning a deaf ear to rebels"--quotes a number of people, identified as street vendors in Lima, who support Fujimori.

These articles do not mention that under Peru's "anti-terrorism" laws, anyone merely making a statement in support of the people's war can be charged with "apology for terrorism" and get locked up for life. If you were a supporter of the people's war in Peru, would you even talk to a reporter from the U.S.? But beyond this fact, even imperialist counterinsurgency experts have admitted that at different periods during the people's war the PCP has controlled between 25 and 40 percent of Peru's territory. In the early 1990s, armed strikes shut down Lima itself. The PCP, under the leadership of its CC, has continued to carry out the people's war--in the face of intense attacks by the enemy and a right opportunist line which has called for an end to the people's war. All this is impossible without deep support among the masses of people in Peru.

The hostage crisis has revealed some deep cracks in Peru's oppressive social order. Reading between the lines of the media coverage, there are signs of nervousness among the imperialists (and even within the Peruvian ruling class) because of the fact that Fujimori has not defeated the armed opposition as he had promised to do. There is concern that Peru's economy, after an upturn based on selling off Peru's resources dirt cheap, is heading for crisis. The current hostage takeover has forced the issue of repression in Peru onto the world stage, and there is worry that this creates an opening for further exposure of the regime's crimes.

On January 5, both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried major articles criticizing Peru's treatment of prisoners. These articles were clearly written with the intention of helping to strengthen the oppressive system by calling for the Peruvian rulers to eliminate some of their most blatant abuses. And these article made no mention of the role of the U.S. in creating and enforcing the horrors that these articles only partially expose.

While busy putting out their own "spin" on the takeover, the imperialists have also tried to stop any nonauthorized views from coming out. When a number of reporters managed to enter the Japanese ambassador's residence and interview the commandos, the Japanese government immediately denounced the press for covering anything the MRTA had to say. Fujimori suspended talks with the MRTA and cut off electricity to the ambassador's residence. A week or so later, a reporter from Japanese TV and a translator snuck past police lines and again entered the ambassador's residence. They were arrested immediately after leaving and are still in custody.

A number of recent media articles in the U.S.--including by Time (1/13), Reuters (1/3), CNN, the Washington Post (1/9), and the Wall Street Journal (1/6)--purport to "expose" the fact that various guerrilla groups and supporters have Web sites on the Internet computer network. One group mentioned has been the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru. The articles seem to be aimed at sounding the alarm within the ruling class about the existence of these Web sites, and laying the groundwork for restricting access by revolutionaries and other oppositional forces to the Internet. The Washington Post article focused on the CSRP's Internet site (http://www.csrp.org). It quotes a U.S. official who said that the Justice Department would like "to find a legal and acceptable procedure" to discover who is posting the information on oppositional sites on the Internet, and that law enforcement agencies--including the FBI, ATF and DEA--are planning to meet and discuss the growth of such sites. [emphasis added by CSRP]

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A military assault to retake the ambassador's residence would, no doubt, cost many lives. It would be yet another criminal action taken by the Peruvian state against the interests of the people, in an attempt to maintain its bloody grip on power.