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MANI
TOBAN
Sept. 22, 2021
Gonzalo’s legacy lives on post-mortem Examining the PCP chairman and his contributions EDITORIAL EDITORIAL In recent decades, Sept. 11 has held varying political significance in different parts of the world. For Americans, it has been a day of mourning for the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. For the Latin American left, it has been a day to remember Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet’s murderous coup against the leftist government of former president Salvador Allende. The death of Abimael Guzmán, commonly referred to as Gonzalo, has been added to that list this year. Gonzalo died at the age of 86 as a political prisoner of the Peruvian state after 29 years in isolated captivity. He was the founder and chairman of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) known more commonly as the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Gonzalo led the PCP through a people’s war — a revolutionary strategy premised upon a peoples’ army which conducts armed struggle under the leadership of the party while also going among the people to establish base areas — intended to overthrow the Peruvian state and establish socialism in the country.
Violence and Warfare To some, Gonzalo will be remembered as a butcher or as the caricature of a fanatic, but this ignores the sheer brutality of the state he resisted. It also dismisses the significance of his achievements during a time where the so-called “end of history” was occurring — an idea popularized by political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argued the end of the Cold War would also mark an end to the struggle between capitalism and socialism. The best known example of brutality committed by the PCP during the war is the 1983 Lucanamarca massacre which witnessed the death of 69 peasants in retaliation to ronderos — peasant vigilante militias — staging the public execution of a PCP commander. “And we say openly that there were excesses […] But everything in life has two aspects,” said Gonzalo about the massacre in an interview with El Diario. He said the excessive violence was negative, but that he wished to demonstrate to state forces the PCP was “a hard nut to crack” and “ready for anything.” Gonzalo explained that “in war, the masses engaged in combat can go too far and express all their hatred, the deep feelings of class hatred, repudiation and condemnation that they
have — that was the root of it.” Overall, the war was brutal, with the state also waging an intense campaign of repression Gonzalo described as genocidal. In a 1992 report, Amnesty International observed “widespread ‘disappearances’ and extrajudicial executions by the security forces […] as well as torture.” The report said between 1983 and April 1992, over 4,000 people detained by the government “disappeared” with thousands more murdered. The organization estimated up to 85 per cent of human rights abuses in the country over that period were committed by government forces, especially the army. In 1986, under the command of president Alan Garcia, Peruvian police are believed to have massacred over 260 prisoners. Between 1996 and 2001, Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori — who came to power in 1990 through an election but dissolved parliament and suspended the judiciary in 1992, thus ruling as a dictator until 2000 — launched a campaign in which over 272,000 women, mainly Indigenous peasants, were forcibly sterilized. Although today Fujimori is in prison after being convicted of human rights abuses, his daughter Keiko Fujimori is currently a major right-wing politician in the country. Overall, nearly 70,000 people either disappeared or were killed throughout the conflict and there are countless examples of excessive violence on both sides. But to only focus on the violence perpetrated by the PCP is to deny historical reality.
The initiation of a new and higher stage While the experience of the Peruvian people’s war demonstrates the horrors of warfare and ultimately did not topple the state, Gonzalo and his school of thought represent significant advancements in terms of revolutionary science and prove concretely we are far from the end of history. Further, the significance of the life of Gonzalo can best be seen by the global campaign launched by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) — an international Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization counting communist parties from around the world as its members, including the PCP — following his capture in September 1992. When Gonzalo was initially captured, his comrades feared the state would execute him despite the Peruvian constitution forbidding the death penalty. In turn, the RIM published a statement called “Move Heaven and Earth to Defend the Life of Chairman Gonzalo.” The RIM dedicated an entire edition of its journal A World to Win to a discussion of Gonzalo and the situation in Peru. “Comrade Gonzalo represents the uncompromising revolutionary vision of a communist future without barbarous class divisions, without imperialism,” wrote the committee of RIM in a statement. “Even beyond Peru, millions worldwide who despise the brutal social system these bourgeois voices represent look to Chairman Gonzalo and the people’s war he is leading to batter down the old social order and bring the fresh revolutionary winds of liberation that know no boundaries among
the oppressed.” As Hinton Alvarez wrote in the journal Kites, this call was taken up and an international conference was convened. There was even a campaign to defend Gonzalo in the United Nations. “Prior to the initiation of the people’s war in Nepal, a major demonstration in Kathmandu demanded Gonzalo’s freedom, while in the [U.S.], the radical band Rage Against the Machine extended support for the revolution in Peru and the fight to keep Gonzalo alive,” Alvarez wrote. The campaign was successful in its aims to keep Gonzalo alive, but it wasn’t enough to secure his freedom. The campaign served to popularize knowledge of the war in Peru and the ideas behind it, and had the effect of uniting people across the world for a common cause. In the opening paragraphs of Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Lenin shared the insight that during their lifetimes, the theories of revolutionaries are met with “the most furious hatred” and “the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander,” but after their deaths become “canonized” with their theories and sanitized of their revolutionary content. It remains to be seen whether Gonzalo will be canonized and his ideas sanitized.
graphic / Dallin Chicoine/ staff words / Cam Cannon/ staff
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