The Peruvian revolutionary peasant and indigenous rights leader Hugo Blanco, a long-time member of the Fourth International, died late last month. We translate and reprint a reflection on Blanco’s life from Pepe Mejía, a member of the editorial board of Lucha Indígena, a newspaper that Blanco founded. During the administration of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), an anonymous military tribunal sentenced Mejía to 25 years in prison. The original appeared in Viento Sur and was reprinted in Correspondencia de Prensa.

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On June 25, Hugo Blanco Galdós, one of the historic leaders and an obligatory reference in the history of the peasant and indigenous movements in Latin America, passed away.

In Hugo Blanco, we encounter three essential characteristics: respect, affection and admiration beyond slogans and ideologies. During his long life, he experienced many incarcerations, exile, deportation, kidnapping and detention. He was not an exemplary father, as he recognized many times, but he dedicated his whole life to fight for a sustainable, ecosocialist world, against the exploiter. And because he thought the best way to confront capitalism is to organize ourselves.

Hugo Blanco, who was born in Cusco on November 15, 1934, was very aware of the principles of indigenous culture.

“El buen vivir” (good living). Happiness, Hugo said, does not consist in the accumulation of money or goods, nor in the possession of “modern” things, but in living in peace, without “stress”.

He was against the individualism that rules the world today. He defended communal solidarity, the “collective self”. The issues that concern the community are not resolved by an individual or by a group of people, but by the community as a whole. For Hugo, agreements are made by consensus, never by majority.

Pachamama was always present in his discourse. Mother Nature is a living being. As are all its components, including the hills and rivers. “We are but a part of her. We must live within her in harmony with her other components. It is loved and deeply respected”.

He made his own the Zapatistas’ philosophy of “commanding by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo). He, who was both a an elected representative and senator, believed that public service is about serving, rather than being  served.

In his ecosocialist journey, the organizer of the land seizure in La Convención and Lares—inspiration for the Agrarian Reform from below—considered that the fundamental struggle is to defend the jungle against the criminal depredation of transnational companies, especially those from hydrocarbon industry.

For Hugo, and the native peoples, other aggressors are the logging companies, mining, and the construction of hydroelectric dams. He organized and supported organization against these companies.

For these indigenous and peasant peoples and communities, hydrocarbon extractors poison river water, which is sacred and one of the fundamental sustainers of Amazonian life. They not only provide water but also fish, one of the bases of the jungle population’s diet.

Against a political system that serves capital

The executive power and the parliament are unconditionally at the service of the multinational companies, as they pass laws to legalize the depredation and plundering. The police forces and the navy are also at the service of the predators, Hugo told us.

He was very clear that the problem of global warming must be solved by humanity as a whole and not by a handful of potentates.

“It is the collectivity that must agree whether a mine or a factory should be opened or not.”

“To do this, we must naturally do away with capitalism and place production be in the hands of society as a whole. Neither do we want it to be in the hands of a vertical state which was the case with the corrupt bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union, whose internal rot brought it down.” (1)

Already more than 15 years ago he addressed a topic that today has special relevance. “It is the collectivity— not the corporations or ‘the market’— that must resolve what ‘modern’ conveniences we must do without in order to avoid the extinction of the species.” (2)

An inveterate follower of the realities of other countries, especially those  in Europe, Hugo pointed this out to us:

“Lately an ecosocialist current is positively emerging among the urban population. Unfortunately, the superiority complex towards the indigenous, sown by the dominant capitalist ideology, makes urban comrades resist understanding that, in reality, they are adhering to two of the moral principles for which for more than 500 years the indigenous peoples of America and probably those of the whole world have been fighting in the practical terrain in their struggle of resistance against imposed, hierarchical and predatory colonization. The enemy has realized the importance of the indigenous movement. In 2000, the U.S. CIA stated: ‘Latin America has a new threat to face: the indigenous resistance movements’.” (3)

Throughout his militant life he taught us to continue fighting against capitalism, whose essence, as we see every day, is the dictatorship of money, that sacrifices at its altar humanity, nature and the descendants of the capitalists themselves. For this we must confront the governments that are capitalist tools.

Hugo Blanco put the indigenous movements at the center of the anti-systemic struggle. “For this they must overcome the prejudices of superiority created by the oppressors and driven through the consumer society.” The sooner the profoundly anti-systemic significance of indigenous struggles is understood, the more strongly non-indigenous people will support them.

Regarding parliamentary democracy and the access of the so-called left, Hugo was always very clear. In 1990 he told me: “It is certain that the rich will not allow us to govern, they will order the officers they have in their service to carry out a coup d’état against the legally elected government”.

Elections are not the main factor in the confrontation

For this tireless fighter, elections are not the main focus in the confrontation between the rich and the poor. The primary focus remains the organization, struggle and preparation for self-defense of the mass organizations (workers, peasants, neighborhoods, etc.). Money is the source of the rich’s strength. Numbers is the strength of those struggling from below. To make our strength effective we must act together, and organize ourselves.

He considered that it was illusory to trust in the permanence of governments that emerged from the popular vote. The threat of a coup d’état is always present, she told us.

“The Armed Forces are the main bastion on which the oppressors rely to maintain their class domination. They cannot serve as a guarantee for the support of a government of the exploited against the exploiters. This is an excessively naive illusion.”

Against reformism

From his beginnings in the organization of peasant unions, he maintained a permanent confrontation with reformist positions. In the peasant struggle in La Convención and Lares there were two lines. A reformist one led by the Communist Party through the Federation of Workers of Cusco. They prioritized legal procedures over mass mobilization. They did not disregard mobilization, but they did relegate it to last place.

The other line was revolutionary, influenced by the Partido Obrero Revolucionario and later the Frente de Izquierda Revolucionario (Revolutionary Left Front). In this line were, among others, Hugo Blanco and Luis Zapata, who later joined the ELN guerrillas.

This line gave priority to mass mobilization: stoppages, marches, rallies, strikes, preparation of armed self-defense, etc. He did not rule out working within the system, but gave it little importance.

For Hugo, agrarian reform was only a redistribution of land, “since a true agrarian reform must include agricultural education, provision of seeds and fertilizers, planning of production at the service of the population, credits, commercialization, etc.”. (4)

“Now the main struggles developed by the indigenous and peasant movement in general are not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of all humanity. The struggles are in defense of the environment, at a time when the survival of the species is threatened due to the accelerated deterioration of the environment. The people of the countryside fight in defense of the soil, the water, the forest, and life. The success of these battles and those of the oppressed peoples throughout the world will depend on the defeat of the system, governed by the large multinational corporations, that is leading to the extinction of the human species. These companies only seek to make as much money as possible in the shortest possible time, without caring about the fate of people and nature, without caring about the fate of humanity. The great majority of governments are only servants of these companies, therefore the struggle for life is also a political struggle against puppet governments”. (5)

Conversations with Arguedas

There is a part of Hugo’s activist career that personally called out to me, and still does. In several conversations we discussed the correspondence he had with the writer José María Arguedas , when he was imprisoned in on El Frontón Island in Callao.

“Brother Hugo, dear, heart of stone and dove”. This is how Arguedas begins one of the letters he sent to Hugo Blanco.

Hugo told me that José María Arguedas asked him permission to visit him in the El Frontón prison. In a second letter, Hugo tells Arguedas that a fleeting visit in El Frontón would not be satisfactory for the great affection he had for him.

On November 25, 1969 Hugo Blanco wrote to Arguedas, four days before the bullet that ended his life by suicide. “You will understand how much that answer of mine weighs on me,” Hugo said.

In one of the letters that Hugo writes to Arguedas, he tells him how as a child he knew a peasant leader mutilated by six bullets from the landowner’s thugs. Hugo tells him about the conversations he had with the peasant leader and the promise of life he made to him. This promise has been one of the driving forces of Hugo’s life.

Hugo and Arguedas talked about love, hunger, poverty, dreams, yearnings, death, ourselves, sadness….

“How long and from where shall I write to you? You will not be able to forget me, even if death catches me. Listen, Peruvian man, strong as our mountains where the snow does not melt, whom prison strengthens like a stone and like a dove. Behold, I have written to you, happy, in the midst of the great shadow of my mortal ailments. The sadness of the mistis (volcanoes  in southern Perú) and of the selfish doesn’t reach us. The great sadness of the people, of the world of those who know and feel the dawn, reaches us. Thus, death and sadness are neither dying nor to suffering. Isn’t it true, brother?”. (6)

Condemned to death by two opposing terrorist organizations—the national intelligence service and Sendero Luminoso—he said he took up arms precisely to fight terrorism.

“The authorities accused him of being a terrorist. They were right. He sowed terror among the landowners and the people.” (7)

Hugo tells us how the land seizure movement began. The peasants decided to stop working for the landowners for free. The landowners began to walk around armed and to shoot in the air, threatening to kill them. When the peasants complained to the police, the police replied that the bosses had the right to kill them like dogs. The only way left to the peasantry was self-defense against the landowners’ terrorism. The government ordered them to attack us and we had to defend ourselves.

A government official sent him a coffin as a gift

Hugo Blanco has countless anecdotes. Many of them unlikely—but all of them true.

In 1980 he was a parliamentary deputy for the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT), Peruvian section of the Fourth International. In 1983 a provincial judge proposed to open negotiations with the Shining Path. In the face of attacks on this judge, Blanco defended the negotiation position in a parliamentary session.

“It is precisely with our enemies that we have to talk. For example, I would have no problem talking with murderers like Hitler, Pinochet or General Noel,” said Blanco in reference to the military man imposed as political chief of Ayacucho.

“Withdraw that statement!” He has said that General Noel is a murderer, bellowed a right-wing deputy.

“Yes, it is true, he is right,” was Hugo Blanco’s answer. I withdraw the statement. General Noel is not a murderer, he is a genocide.”

Hugo was suspended for four months. The next day he started selling ground coffee near the Congress. A journalist approached him and said: “Listen, aren’t you ashamed to be selling ground coffee in the street?”  Hugo answered: “Look, a few blocks from here the other parliamentarians are selling the country, ask them if that doesn’t make them ashamed.”

“He slept under the stars and in cells occupied by rats. He went on 14  hunger strikes. In one of them, when he could stand it no longer, the Minister of the Interior made a loving gesture and sent him, as a gift, a coffin.” (8)

“And when a drill opened his skull, because a vein burst, Hugo woke up in panic that the surgeons had changed his mind. But no. He was still, with his skull sewn up, the same old Hugo.” (9)

On progressive governments

For Hugo, the progressive governments embody some aspect rebellion against the interests of big capital, but they do not break with the anti-democratic system and capitulate to the transnationals when they initiate an economic boycott against the government.

But he also had a message for the communist parties: “Unity is possible on the basis of a true class independence, without compromises and agreements with the bourgeois forces, it is on these bases that pressure must be exerted on the CP to break with its false strategy of seeking allies in the bourgeois parties and in the supposedly leftist generals”. (10)

In all the conversations I had with Hugo he always touched on the Zapatista theme. He emphasized horizontality and internationalism. But also on continuous education, self-help, accompaniment.

In Hugo’s opinion, it would be healthy to return to our original morality, which does not mean returning to primitive life: deep human solidarity, intimate ties with nature, living without the pressures of consumer society, remembering our ancestors.

A great defender of the coca leaf, “for us it is the sacred leaf,” he said. The coca leaf is present in the indigenous baptism, accompanies the Indian in marriage and in burial, in a housewarming or in an important transaction. When two people cross each other’s path, one invites the other to drink coca and they sit down to talk like old friends.

To Eduardo Galeano, “Hugo Blanco has walked his country backwards and forwards, from the snowy sierras to the dry coast, passing through the humid jungle where the natives are hunted like wild beasts. And wherever he went, he helped the fallen to rise up and the silent to speak out”.

And our dear friend and comrade, a great friend of Hugo Blanco, Miguel Romero, El Moro, said:

“Hugo Blanco does not have the makings of a hero, but the struggle to seek a revolutionary alternative to capitalism does not need heroes. Hugo Blanco has the makings of a peasant, of an indigenous person, of a trade unionist, of an indomitable revolutionary militant…And we do need all of those, to have internationally recognized comrades who can be trusted, who are like shared links between the rebellions and revolutions of the 20th century and those of today, in which, by the way, whether in Tahrir, in the Casbah, in Syntagma or more modestly in our 15M, Hugo would have felt at home.”

Notes

1. “Salvemos a la humanidad. Retomemos las raíces indígenas”, Hugo Blanco. Página 18. Ediciones Lucha Indígena. Mayo 2009. 
2. Ídem. 
3. “Salvemos la humanidad. Retomemos las raíces indígenas”, Hugo Blanco. Página 19. Ediciones Lucha Indígena. Mayo 2009.
4. “La verdadera historia de la reforma agraria”, Hugo Blanco, Página 5. Ediciones Lucha Indígena. Abril 2009. 
5. Ídem. 
6. Carta de José María Arguedas a Hugo Blanco.
7. Comentario de Eduardo Galeano. “Nosotros los indios. Hugo Blanco”, Página 17. Ediciones La Minga.
8. Comentario de Eduardo Galeano, “Nosotros los indios. Hugo Blanco”, Página 17. Ediciones La Minga.
9. Ídem. 
10. Trabajadores al poder. Hugo Blanco. Página 65. Eris Editorial S.A.