However, Creydt and his organization did support China against the USSR. Thus, in attacking the participation of the pro-Moscow Paraguayan party in the international conference of Communist parties at Moscow in 1969, it claimed that the conference was “’a limited, discriminatory, exclusive and divisive’ meeting organized by the CPSU to isolate China while the Soviet Union was carrying on ‘super-secret negotiations’ with the United States.” The same document denounced the presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia as “military occupation.”[446]
In 1970, a U.S. State Department source reported, “The PCP faction headed by Oscar Creydt appears to be increasingly Peking-oriented.” Certainly, by the middle 1970s, the Creydt party, which was publishing the periodical Unidad Paraguaya, was clearly in the Chinese camp. It was accused by the Paraguayan Ministry of Interior of receiving aid from China.[447]
The loyalty of the party of Oscar Creydt to the Chinese Party leadership apparently was not undermined by the changes in personnel and direction in the Chinese party after Mao’s death.
Oscar Creydt hailed the defeat of the Gang of Four as “the great victory of the Chinese people,” and said that it “has further strengthened our trust in China. … Our conviction in the worldwide victory of the proletarian revolution has become firmer than ever.”[448]
In March 1977, Oscar Creydt visited China at the invitation of the Central Committee of the Chinese party. He was received by Politburo member Chi Teng, and Creydt “had a cordial and friendly conversation with him.”[449] Creydt’s party thus somewhat belatedly received the full “Chinese franchise” in Paraguay.
After the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the Creydt PCP’s Political Commission wrote to the Chinese party in March 1978 that it was “fundamentally in agreement with the ideas you have formulated in the principal report approved at the Eleventh Congress.” That letter, signed by Creydt, said that the PCP was “most satisfied with the fact that Chairman Hua has energetically reaffirmed the proletarian revolutionary line of Mao Tse-tung and demonstrated that ‘Russian revisionist imperialism is the greatest danger in the present world.’”[450]
There is no indication that, although theoretically committed to the violent road to power and guerrilla warfare, the Paraguayan Maoists ever sought to launch any kind of armed struggle.
Peruvian Maoists
One of the first Maoist parties of Latin America to be “recognized” by the Chinese was that of Peru. However, as was true of many Maoist groups, it was soon characterized by bitter factionalism, and by 1970 had split into at least three recognizable groups; other schismatic elements were added in subsequent years.
The Peruvian Maoists were of considerable importance in the student movement. Although the pro-Moscow party continued to have the most influence of all Communist groups in organized labor, the Maoists had certain elements of strength there, too.
Unlike most Maoist parties in Latin America, one of the factions into which the movement split sought to put into practice the model of Mao Tse-tung’s “popular war under the leadership of the working class,” that is, of the Communist Party. That group was what became known as the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Peru-Sendero Luminoso). In 1980 it launched a guerrilla war that is still underway as this is being written. It became one of the major heirs to the tradition of International Maoism long after the Chinese Communist Party leadership had lost all interest in the subject.
Background of Peruvian Maoism
The origins of the Communist Party of Peru go back to the late 1920s, when José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the few original Marxist theoreticians Latin America has produced, established the Socialist Party of Peru, which became a “fraternal” member of the Communist International (CI). Mariátegui was condemned by a Comintern conference in 1929, and he died soon afterward. In 1930 some of his followers, led by Eudosio Ravines, reorganized the Socialist Party as the Communist Party, which became a fullfledged member of the CI.
For the next forty years, the principal significance of the Peruvian Communist Party was as a far Left opponent of the Aprista Party, led by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, which during all that period was the most significant popular party in the country. The Communists collaborated with a variety of dictatorships and right-wing regimes, in an effort to capitalize on such cooperation to get control of the labor movement and popular politics generally. For a quarter of a century after World War II, however, organized labor was firmly in the hands of the Apristas, and the Communists amounted to not much more than a minor, although very active, irritant to them.
Throughout all of this period, the Peruvian Communist Party remained exceedingly loyal to Moscow. Its founder, Eudosio Ravines, was for some years an international agent of the Comintern. Even after he broke with the Comintern in 1942 and formed his own party, the Communist Party of Peru continued to be a faithful collaborator with the CPSU until the collapse of the latter.
During the period in which Maoism was developing in Peru, there were a number of significant changes in the country’s general political picture. A military coup in 1962, carried out largely to prevent the Aprista Party from coming to power, was followed by elections in 1963, in which a “populist” candidate, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, was chosen. A very modest agrarian reform and some other changes were enacted.
Then, before the election scheduled for early 1969, there was another coup. Although it, too, was designed at least in part to keep the Apristas from power, the military men who seized power in October 1968, led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, were reform-minded. They enacted a very fundamental agrarian reform, tried an experiment with “industrial communities” in which, over time, workers would supposedly come to have majority control of their enterprises, and a variety of lesser measures.
However, the military men’s enthusiasm for finding a “third way” between capitalism and the Soviet system flagged. Finally, in 1978, elections for a constitutional assembly were held, and in the following year general elections took place, once again won by Fernando Belaúnde.
Emergence of Peruvian Maoism
There are indications that by the late 1950s there was considerable discontent among the secondary leadership with those who had controlled the Communist Party of Peru since Eudosio Ravines had abandoned it in 1942. The Lima Committee of the party at its 15th Departmental Congress in 1958 demanded the establishment of a “Leninist Provisional Central Committee,” a demand that the national leadership claimed was an attempt “to make it appear that the Communist Party is divided and to denigrate its past and its political line.”[451]
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