Three and a half years later, in 1962, “a period of intense and prolonged struggle began.” In 1963, after a number of the top party leaders had been jailed following a military coup, the split in the party started. By that time, the Sino-Soviet split was out in the open, and the top leadership of the party was divided on the issue. The seventeenth plenary session of the Central Committee was held when most of the pro-Soviet leaders were still in jail, and it purged several pro-Soviet leaders who refused to accept this measure. A few months later the split in the party was formalized.
In January 1964, the pro-Chinese element held what they called the Fourth National Conference of the Communist Party of Peru. It formally expelled the principal pro-Soviet leaders, who, however, kept control of the party’s paper, Unidad, as a consequence of which the pro-Chinese group launched its own paper, Bandera Roja. Since both parties continued to call themselves Communist Party of Peru (PCP), they became known by their papers as the PCP Unidad and the PCP Bandera Roja.[452]
Eugenio Chang Rodríguez has noted that in addition to adapting their position to that of Mao Tse-tung, the PCP Bandera Roja (PCP-BR) also looked back to José Carlos Mariátegui for inspiration. Chang Rodriguez wrote that the PCP-BR “postulated the study of Mariátegui and the beginning of the armed struggle. It believed that revolutionaries should not await the spontaneous development of subjective conditions; on the contrary, they had the ‘obligation to create them, develop and organize them.’ Its National Conference of November 1965, following Mariátegui, characterized Peruvian society as semi-colonial, and following Mao, adopted the revolutionary tactic of the march from the countryside to the city in a prolonged popular war.”[453]
Cecil Johnson noted that the Chinese Communist Party “recognize” its Peruvian counterpart immediately upon its establishment. He said that it did so because the Peruvian party followed closely the international line then being put forward by the Chinese. He wrote that “on the international scene, the Peruvian analysts perceived a situation ‘favorable to the people of the world fighting for national liberation.’ They accepted Mao’s idea, articulated at the Moscow Conference of 1957, that the ‘East Wind prevails over the West Wind,’ and they adhered to his instructions to select, as a basis for policy-making, the principal contradiction of the present historical moment. … Similarly, the stand taken by the Peruvians on questions of war and peace coincided precisely with that of the CCP. They insisted, for example, that imperialism, not the bellicosity of People’s China, was the source of modern war. Emulating their Chinese mentor, they also rejected the Soviet understanding of ‘peaceful coexistence.’ Suffice it to say that the Peruvians held that revolutionaries must not be awed by the nuclear power of the United States. If they were, their will to struggle for national liberation would be paralyzed.”[454]
In spite of its revolutionary rhetoric, the Bandera Roja in its early years was not totally averse to running candidates in elections. For instance, in Ayacucho, in the municipal election of 1966, the party had a slate of candidates and elected one member of the city council, coming in third overall in the city. However, in the by-election for a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Lima in 1967, the party called for its supporters to cast blank ballots.[455]
Splits among Peruvian Maoists
The two principal leaders of the Partido Comunista Bandera Roja were Saturnino Paredes, who was elected Secretary-General of the pro-Chinese group, and José Sotomayor Pérez. They very soon came to head rival factions within the party, and in the Fifth Congress of the organization there was a new split, with Sotomayor breaking away to establish the Partido Comunista-Marxista Leninista.[456]
The Bandera Roja party of Saturnino Paredes continued to hold the Chinese “franchise” in Peru. Thus, the Chinese Maoist parties in other countries gave publicity to a letter sent by Paredes late in 1967, on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic. In that letter, Paredes claimed that “The Marxist-Leninist ideas developed by Mao Tsetung guide the world revolution,” and “when they are understood by the masses they will be converted into a material force more potent than nuclear arms.”[457]
The Sotomayor schism was only the first of several in the ranks of the Peruvian Maoists. Discontent with the leadership of Saturnino Paredes increased within the party. Rogger [sic] Mercado has noted that “basing itself on the discontent of the rank and file, there was formed a fraction headed by the Central Regional organization, the organ of which was Patria Roja, and its Secretary-General, Odón Espinoza. There was thus created chaos in the rank and file, which in many cases acted on the basis of sympathies and discontent.”[458]
This crisis reached its high point in the Sixth Conference of the PCP Bandera Roja in March 1969. According to the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, “At the Sixth Congress… the ‘Patria Roja’ faction repudiated the policy of ‘closed doors’ imposed by Secretary General Paredes, three members of the Political Commission of the Central Committee, two Central Committee members, a member of the ‘revolutionary committee,’ and a member of the Executive Bureau of the party’s youth group, the JCP. Paredes was charged with opposing in practice the thought of Mao Tse-tung, distorting and sabotaging the tasks established by the party’s Fifth Conference, advocating a ‘sterile sectarianism which isolated the party from the masses,’ of establishing a ‘bureaucratism which isolated the leadership from the rank and file.’”[459]
Both the Paredes group and those who ostensibly had expelled him continued to call themselves the Communist Party of Peru. Paredes’ party therefore came to be known as the Partido Comunista del Peru (Bandera Roja) and that of his opponents as the Partido Comunista del Perú (Patria Roja).
However, the defection of the Patria Roja group was not the last split in the ranks of the Partido Comunista del Perú (Bandera Roja). One of the people who had supported Saturnino Paredes in the 1969 schism had been Abimail Guzmán, head of the party in the region of Ayacucho, a heavily Indian area in the Andes in south-central Peru. He emerged from the 1969 split as the head of “Agitprop” for the party, and in that capacity was editor of Bandera Roja. He became increasingly critical of Paredes’ leadership.
Rogger Mercado noted that “the struggle took place internally, openly headed by Abimail Guzmán… who published the editorials of Bandera Roja, giving the rank and file, and the readers in general, the image of a double line.”[460]
This conflict reached a head in the Plenum of 1970, where the Guzmán group demanded the calling of the 6th National Conference of the Party (the Paredes group did not recognize the validity of the “6th Conference” the year before, which had expelled Paredes and others), and Paredes refused that demand. Guzmán and his supporters also “criticized the ‘liquidationist’ line, the cult of personality and the ignoring of clandestine work by the leadership of Saturnino Paredes, who had gathered together phrases and slogans of his in a book similar to the Red Book of Mao.”[461]
452
For details of this split, see Cecil Johnson,
453
Eugenio Chang Rodríguez, “Sendero Luminoso, Teoría y Praxis,”
455
Carlos Ivan Degregori, “Sendero Luminoso”: volume II,
456
Rogger Mercado,
457
459
Nelly Stromquist,