However, the most important organization under control of the Maoists of Patria Roja was the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Educación Peruana (SUTEP), the national teachers’ union. In 1978 and 1979, the Maoists led SUTEP on two national strikes. The party also controlled some unions of manual workers, and in 1980, Daniel Premo credited it with having more than 100,000 workers under its influence.[475]
During the 1960s and 1970s there were several competing central labor organizations in the country. The oldest of these, the Aprista Party-dominated Confederación de Trabajadores del Perú (CTP), was the dominant group until the reformist military regime took power in 1968. Thereafter, for some time the government of General Velasco Alvarado favored the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), controlled by the pro-Moscow Communist Party. However, in the early 1970s it aided in establishing a new group, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers of Peru (CRTP).
In addition to these central labor bodies, there were some other groups seeking to establish such organizations. One of these was the Comité de Coordinación y Unificación Sindical Clasista (CCUSC), which was controlled by the Patria Roja Maoist Party.[476]
As did the Bandera Roja, the Patria Roja party participated in elections at the end of the military period of 1968—1980. In the presidential election of 1980, it organized a coalition with a number of other groups, the Revolutionary Union of the Left (UNIR), which had Horacio Zeballos, a leader of SUTEP, as its presidential candidate. Zeballos came in sixth of fifteen candidates, getting 152,272 votes, or 3.7 percent of the total.[477]
In its earlier years, Patrio Roja seemed to deviate somewhat from the Maoist theoretical analysis, at least insofar as Peru was concerned. Although at its first national meeting, the Sixth Conference, it characterized Peru as being “semi-feudal and semi-colonial,” at the Seventh Conference, it modified this description, categorizing Peru as “a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society in the process of transformation into dependent capitalism.”[478]
However, by the middle 1970s, the Chinese seemed to be favoring the Patria Roja instead of Saturnino Paredes’ Bandera Roja, which, as we have noted, was gravitating toward the Albanians. Chinese sources reported in October 1975 that Patria Roja had sent greetings to Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic.[479] In 1977 delegations of Patria Roja visited China and Albania. In September of that year, Patria Roja sent greetings to the 11th National Congress of the Chinese party and congratulated it on the selection of Hua Kuo-feng as its chairman.[480] Patria Roja’s loyalty to the Chinese party was also reflected in its attack in February 1979 on Vietnamese “Soviet-backed aggression against Kampuchea.” At about the same time, the party noted that the Soviet Union was using Cuba “as a tool for its social-imperialist expansion.”[481]
Patria Roja suffered its share of internal bickerings and schisms. In the 1970s, at least two other “national groups separated from it, one taking the name Tierra Roja (Red Land), and the other, Partido Comunista Marxista-Leninista Maoista.[482] There were also schisms in all or part of several of the party’s regional organizations.[483] Little information is available concerning what became of these dissident groups.
Lewis Taylor reported in 1997 that “Patria Roja still exists but is much diminished in size and influence since the crisis in the Left after 1988. … It still has influence in SUTEP but both party and union are a shadow of their former selves. Equally, what influence Patria had among the peasantry is much reduced.”[484]
Partido Comunista del Perú Sendero Luminoso
The only faction of Peruvian Maoism that sought to put into practice the guerrilla war teachings of Mao Tse-tung was the one popularly referred to as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), although, like most of the other Peruvian Maoist groups, it claimed to be, and referred to itself as, the only real Communist Party of Peru.
The popular appellation for the party led by Abimael Guzmán Reynoso was derived from a slogan used by one of the student organizations that it controlled, the Revolutionary Students Front (FER). That slogan was “By the Shining Path of Mariátegui.” “Shining Path thus became the shorthand way of differentiating the Guzmán group from all of the others claiming to be the Communist Party of Peru.
To a large degree, the story of PCP Sendero Luminoso is the story its leader, Abimael Guzmán. He arrived in Ayacucho in 1962, as a faculty member of the newly established National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH). A member of the Communist Party, which until then had been very weak in Ayacucho, he was put in charge of work among the youth, particularly the university students.
During the 1960s, under Guzmán’s leadership, the Partido Comunista del Perú Bandera Roja came largely to control both the student body and the university. Working through the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (FER), they succeeded in getting their candidate for Rector chosen in 1962, and dismissed seven years later when they had quarreled with him.
Meanwhile, in 1966 Guzmán and the PCP Bandera Roja reached outside the university, organizing parents of university students and would-be students when the government sought drastically to reduce the UNSCH budget. For this purpose, they organized the Frente de Defensa (Defense Front).
With the advent in 1968 of the reformist military regime, which Guzmán (and subsequently the PCP Sendero Luminoso) labeled “fascist,” major socioeconomic changes occurred in the Ayacucho region. Execution of the various reform programs of the regime led to a substantial increase in government personnel in the area. Agriculture was modernized to some degree and was commercialized to a greater degree. Within the university, substantially different elements—people not native to the region were added to the professional staff, while among the students there were increasingly large numbers who were not children of the provincial intelligentsia, professional people, and more prosperous peasants—who had hitherto constituted the student body, and among whom the PCP Sendero Luminoso had largely found its supporters. Outside the university, substantial new peasant organizations and labor unions, not under Sendero Luminoso control, were estabhshed.[485]
Although certainly not giving up their struggle in the university and outside of it, the first reaction of Sendero Luminoso to its reduced influence in the UNSCH was to turn inward. On the one hand, it launched an intensive study among its members of the works of Mariátegui. On the other hand, it stressed the need to “reconstruct the party”, which as Rogger Mercado has noted, “basically signified making the Party organizationally, ideologically and politically… an apparatus capable of carrying forward the armed struggle.”[486]
475
Daniel Premo, in
477
Agence France Press, reported in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, May 20, 1980; see also Will Reissner, “Hugo Blanco Campaigns for Working Class Independence,” Intercontinental Press, April 7, 1980, pages 341, 343.
479
Robert J. Alexander, in
480
Daniel Premo, in
485
For details on early years of Sendero Luminoso, see