Early in 1995, having had the constitution altered to make it possible, President Fujimori successfully ran for reelection. When I visited Peru twice a few months afterward (visiting several different parts of the country), it was clear to me that Fujimori had clearly won the support of the majority of the people. In conversations with a wide range of people of many different sorts, I was told that there had been two basic reasons for his victory: he had ended the runaway inflation, and he had drastically curtailed the menace of Sendero Luminoso. At least in the urban areas of the country, the people had lost their fear of Shining Path.
The hostility of a large part of the population to guerrilla attacks was also made clear when another armed revolutionary group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) seized the Japanese Embassy in Lima at the end of 1996. At that time, journalists on the scene reported that there was little or no sympathy in the Lima shantytowns for those who had seized the Embassy, and that, on the contrary, there were demonstrations against them.
Of course, Sendero Luminoso was not dead. It still existed and was more or less active in various parts of the country. A World to Win claimed, “A country-wide series of guerrilla attacks in late July and August 1996 marked a high point in the People’s War in the last several years,” and “the PCP is active in 15 of Peru’s 24 departments.”[507] However, with the growth of increasing resistance to it both among peasants and in urban slum areas, and with incarceration of its “fount of all wisdom,” Abimael Guzmán, and splits within its own ranks, it no longer seemed to have much capacity to overthrow the existing economic, social, and political system and to seize power and impose the kind of society prescribed by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought-Gonzalo Thought, as elaborated by Guzmán.
Whether Sendero Luminoso will be able to recover from the setbacks that it sustained in the early 1990s will depend, of course, in large part on whether the social and economic conditions that originally provided Shining Path with fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of a Maoist “popular war” are substantially changed. Undue optimism on that score is perhaps not justified.
Conclusion
Peru was the American country most influenced by Maoism. The Maoist split in the local Communist Party was one of the first such divisions to take place in Latin America. However, as was characteristic of Maoist groups in many countries, the followers of the Chinese leader in Peru soon split into several warring factions.
It was one of these factions, the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path), which began in 1980 to try to put into effect the Maoist credo of “popular wax” by launching a guerrilla effort to seize power—the only such attempt made in the western Hemisphere. Developing his own version of Maoist doctrine, Abimail Guzmán, who took the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, converted his following into a serious challenge not only to the government of Peru but also to the whole social, economic, political, and cultural structure of the country. However, with increasing popular resistance to Sendero Luminoso and the capture of much of its top leadership (including Presidente Gonzalo), the Maoist revolution in Peru suffered severe setbacks after 1992. Although half a decade later Shining Path had by no means totally disappeared from the scene, its future remained very uncertain.
Puerto Rican Maoists
Maoism in Puerto Rico was largely the creation of Juan Antonio Corretjer. He had been Secretary-General of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party of Pedro Albizu Campos, but resigned from it as a result of serious disagreements with Albizu Campos in 1944. Subsequently, he joined the Puerto Rican Communist Party, and for a while he worked on the New York Communist newspaper Daily Worker. At the time of the ouster of Earl Browder as Secretary-General of the CPUSA, he offered his resignation from the Puerto Rican Communist Party, but it was rejected. However, in 1948, he was expelled from that group “for a long list of alleged deviations.”[508]
In 1959, Corretjer organized the Acción Patriótica Unitaria (Single Patriotic Action), a Puerto Rican nationalist group. However, in 1964—1965 serious internal disputes resulted in the dissolution of that group, and Corretjer led one of its factions in establishing the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Socialist League; LSP). It soon entered into close relations with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which then held the Chinese “franchise” in the United States.[509] As early as April 1965, the PLP’s newspaper, Desafío, began publishing material from the LSP.[510]
The LSP preached a combination of Puerto Rican independence and socialist revolution, to be achieved by armed insurrection. Corretjer had broken with Pedro Albizu Campos and the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in large part because he rejected the policy of individual terrorism that Albizu Campos insisted was the principal way of inciting the struggle for independence.[511]
Corretjer put forth his own view in an article in October 1967.
He wrote, “Only an independence movement with military orientation can break the will of imperialist resistance. For reasons of historical necessity that independence movement must be not only military but Marxist. It will definitely seek the road to socialism, moved by the same historic law which transformed the Cuban nationalist revolution into a socialist one. … The Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña seizes the military heritage of the patriotic revolution; it illuminates it with Marxist thought. … For that reason it will win.”[512]
The LSP centered its efforts on several campaigns. One of these was opposition to the application of the U.S. military conscription law in Puerto Rico and, more generally, U.S. military presence in the island. On one occasion, it organized picket lines in San Juan, Ponce, and the town of Adjuntas, protesting the draft. One young man in the picket line outside of Fort Brooks in San Juan carried a placard proclaiming, “My name is Antonio Rivera, I am a Marxist-Leninist and I am not going into the army.”[513]
One of its most spectacular actions on this theme was a riot at the University of Puerto Rico in October 1969, during which the headquarters of the ROTC was set afire. Among those arrested following this event were Juan Antonio Corretjer and half a dozen other leaders of the LSP.[514]
On another occasion, the LSP played an important role in a protest against the use of the offshore island of Culebra for U.S. Navy exercises and target practice. At that time, Corretjer claimed that “Neither by natural right nor by juridical right, does the United States have any power over the Puerto Ricans. Logically-which they know how to be—when any question is involved which affects or can affect, their domination of Puerto Rico, they speak through the chiefs of the armed forces; that is to say, as a government which supports itself on an army of occupation.”[515]
Another campaign of the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña was against participation in elections. Thus, they strongly opposed voting in a plebiscite held on the subject of the island’s status in 1967. Defending abstentionism, the LSP wrote, “Faced with the reality which we must face, to react any other way would be to join the colonial hypocrisy and simulated reformism and convert ourselves into miserable provocateurs.”[516]
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Milorad Popov, in
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Article by Alejandro Figueroa in