WeeklyWorker

16.01.1997

Siege shatters Peruvian ‘peace’

The MRTA holding of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima poses specific tasks for of the working class, says a member of Poder Obrero in Lima

In a bold military action, commandos of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took around 500 hostages at a reception in the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Peru.

This event has broken into an almost sepulchral peace that has seemed to characterise the political situation in Peru. This peace has been disturbed up to now only by the machinations of the prudish opposition, against the amnesty with the military assassins; the privatisation of the oil industry; the re-election of Fujimori; and by the seizure and later release of General Robles. The working class and its organisations, with some exceptions, have been in a retreat that has continued to permit the political stability of this Bonapartist civic-military regime.

Peru has one of the highest levels of cost of living in the southern hemisphere, with average monthly wages not sufficient to cover a family’s costs for more than a few days, and with 90% of the population unemployed or underemployed. A servile parliament has tried to hide corruption in the regime which has recently been exposed. Fujimori continues to approve laws which strengthen his authoritarian hold. All these conditions contributed to a massive decrease in the government’s popularity, but without producing the solution of mass organisation.

The occupation of the ambassador’s house has destroyed the prevailing myth that the armed groups have been absolutely defeated. Nevertheless, it has also distracted the masses from their initial questioning of the regime’s authoritarianism and policies of starvation and centralism, and has fuelled the repressive forces which aim to eradicate all popular and working class resistance. The bourgeois ‘opposition’ has started to defend the regime around the slogan of ‘national unity’, which actually aims to isolate and defeat the MRTA’s putschist action and to maintain the political stability which Fujimori has achieved.

The government had secured this popular support largely through having supposedly managed to contain and defeat ‘terrorism’. The capture of the Japanese ambassador demonstrates that this country is still in internal conflict.

The national flag is seen displayed on domestic houses in affluent areas but not, by and large, in zones inhabited by the poor, reflecting a social contrast which is also demonstrated in varying support for the action of the MRTA.

The majority do not support the action of the MRTA, but nor do they feel solidarity with the wealthy hostages.  Calls for national unity have not gained support among the poor. While the president’s wife offered Christmas turkeys and other special foods to the embassy hostages and the media were fulsome about her concern that the hostages had no water or electricity, the masses are conscious that they themselves survive from day to day in worse conditions than these. Popular opinion everywhere combines opposition to violence with ironic comments about those who, for the first time, are having to endure the daily living conditions of the Peruvian masses.

The working class does not identify with the MRTA. It is a petty-bourgeois movement with opportunistic methods. But it has raised anti-imperialist demands and we must defend it against our common enemy, the bourgeois state. This state and its government do not have the right to criticise the morals of the MRTA action. The death squad, ‘Grupo Colina’, under the protection and support of the government, has committed far more bloody acts, legally sanctioned and rewarded.

Workers should support all popular struggles for the release of political prisoners, but the correct method for this is through strikes and other direct mass action. The seizure of the embassy was carried out by an elite who are completely divorced from mass movements. They do not call for the mobilisation of workers, but merely struggle in defence of their own partisan interests (their own legalisation, release of prisoners, funds, etc).

The Peruvian working class has suffered massive defeats. The parliamentarian Stalinists (IU) and the militaristic Stalinists (MRTA and Sendero Luminoso) have been largely responsible for these defeats. Both variants of Stalinism are ideologically based in a framework of the national bourgeois state and are opposed to the revolution of workers’ and peasants’ councils. The parliamentarist Stalinists have supported privatisation and repression. The equally repressive militaristic Stalinists have also colluded in the demoralisation and fragmentation of the working class.

Revolutionaries in Peru oppose the murder carried out by the MRTA on various of their dissidents. But we cannot consign the MRTA militants to the mess of bourgeois justice because this state is not fit to stand in judgement on them.

At first, the aim of the MRTA action was to seek the release of its imprisoned members, for which it initially raised progressive demands. But currently it is apparently negotiating a ‘peace agreement’. If this is confirmed, all it will be possible to say is that the MRTA is seeking a ‘heroic’ capitulation in order to distinguish itself from the shameful capitulation of Gonzalo’s PCP-Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).

Javier Diez Canseco (leader of the United Left) and the reformist left maintain that the government should come to an understanding with the MRTA and should be flexible about the prisoners, in just the same way as it decreed an amnesty with the ‘Grupo Colina’. The exploited should not make the same mistake of placing the state terrorists in the same bag with the petty-bourgeois rebels. The workers’ movement must fight for the unconditional release of the rebels, and for absolute condemnation of the state assassination squads. Only workers’ tribunals have the right to judge politically the rebels who have attacked workers’ interests.

Some of the released hostages have expressed conciliatory sentiments towards their former captors. Toledo (the candidate who received the third highest votes in the last presidential elections) compared the conditions in which the embassy hostages were kept to those in which the MRTA prisoners live, where only one half-hour visit is permitted per month, and where there is no access to television, radio or newspapers.

The MRTA is trying to convince the Peruvian leading lights that it can be reintegrated into the system, just as happened with its comrades in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua and now Guatemala. The Expreso newspaper and other reactionaries are arguing that the MRTA is extinct. It is clear that this is a desperate call for attention.

Revolutionary Marxists do not support this ‘guerillarist’ strategy, but neither do we call on the MRTA or the PCP/SL to give up their arms to the capitalist armed forces and the state. We call on the fighters in both movements to give up their strategies and to dedicate their military forces to self-defence tasks defined by assemblies of workers and poor peasants.

The CGTP and other popular and workers’ organisations have lost the political initiative. Their bureaucrats are conforming to a perfect neo-liberal model of demands for peace and negotiation.  We workers must struggle to revitalise our unions and to mobilise mass resistance to these bourgeois attacks. Anti-imperialist and workers’ organisations must seize this moment to organise events and to mobilise demands for the release of all political prisoners, employment stability, full employment and defence of the social demands of the workers.

The state of emergency decreed by the government in Lima and Callao is aimed at stopping all mass organisation, and to ensure that the silent and growing discontent of the poor does not explode. We must take advantage of the fact that the government is in a weak position and weaken it still further with greater force.

We do not accept the government’s call for national unity. We do not want unity with a government which weakens us with starvation wages and more unemployment. We call for an independent fight, uniting all our struggles against the common enemy.

We call for: