15.10.1998
Demonstration shows the way
José Villa of Poder Obrero (Peru) and the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International describes the situation in Peru after last month’s occupation of the presidential palace
September 30 1998 saw an historic event in 20th century Peru. Workers occupied the presidential palace in Lima, the most heavily guarded building in a heavily militarised country. Inside Fujimori’s headquarters the protesters burned tyres and captured uniforms and even ammunition from the presidential guard.
A joint day of action had been called by the engineers’ and teachers’ union (SUTEP) and backed by the Peruvian General Union Confederation (CGTP). It consisted of a national strike and massive demonstrations in the main cities. In the morning tens of thousands of workers marched, together with students and pensioners, in Lima, Arequipa, Cuzco and other provincial capitals. In Lima alone around 50,000 people participated in the demonstrations (La República October 1).
At midday the workers were able to enter the Plaza Mayor. This is Lima’s central square which the army and militarised police protect with tanks and armoured vehicles. The demonstrators not only broke through the protective barriers, but marched right into the presidential palace. Against the wishes of their leadership, militant industrial workers, teachers and students climbed the palace railings and entered its yard. One worker made a speech from the presidential balcony. Fujimori saw his headquarters occupied by ‘terrorists’ but was unable to expel them for over half an hour.
These events moved Peruvian public opinion. The palace, built by Francisco Pizarro (the Spanish soldier who conquered the Inca empire), has been for nearly five centuries the symbol of unquestioned power, and the ruling class never allow the ‘mob’ inside its walls.
The September 30 demonstration marked a radical turn in Peruvian politics.
During the 1990s Fujimori was able to defeat not only one of Latin America’s most militant labour movements, but also a guerrilla insurgence. He imposed an ultra-Thatcherite monetarist policy. In August 1990 he froze wages, while increasing energy prices 30-fold and cutting all subsidies. He destroyed the welfare state and privatised one of the most state-based economies in the region. Next he militarised the main national universities and factories and imposed the most draconian and repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ laws.
Under them there are more than 5,000 political and union prisoners. Anybody can be arrested and held for up to 15 days without access to lawyers or contact with their family. During this time they are subject to brutal torture. Immediately afterwards they can be sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal. ‘Terrorists’ have no access to radio, television or books. They have access to sunlight for half an hour a day and are entitled to just an hour and a half of family visits per year. As Fujimori declared, they are in “living tombs”.
Before the 1990 general election Fujimori was an unknown ‘non-political’ personality. The main ‘anti-imperialist’ forces were discredited. Alan García’s APRA government (1985-90) initially was very popular due to its policy of extensive price subsidies. Although APRA was not a bourgeois workers’ party, it was affiliated to the Socialist International. When García nationalised the banks the right mobilised opposition. His government disintegrated amidst hyperinflation, general strikes and guerrilla advances.
However, the left was incapable of capitalising on the discontent. The United Left, a popular front that enjoyed almost one third of the votes and was based on three ‘Marxist-Leninist’ reformist parties and small bourgeois forces, betrayed the strikes and backed many of García’s repressive measures. Its programme was not very dissimilar. The Maoist-Stalinist PCP-Sendero Luminoso achieved some support in shanty towns and among poor peasants, but alienated many other poor strata and workers with its sectarian and totalitarian militaristic policies. They opposed strikes and they killed many union militants.
By 1990 the traditional right wing was reunited around Mario Vargas Llosa as its presidential candidate. The APRA and the United Left opposed Vargas’s shock therapy programme and backed Fujimori. He was able to win nearly 60% of the votes in the second round, presenting himself as the candidate against the traditional elite. However, once elected, he chose to adopt the IMF’s austerity programme, backed by military might. The official unions and the left were discredited by their initial collaboration with Fujimori.
Fujimori managed to marginalise the revolutionary left and the unions. He persuaded the official left to join his ‘anti-terrorist’ crusade. The PCP-SL’s methods pushed many into Fujimori’s camp. He was able to obtain popular support through posing as a strong man capable of defeating hyperinflation and terrorism and who was attracting Japanese and western capital to reactivate the economy. Billions earned through privatisation were used for public works in the poor areas.
In April 1992 Fujimori sent in tanks to dissolve parliament. Yet many workers preferred him to the ‘traditional’ parliamentary forces, renowned for their corruption and attacks on the working class.
Fujimori obtained a majority in a new fraudulent ‘constituent congress’ and in a referendum for his authoritarian Magna Carta. In 1995 he was re-elected with nearly 60%, almost three times more than Javier Pérez de Cuellar, the former UN secretary-general, who led a broad opposition coalition (from rightwing neo-liberals to Stalinists). He established an authoritarian regime with the backing of the army and the all-powerful National Intelligence Service (SIN). His system was based on ‘independent’ and ‘technocratic’ leaders and movements.
In 1998 Fujimori and his congress imposed a law which allowed him to be re-elected for a third term for the period 2000-2005. He purged those who had objected from the Constitutional Tribunal, withdrew Peruvian nationality from the owner of an opposition TV channel and forced the president of the association of lawyers into exile.
More than a million signatures were collected demanding a referendum over the re-election issue. Massive student demonstrations took place.
Opposition forced Fujimori to replace his prime minister with Javier Valle Riestra, former leader of the left and ‘pro-human rights’ wing of APRA. Valle Riestra instructed the police not to attack the students. He opposed Fujimori’s re-election and declared he was a democrat who wanted to reform the authoritarian machine from the inside. Tens of thousands of students assembled in the Plaza Mayor and he withdrew the army from the universities. However, Valle Riestra did not even last two months in power before he was replaced by the former prime minister.
The Peruvian workers’ movement has very militant traditions. In 1918 it was in the vanguard of the struggle across the continent for the eight-hour day. It was associated with student radicalism. In 1930 general strikes shook Peru. In 1945-48 the workers’ movement won many rights in the ‘democratic interregnum’. In 1956 workers’ strikes were at the forefront in defeating Odría’s dictatorship. During the 1970s Peruvian workers, teachers and peasants organised massive strikes which overwhelmed the ‘socialist’ military junta and later pushed it out of power. On July 19 1977 an historic general strike saw most of the nation rally behind the proletariat. There was a revolutionary situation, with massive demonstrations and the creation of people’s assemblies. However, far from developing organs of dual power, the ‘left’ fell into electoral cretinism. Nevertheless, in 1978 the ‘Marxist’ left for the first time became a national electoral force. Hugo Blanco’s ‘Trotskyists’ won 12% of the vote.
In the 1980s several general strikes were fought in a decade of austerity measures and militarisation. Nevertheless, the working class was held back by Stalinism in two different forms. The parliamentary Stalinists (IU) always tried to contain strikes and demonstrations within safe reformist limits. The guerrilla-Stalinists (PCP-SL and also MRTA) also distrusted workers’ organisations and mass mobilisations. The Senderistas violently opposed unions and strikes. They wanted to subordinate the proletariat to the dictates of an elite.
The four general strikes of 1988 and the National Popular Assembly, a proto-soviet created in November 1987, were betrayed in two ways. On the one hand the labour bureaucracy and the IU opposed an indefinite general strike in favour of more moderate demands and methods. On the other hand the guerrillas tried to convince the masses that liberation would not come from their own struggles, but from supporting a petty bourgeois armed vanguard which was against the construction of autonomous workers’ soviets and militias.
Over the last decade most of the left leaders have migrated to the neo-liberal camp. The powerful IU disintegrated and its fragments are now reduced to less than one percent of the vote. Some of them ended up with Fujimori or the neo-liberal opposition. Even many guerrilla fragments, including Abimael Gonzalo’s Senderista faction, are now backing the state.
The workers’ actions on September 30 show that a new actor could change the political scene. The bourgeois opposition was trying to capitalise on the discontent against Fujimori. A ‘Democratic Forum’ was created around former Fujimori supporters. The union leaders who marched on that day form part of this broad cross-class bloc.
The Democratic Forum supports most privatisation and the payment of the foreign debt to the imperialist pirates. Many of its components are well known for their corruption and for backing the draconian anti-‘terrorist’ laws.
The banker Gustavo Mohme, national coordinator of the Democratic Forum, is also the owner of La República. He supported state repression of ‘criminal subversives’ and wants to keep revolutionary ‘infiltrators’ out of workers’ demonstrations. Caretas, the main opposition bourgeois journal, attacked the demonstrations, saying the army intentionally allowed the radicals to enter the palace with the aim of discrediting the opposition. During the demonstration some leaders of the moderate opposition tried to address the masses, but they were attacked by the militant workers.
On Sunday October 11 the municipal elections showed how unpopular Fujimori is becoming. In Lima, where one third of the 25 million Peruvians live, ‘Vamos Vecino’ (a new Fujimori front) obtained less than 30% of the vote.
The September 30 demonstrations and previous student marches have shown the way. Only direct action can stop Fujimori. Poder Obrero (Workers Power) has been very active, producing leaflets and its paper. We are agitating with thousands around the slogan, ‘Down with Fujimori’s dictatorship! General strike now!’
Poder Obrero is against the Democratic Forum and any other class-collaborationist popular front with the bourgeoisie. We are demanding a workers’ united front. We are for building rank and file coordinating committees which should have their own self-defence guards and should organise demonstrations and strikes. We are against voting for bourgeois candidates in the elections. We called for workers’ candidates in the last elections.
Against Fujimori’s autocratic constitution we call for a democratic constituent assembly. We demand the abolition of all anti-terrorist laws, the elimination of all militarised zones (under which half the population has to live) and the unconditional release of all anti-imperialist prisoners.
We are for a new party to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ revolutionary government.