"There Is No Other Way" An Interview with Luís Arce Borja
Fokkema, Anita
Luis Arce Boraa is the editor of El Diario, a pro-Sendero newspaper published in Lima. He was interviewed in Belgium, where he lives in exile. Are you a member of Sendero Luminosoa? Sendero...
...More than 3,660,000 did not vote...
...The same happened in China when Deng Xiao Ping rose to power after the death of President Mao...
...I don't know in what sense a war can be humanized: a war without bullets...
...If there are no bullets, there will be knives and spears...
...Even if you take away its power, its army, its state...
...Abimael Guzmin, the leader of ade PC, and have had the opportunity to study its documents...
...Now 50 million Chinese peasants live in poverty-that never occurred when Mao was in charge...
...Speak up about all the gamonal has done...
...But we ought to ask ourselves: If the PCP is and does all the bourgeois press accuses it of, how can we explain its growing support...
...My political convictions coincide with those of the PCP or, I would rather say, I can express the PCP's ideas correctly...
...The people cannot bear it any longer...
...The peasant sees justice done, for the first time in 400 years, since the time of Tdpac Amaru...
...The Peruvian legal system is incapable of punishing these crimes, so the PCP does it...
...In terms of logic, no guerrilla army can grow and develop if it kills its own people...
...It is the only way to keep the bourgeoisie from returning to power...
...Confrontations between the guerrilla forces of the PCP and combined forces of the army, the police and peasants recruited by them do occur...
...A nation destroyed...
...What we can foresee is that the violence will develop further...
...By negotiating like the guerrillas did in El Salvador...
...One-third of Peruvian families are now headed by women, and this statistic is much higher in most rural areas.' Besides assuming the primary burden for maintaining subsistence agriculture, many women are entrepreneurs or contract workers in the "informal economy," or have some income from wages but not on a regular or full-time basis...
...That is the same in every war...
...The PCP calculates that in the coming two to three years the war will escalate to the hilt, as will U.S...
...To completely destroy the old state and install a new one, under the leadership of the working class and the peasants, in alliance with the other social classes...
...Isn't there a contradiction between Fujimori's overwhelming electoral victory and your assertion that the PCP controls 80% of Peruvian territory...
...There is aclear distinction between neutrality, complicity and opposition to the revolution...
...The economic resources are being destroyed just like the Europeans did in their struggle against Hitler, as part of the military strategy to weaken the establishment...
...It is certainly true that there are executions by the PCP of elements of the army, the police, of paramilitary groups, of corrupt authorities and of activists of the United Left, which hasn't been a real Left for years...
...It's impossible to tell what the future will bring...
...And then the army comes in and kills half the village...
...The Peruvians are different frdm the Nicaraguans or the Salvadorans, because the feudal system has hardly changed since the time of Spanish domination...
...Our party, learning from the Chinese, Soviet and Eastern European experiences...
...the correct name is Communist Party of Peru, PCP...
...That is betraying your people and the blood that has been shed in40 years of struggle...
...The punishment is execution...
...Ten years ago, when the war began, the PCP said the feudal system had to be destroyed, and the feudal lords with it...
...That's how it works in Peru...
...A lot of people say that the Eastern European experience proves the failure of socialism...
...Or by handing overpowr to the imperialist bourgeoisie like the Sandinistas did...
...It seeks to influence international public opinion, to prevent the guerrillas from finding support among the peoples of the superpowers...
...How can you talk of peace when peasants hang themselves because they can't bear to go on living...
...Many poor women, therefore, tend to be skeptical about the possibilities for real change short of rebuilding social and economic life literally "from the ground up...
...But massacres of peasants only occur at the hands of the army in the areas liberated by the guerrillas...
...It does not mean the people opted for a third way...
...Or like the Peruvian MRTA that wants to negotiate about the war...
...No, there is a war going on here...
...Always...
...You have to fight ideas with ideas, and you have to fight hard...
...The masses always want peace, but in Latin America they have never had any...
...In a war with such extremely ferocious opponents, you are not going to find softer ways to punish people like the gamonales...
...You need a very intense cultural revolution...
...It said boycott as far as possible...
...I may sound like an apologist for war, but there is no way to avoid the confrontation between the Peruvian people and the U.S...
...Or by handing in your weapons in exchange for a post as health minister, like the M-19 in Colombia...
...Selective executions of United Left, police, members of paramilitary groups, government functionaries, foreign officials, yes, all that happens...
...Impossible, it doesn't achieve a thing...
...I don't mean to say that you have to murder everybody with bourgeois ideas because coming from a bourgeois system all have been influenced, we all have bourgeois tendencies...
...The rural masses in Peru have always used violent methods to punish crimes and offenses...
...To give a historical example, when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, the Western press not only said they tortured the Russian people, but even accused them of eating their children...
...But there is no real choice...
...It is not the failure of socialism but the failure of the usurpers of the people's power...
...As part of its counterinsurgency policy, the Peruvian government distorts the realities of the Peruvian guerrilla struggle...
...military intervention...
...In the second round, with two candidates, sure they voted for him...
...In such cases, it is possible that some peasants fall victim to PCP bullets, but these are a sort of paramilitaramilitary group within the army...
...But one cannot accuse the PCP of going to the villages to commit the horrible kind of killings of which the army and the police are culpable...
...Shining Path provides them with a vehicle for pursuing such a radical vision and has welcomed women's leadership in the process...
...In the last elections in Peru about 10 million Peruvians were eligible to vote...
...First, the most bloody regimes have held elections in Peru, as in the rest of Latin America...
...the bourgeoisie will continue to exist...
...What is going to be left of Peru after this war...
...But all that has failed there is a military caste, a dictatorship, a regime of state capitalism...
...Even the PCP's opponents have had to recognize that the army is using thousands of peasants as cannon-fodder...
...The point is not what will be left of Peru after the guerrilla struggle, but what the disastrous consequences of the economic policies of this government will be...
...Can we consider this neutrality...
...Therefore, it is not surprising that a lot is opment did bring massive dislocation of peasants, and peasant mobilization against the usurpation and despoliation of communal lands, forcing the government to initiate agrarian reform in the 1960s...
...They made the revolution, threw out the dictator, but the state apparatus persisted as before, and in the countryside the peasants' position with respect to the landowners remained unchanged...
...They helped bring Fujimori to power, just as they supported Alan Garcia for the past five years...
...You can count on the number of victims reaching 100,000 people in the next two years...
...ButI can very well imagine that many Peruvians are sick and tired of war and killing, and want some peace and quiet...
...And it is making progress, killing gamonales, corrupt authorities, judges, mayors, etc...
...What we can learn from Nicaragua is the importance of changing the state, violently...
...There is no alternative...
...That's why the PCP didn't push too hard for the boycott...
...Fujimori obtained 24% of the six million cast in the first round, a ridiculous amount...
...Sendero Luminoso is a pejorative term, used by the foreign and bourgeois press...
...Nevertheless, isn't it a fact that Sendero Luminoso has killed trade-unionists and left-wing politicians...
...That is impossible...
...Even though in the last elections we called for a boycott, we haven't begun to kill all the people who voted for Fujimori...
...How do you see the recent experience of socialist revolutions...
...So they came into the villages, took the gamonal, called in the population and said: "We are going to have a people's court...
...Their activities are financed by the state and by foreign powers because they all live from NGO money...
...knows it has to develop a permanent cultural revolution-a struggle between bourgeois ideas and the proletarian ideas of the masses...
...How could this guerrilla army, which started in 1980 with nothing but sticks, have come to dominate more than 80% of Peru's territory...
...Because before, if a peasant dared to go to court and denounce these crimes, he ended up in prison accused of theft or something...
...That is what ought to preoccupy the democratic press abroad...
...People have said that after the Nicaraguan experience, revolution in Latin America has become impossible...
...The real problem is what is goingto happen in case of a large-scale U.S...
...intervention...
...As in a number of other nations, the agrarian reform efforts only sharpened class divisions and accelerated political conflict in the countryside...
...Fujimori, Vargas Llosa and the United Left are all part of this folkloric tinglado [spectacle] that takes place every five years in Peru...
...The PCP recognizes that peasants can be neutral, because the progress of the revolution can be slower or faster according to circumstances...
...The Nicaraguan example only proves that once a people takes power, it has to change the state...
...Where do you draw the line between complicity with the establishment and, for example, neutrality...
...Neither the government nor the country's major union federations have offered women consistent support in any of these roles...
...And the peasants testified how he raped their daughters and killed their husbands...
...To say that the PCP murders peasants is really abig lie, and neither the bourgeois press nor the army has been able to prove it...
...That is worrisome, but how can it be avoided...
...To try to humanize the war...
...That is the way to put an end to bourgeois oppression...
...If you leave the state apparatus intact, the bourgeoisie continues to rule...
...they are accomplices in the drama the Peruvian people are living...
...I arajournalist, editor of El Diario...
...How can you have peace with millions of children dying of hunger, or with women killing their own children because they can't feed them...
...Nicaragua suffered from that mistake...
...I say that, at this very moment, the time is actually quite favorable for socialist revolution...
...What does that solve...
...While women's economic interests have become sharply differentiated from those of men in many commubeing said and written against the PCP...
...Could you clarify this at ledst apparent contradiction ? Not a single revolution has come about without having to fight against the gigantic publicity machine of the major imperialist powers and the establishment...
...I have had the privilege ofinterviewing Dr...
...interventionist forces...
...Whoever thinks that a war can be fought with rose petals is wrong...
...Executions of these elements is not like killing ignorant or innocent people...
...They have never been the democratic expression of the people, not once in the whole history of Latin America...
...But the people from the United Left are not neutral...
...it means that within the manipulative electoral system, people always have some hope that one candidate or another will change something...
...There is no other way out but the revolution...
...What for...
...But I do not consider myself an official representative of the Communist Party...
...Our perception is that Sendero is a revolutionary movement of the Peruvian people, which seems to commit indiscriminate acts of violence against that same people...
...This is how the PCP avenges the peasant, and begins to do justice...
...No, there is no such contradiction...
...Sendero Luminoso intends to put an end to such abuses...
...It has been said that it murders peasants, that it enlists peasants for guerrilla fighting at gunpoint, that the Peruvian peasant is stuck between the army and the guerrillas...
Vol. 24 • December 1990 • No. 4
