PERU A Self-Critical Farewell
Galindo, Alberto Flores
Historian Alberto Flores Galindo, one of Peru's most gifted left intellectuals, died of cancer in March of last year at age 40. His work on the pre-Columbian and colonial past...
...I suspect that we do not have an unlimited amount of time...
...But if we aspire to a future, now more than ever we have to overcome our fear of creativity, to recover the utopian dimension of socialism...
...This happened in a "democratic" country, with silence from the Right but also inaction from the Left...
...Now, liberal rhetoric is once again directed against traditional forms of organization, using instruments and possibilities unavailable before today...
...The same people who called themselves leftists...
...Socialism has been dealt a blow in other countries, but here it could still have a future, if we are capable of rethinking it, of imagining new scenarios...
...On the one hand, we have the Right, represented by FREDEMO, an apparently homogeneous front made up of diverse and often competing interests...
...Many thanks to all my friends and, of course, above all to those who disagree with me...
...still others sent words of encouragement...
...For the moment...
...Some believe that the formulas are already there, just waiting to be applied...
...The fact is that we intellectuals have been quite numerous, but we have not been very creative...
...Thanks to my friends, I was able to travel for two months of treatment at Presbyterian Hospital in New York...
...All this has forced me to put aside my habitual pessimism, to discover the power of solidarity...
...A socialism built on new foundations, one that recognizes the dreams, hopes and desires of the people...
...The people I'm referring to are all my friends...
...And the rest remain silent...
...His dedication to scholarship was as uncompromising as his insistence on making history accessible to a wide audience, a commitment to the future as well as the past...
...Hopefully, they will stop admiring and respecting us so much, and will take responsibility for what we have not done...
...In another part of the city, marches and aggressive street confrontations have become more frequent and beg urgent solutions...
...the system seems to relish making things as difficult as possible...
...Critical Thinking and Outrage Although many of my friends no longer think the way they used to, I continue to believe that the ideals which gave rise to socialism are still valid: NACLAREPORTONTHEAMERICAS 8justice, freedom, humanity...
...Help came from Spain, France, England, Germany and the United States, making me feel not only Peruvian, but a citizen of the world...
...I don't exclude myself from this...
...Thanks to foundations and research centers, I must admit we have done quite well...
...Between 1980 and August 1989, 17,000 Peruvians met violent deaths...
...Intellectuals have a role to play...
...Between the two extremes we have the United Left...
...This is perhaps impossible without breaking with those leftists who are overly eager for power and barely interested in what's really happening around them...
...Many of us have grown old before our time...
...we just have to find new ways to open them...
...Capitalism, on the otherhand, has been expanding for several VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 5 (FEBRUARY i99i) 9 VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 5 (FEBRUARY 1991) 9centuries...
...no one became outraged...
...I hope that the next generation will recover what we have lost: the ability to feel outrage...
...Then, we have Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA, one resorting to criminal actions, and the other lacking creativity and without a social agenda...
...No one dares to say that many people are being murdered, that there are innocent victims executed by the forces of repression...
...others just pocket change...
...Moreover, we have our children...
...Property owners, workers, the unemployed, peasants-all had names and faces, though we'll never know them...
...Peru's political spectrum can be divided into three parts...
...We face, then, not only economic challenges, but ethical demands...
...A socialism with room for these needs...
...Capitalism does not need that Andean world, knows nothing about it, and would just as soon destroy it...
...It has since degenerated into fanaticism, sectarianism and criminality...
...Too many of us ended up as spectators...
...Many people stepped forward...
...The idea is not to look for yet another formula, but to create one for ourselves, to persist with every bit of our imagination...
...I have no intention of setting myself up as an example of anything...
...The creative challenge is enormous...
...Here, things have taken a different course...
...You can imagine how expensive it all was...
...Rising to the occasion will not be easy, but it is possible...
...But this "Right" is still a heterogenous mix of individuals with private interests, often heavily dependent on connections abroad...
...But to prevent it we must propose an alternative...
...Young people today do not think and act the way we did twenty years ago...
...The Left has not managed to meet this challenge...
...We heard of countless incidents like the one in Molinos, where the armed forces took no prisoners and left no wounded...
...Contrary to what many suppose, Arguedas' book does not refer to local problems, but to changing society as a whole...
...What happened to the Left occurred without discussion or debate, much less introspection...
...The Right is advancing on all fronts, trying to stay prepared militarily while maintaining the illusion of a new discourse-a cynical one really, one which masks countless deaths...
...Socialism came to power unexpectedly in 1917, a mere 70 years ago, in one of the most unlikely places imaginable...
...Can we do it...
...Elements that must be built on, but not by middle class professionals...
...Quite the opposite...
...That extremely radical sector arose first, and, though it started out small, it managed to survive and grow...
...But the poor and working classes think...
...We have to find new paths, lose our fear of the future, renovate the way we think and act...
...iQue buenos amigos...
...We have not been able to offer our country the possibility of a new Marxism...
...Some move toward the Right or toward APRA [the social democratic Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana...
...But friends are a different story...
...How horrible...
...Friends watched over me during my stay in the hospital...
...We have also become accustomed to the crimes of the other side...
...Since the sixteenth century, the excluded and embattled Andean cultures have managed to resist, change and continue...
...In this final statement, an open letterwritten afew weeks before hisdeath, "Tito" Flores projects a vision that is critical, yetoptimistic: There is afuture for socialism, but it means breaking the molds and beginning again, perhaps with something as simple as solidarity among friends...
...Some on the Left imagined that the votes of the poor belonged to them automatically...
...the rest made the bureaucratic rounds and, idiotically, so did we...
...What will cost us most dearly, however, is to have separated morality from culture...
...Some gave a lot of money...
...But I lament the distance that exists now between intellectual and political activism...
...They helped me to travel, get medical attention, and confront this ordeal...
...But the Left is not homogenous either...
...It is not inevitable that tradition be destroyed...
...Later, I had to return for another week...
...And, naturally, when you rallied to my defense, you weren't interested in knowing what position I had taken on culture or politics...
...The issue is posed only as a choice between advocating violence and opting for a legal route...
...To have lived forty years in this country is to have made too many deals...
...Perhaps I exaggerate, but we too should be the object of some critical thinking...
...Yet no one protested...
...We have to look at the issue of power, and not only with regard to production and markets and such, but where power lies, who holds it and how we can attain it...
...Friendship here was notjust an abstraction...
...On the other extreme, there are the impoverished intellectuals, many of them from the provinces, who must be filled with resentment and even hatred...
...This means going against the tide, opposing those who worship death and those who think only of repeating the recipes of other countries...
...Its members have even taken to eliminating the leaders of grassroots organizations,just like the tactics of the Right...
...Dear friends, On February 3, 1989, I was struck down unexpectedly by a rare type of cancer, a multiform glioblastoma on the left side of the brain, which required treatment outside of Peru...
...One cannot say this in public without transgressing the "democratic order...
...There is a need for an alternative...
...Close to them, there is a smaller sector that wants to be revolutionary, not criminal, that wants to undo structures, not reform them, that has begun to face the problem of constructing an original socialism...
...Some of our paperwork got lost...
...The writer and novelist Jos6 Maria Arguedas warned us of this...
...We have to make room for new kinds of leaders, for other social sectors and for the young...
...We have become domesticated...
...Un abrazo...
...Twenty years have passed since his death and the task for socialists remains keeping Andean tradition from being destroyed...
...We're too modern, incapable of pulling together a movement...
...New Kinds of Leaders In every revolution an ultra-radical sector turns up at the last minute...
...We must question the liberal line...
...They stood by my wife and helped take care of my sons...
...At the end of the eighteenth century, the indigenous Andean aristocracy was attacked and exterminated, but the peasant world endured...
...Again, I insist that while socialism has been destroyed in many other Latin American countries, here it remains a force to be reckoned with...
...The doors to socialism are not permanently closed...
...New voices will appear...
...The end will come in a few weeks, more or less...
...for those solutions...
...This is an ancient country...
...This "official" Left, that participates in elections and the traditional routes to power, has isolated itself from the popular movement and is ethnically and culturally removed from the majority of the population...
...But if it is not said, things will get worse...
...This, of course, is not unusual...
...His work on the pre-Columbian and colonial past (especially Buscando un Inca) and his critical appraisal of Peruvian Marxism (La agonfa de Maridtegui) had enormous influence on both the study ofhistory in his country and the course of the Peruvian Left...
...We must not limit our horizons of thought...
...But successful revolutions always have been, and always will be, unique...
...Are we looking While Peru sinks into poverty and violence, the Left has been domesticated...
...There are many other cases like this one...
...I would have liked to thank everyone personally...
...The twentieth century brought new confrontations: in the 1920s, the 1960s, and again today...
...On the contrary, this is in part an autobiography...
...Young people can do this...
...Nor is it a beaten path...
...We have become accustomed to living like this...
...In spite of the good will of some public officials, we got only promises from the Peruvian social security agency...
...Socialism is the product of another morality, other values...
...Socialism in Peru is a difficult encounter between the past and the future...
...What stands out is the display of support which still sustains my treatment and my family, which accompanies my wife Cecilia and my sons Carlos and Miguel at the most difficult moments...
...Disagreeing is just another way of coming together...
...It has no one program...
...It doesn't matter that the cancer is incurable...
...Intellectuals and politicians alike ignore the past, history, who they have been...
...Nearly every day for months, we had to show up at their offices to track down the right forms...
...I lost...
...In a country like Peru, the revolution calls not only for reforms, but for the formation of a new type of society...
...Nevertheless, those well-mannered leftists who spend more time at receptions than at debates, have trimmed their sails to the breeze...
...To have spent forty years in this country is to have made too many deals, compromises, silences, retreats...
...Apparently, the majority wants to remain doggedly in the center, insisting on reforms...
...Of the 62 dead rebels, the MRTA [Movimiento Revolucionario T6pac Amaru] recognized only 42 as their combatants...
...We must face the consequences of our own incorporation into the establishment...
...Out of a Left that a few years ago considered itself completely revolutionary, some groups have been breaking away and redefining themselves...
...We're used to reciting and repeating, to quoting correctly...
...some of us even became consumed by the most vulgar economic determinism...
...A fresh and solid revolutionary alternative doesn't yet exist, but the elements are there...
...At a time when everything seems to be falling apart in Peru, this warmth and solidarity showed me other facets of my country...
...A third, fourth, fifth way...
...Discussion has begun on the role of campesinos in this process, not as folklore, but as protagonists...
...Socialism is notjust one path...
...Indeed, as the country sinks ever more deeply into poverty, many of us on the Left have seen our living conditions improve...
...Things have changed...
...What Arguedas proposed in his novel El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo was not a return to the past, but the construction of a new society...
...Some came to visit...
...We lost...
...The Poor Do Not Belong to the Left In Peru, we envision only one route to communism, ignoring those that were defeated but were perhaps worthy of discussion...
...I'm afraid that our generation is held in too much esteem by a certain sector of middle-class youth...
...they do not give blank checks...
...Years later, after the Second World War, it spread to other continents, Asia and Africa...
...All this should not be taken as criticism by someone who imagines himself above the fray...
...Some blame must also be placed on those who have been too caught up in short-term battles, sectarian politics, or petty power struggles...
...We have to rediscover the most distant traditions, but to do so we will have to think in terms of the future...
...These were executions...
...We must not accept the armed society which the military wishes to impose...
...Admittedly, there is not much here that we should hold out as a model for the young...
...For the most part we learned to accommodate ourselves to authoritarianism and murder...
...We have to return to the essence of critical thinking, even when this is at odds with making ourselves acceptable or finding a profitable niche...
...The degradation and destruction to which capitalism dooms us is still evident, but so is our refusal to become a replica of a North American suburb...
...That's one way to grow stale...
...The majority of our intellectuals and far too many leftist political leaders, myself included, became immune to indignation...
...My style is always aggressive, but that shouldn't conceal the affection and gratitude I feel toward all of you, particularly toward those with whom I've disagreed the most...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 5
