By Veronica O’Kelly y Alejandro Bodart
Following the presentation of the documentary “Hugo Blanco Río Profundo,” there has been a series of attacks against him, accusing him of being a terrorist and a murderer. We want to express our deep rejection of those attacks and greatest international solidarity with Hugo Blanco and his history of struggle.
The attacks come, of course, from those representatives of the Peruvian right who see how the defense of the environment, land, wages or equality become engines of rebellions and revolutions in the whole world. That is why they attack the heroic struggle of the Peruvian people that had Hugo Blanco as one of its most important references, leading the colossal uprising in Cuzco in the early 1960s, organizing the peasantry in defense of the right to land. A historical experience that strengthened the peasantry and the working class in their fight against landowners, forcing the bourgeoisie to implement an agrarian reform that, albeit limited, meant a conquest torn from the landowning and corporate power.
Hugo Blanco was imprisoned and sentenced to death at that time. But a great campaign of international support and solidarity, in which the historical current founded by Nahuel Moreno was a driving force, avoided this and his freedom was achieved a few years later. For many years we shared with Blanco the same path of building a revolutionary, working-class and socialist political tool, later taking diverging political directions. Today, we share the fight against capitalit environmental depredation and for the distribution of land for those who live and work on it.
Peasants, workers, women, the youth, in short, the oppressed of the entire world, are not going to stand by as capital prepares to solve its crisis with more exploitation and violence. Just as in Cuzco in the 1960s, peoples´ rebellions today are already beginning to be seen in some countries and regions. That is why bourgeois governments respond with attacks and repression with which they intend to stop these processes. Attacks on heroic deeds such as those against comrade Hugo Blanco, only reveal the terror felt by the capitalist 1% who see their profits in danger.