José Pedro Castillo Terrones, the democratically elected, legitimate president of Peru, has been ousted by the right-reactionary wing of Peru’s ruling class. President Castillo, a former union leader and school teacher who stood as the candidate of Free Peru, a Marxist party, ran on the most progressive platform in the country’s history, and beat Keiko Fujimori, leader of the right-fascist and neoliberal Popular Force party, in the 2021 elections. Since those elections, every reform put forward by President Castillo’s progressive government has been obstructed by a reactionary-right opposition bloc in the country’s Congress. This obstructionism has earned the opposition-dominated Congress a staggering 10% approval rating from an increasingly disgusted public. Initially, Castillo attempted to reach conciliation with the moderate wing of the opposition; he governed as a moderate left-wing social democrat for 18 months, despite his radically progressive election platform and the clear mandate he received from his political base in Peru’s working classes and peasantry. From the start of his presidency, Castillo lacked the necessary revolutionary infrastructure to see through his ambitious plan. The Castillo government was unable to dislodge Peru’s entrenched political establishment, characterized by right-wing neoliberalism and anti-Indigenismo racism.
Finally, on 7 December, 2022, in an attempt to purge the government of these rightist-reactionary obstructionists, President Castillo dissolved the Congress, formed a provisional government, instituted a national curfew, and called for the formation of a new, popular Constituent Assembly to draft a new, popular-democratic constitution.
President Castillo’s last-ditch effort to save Peru from another right-wing dictatorship has seemingly failed. Nevertheless, now is the hour to stand with President Castillo and denounce the right-wing Congress, the treasonous armed forces of Peru, and Peru’s colonial-capitalist oligarchy. Now is the time to stand firmly against the imperialist machinations of “our own” U.S. monopoly capitalists and their minions in “our” U.S. imperialist federal government, who interfere in the internal politics of Peru for the purpose of resubjugating and recolonizing yet another Latin American country.
Class Struggle in Peru
The territory that is now the Republic of Peru was conquered by Spain in the middle of the 16th century. This conquest expanded Spanish rule over the Americas and brought with it a caste hierarchy. This hierarchy, called casta (literally “lineage”), divided the subjects of the Spanish empire in the New World into racial categories: peninsulares, the Spanish administrators born in Spain; the criollo, or Spanish born in the so-called New World; mestizos; mulatos; indios; zambos; and negros. High positions in the government of New Spain were more or less reserved for peninsulares.
At the beginning of the 19th century, wars of independence swept through Central and South America. Peru remained loyal to the crown throughout much of this period. It was Simón Bolívar the Liberator himself who brought republican rule to Lima. In 1821, a congress of Peruvian aristocrats sent a plea to Bolívar for assistance in winning their independence. Although this congress of Spanish aristocrats would not maintain any kind of actual, institutional continuity, it is telling that even at this early stage in Peru’s formation, the decision to fight for independence from Spain was made not by the people, but by a narrow group of unelected, unrepresentative, elite officials.
The early republic was unstable, and it was replaced by a series of criollo strongmen after 1830. The criollo nobility refused to recognize Indigenous people of Peru as citizens until the 1860s. During the 19th century, under the Monroe Doctrine set forth in the 1820s, the U.S. consolidated its imperial hegemony over the Americas, systematically driving out its Western European rivals. By the early 20th century, the Peruvian planters and landowners, supplied and financed by the U.S. Empire, ruled the country in an uneasy truce with the powerful Peruvian military.
In 1895 the Partido Civilista, planter-aristocrats opposed to military rule, established the so-called “aristocratic republic.” Ostensibly liberal — that is, inspired by Enlightenment values — strict property and literacy requirements effectively meant that essentially only criollo landowners could vote. During the late 19th and early 20th century, these powerful criollo families developed plantation agriculture along the country’s coasts and their Partido Civilista dominated the presidency; planters served in the cabinet, the senate, and the chamber of deputies. Almost every sugar and cotton planter occupied some political position. The planters brought 17,000 Japanese workers into the country from 1898-1928 to work their plantations and increase sugar production. Even though the aristocratic republic saw the rise of very powerful pre-capitalist plantation and mine owners, the mining industry, plantation agriculture, and other areas of the Peruvian economy in the early 20th century were heavily financed by foreign, primarily British, capital.
In 1920, a progressive constitution was adopted and the old planter “aristocratic” families fell from their stronghold. Plantation agriculture had declined, the price of sugar on the world market collapsed in 1921, and growing professional, artisan, and capitalist classes displaced the largely unorganized semi-feudal planters of the coast. President Augusto B. Leguía courted these new class-elements which were primarily focused in the country’s cities. He began a program of public works and infrastructure improvement that included new streets, sewers, and public buildings in Lima. Rural infrastructure was expanded through a forced-labor system that drafted indios, Indigenous, labor. In order to finance this development, Leguía borrowed freely from the U.S. and other outside capital.
In 1924, reform leaders in Mexico, who had been forced out by Leguía’s political repression, founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a Pan-Americanist, anti-imperialist, pro-Indigenous political party. In 1928, the Peruvian Communist Party was founded, in part by José Carlos Mariátegui, who was himself a former member of APRA. In 1929, the worldwide economic crisis and the beginning of the Great Depression destabilized the Leguía government and undermined its base among the urban capitalists.
Leguía’s government could not weather the storm. In 1930, the military, which had been so powerful during the 19th century, again took action. A military junta removed Leguía and the presidency then passed from military figure to military figure until the so-called Primavera Democrática, the Democratic Spring, of 1939. A general election was held on 22 October, 1939 and the victor, Manuel Prado Ugarteche, was elected by a huge margin.
From 1939-1968, something approaching a liberal-democratic republic governed in Peru, although the occasional interference of the armed forces would continue throughout the 20th century. During the latter half of the 1960s, the Peruvian military intervened yet again, and the long-antagonistic relationship between the military and APRA became more hostile as new revolutionary Communist forces sprang up in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, including the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which launched an open insurrection in the middle-60s. The military, by and large under continuous leadership (unlike the civilian government) began a long campaign of suppressing the various Communist guerilla movements.
Operation Condor and the Shining Path
In 1968, the U.S.-friendly capitalist regime was again toppled by the Peruvian Army, which installed itself as a military dictatorship. To forestall a revolution from below, the Peruvian armed forces instituted what they called a “revolution from above.” The military enacted a sweeping agrarian land reform project that redistributed farmlands from the wealthiest families in Peru and helped alleviate the country’s worst land-poverty. The army nationalized whole industries, and placed the economy under the control of the Peruvian working people.
The very next year, 1969, the Peruvian Communist Party – Red Flag (Bandera Rosa), which had itself split from the original Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), split again. The splitting faction, led by Abimael Guzmán, founded the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Bandera Rosa had split with the PCP over which “camp” — that of the Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China — to follow during the Sino-Soviet Split. In turn, Sendero Luminoso split from Bandera Rosa because of a disagreement over tactics. Whereas the majority of Bandera Rosa believed it would be necessary to remain a mostly legal party, and that direct war with the Peruvian state was out of the question, Guzmán and his followers claimed that only an immediate, years-long, low-scale, violent insurrection could free Peru from capitalism; this, despite the fact that it was capitalist provocateurs who most loudly advocated for open war and terrorism, and despite the near-century of evidence proving the ineffectiveness of direct confrontations with the Peruvian state. In the ten years from 1969 to 1979, Sendero Luminoso built a strong base within student organizations and recruited almost exclusively from among radicalized university students; its central leadership included several highly-placed university professors, Guzmán among them. In this it was typical of “Maoist” parties of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the Western imperialist world, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the Maoist Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1980, when the party turned away from mass organizing toward open warfare with the Peruvian state, its roots among university students would wither.
In 1975, an official with close ties to Yankee capitalists, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, became the military’s new leader. Just like that, the military dictatorship became yet another puppet-regime for Yankee capital. Because the dictatorship was anti-democratic, it lacked strong roots among the people; even though it was widely popular, it had few defenses against usurpation from within. An official like Bermúdez was thus able to simply step into office and retool the state apparatus built up by his predecessor. The Bermúdez regime brought the Peruvian government into the fold of Yankee imperialism, joining the U.S.-designed and financed Operation Condor, a continent-wide campaign of political repression and anti-Indigenous, anti-labor, anti-Communist state terror that suffocated the oppressed of Latin America during the 1970s and 80s.
In 1980, the military government caved to mass pressure, and relinquished power, permitting elections for the first time in decades. APRA, which had led the campaign for democracy and had earned itself mass support from the common people of Peru, won the 1980 elections and formed the new government. Peru began its slow and still-incomplete transition to a semi-democratic republic under a liberal constitution.
At the same time, in 1980, Sendero Luminoso, having amassed about 500 members, abandoned its base in the university campuses, and launched its doomed insurrection against the Peruvian state, which it called a “protracted people’s war,” after the military strategy of the Communist Party of China during the Chinese revolution. In truth, Sendero Luminoso never earned the widespread support of the people — the key to the Chinese Communists’ success. Instead, Sendero Luminoso fought not only against the Peruvian state, but also against everyone, from other Communists to peasant villages, who did not join their crusade. It attacked the new 1980 elections as illegitimate, and did the same following the APRA’s 1985 electoral victory; it branded the APRA “revisionist” and the APRA-led government its enemy. When Sendero Luminoso militants attempted to establish “base areas” in the Peruvian countryside, the party was met with stiff resistance from the peasantry, who were largely against its insurrection. Sendero Luminoso members resorted to acts of terrorism, massacres, and brutal methods of execution against the peasants in villages that resisted its occupation. Indigenous communities and leaders in the Peruvian countryside were similarly terrorized by Shining Path militants. Although Guzmán and his clique called themselves “Maoists,” there was little in their tactics that Mao would recognize; they did not serve the people, they did not build popular workers’ and peasants’ councils, they did not bring literacy to the countryside, they did not redistribute the land, and they did not listen to criticism from the masses. Rather, they told the people that the time had come for warfare, and rather than attempt to prove themselves as revolutionaries and win over the poor masses of Peru, they butchered individuals and whole communities who objected to their methods. Other Peruvian Communists have characterized the Shining Path’s activities as similar to those of the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Shining Path’s anti-union, anti-campesino and anti-Indigenous terrorism drove the poor masses of Peru not only from their faction, but from Communism as a project; every Communist faction in Peru was now forced to overcome the people’s widespread fear and distrust. This dangerously weakened the left-wing political alliances that had so often triumphed over even the most violent right-wing repression throughout the early 20th century, and strengthened the right-wing political camp representing Peru’s capitalist and landlord oligarchy. The right-wing parties soon clawed back their power.
Fujimori
In 1990, APRA was defeated by the far-right presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori, who ran on an extreme right-wing platform of neoliberalism, anti-Indigenous racism, and militarism. These politics, which came to be known as Fujimorismo, were cut from the same cloth as those of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime in Chile.
Pinochet came to power in a 1973 military coup, in which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, relatively moderate Marxist president, was murdered; thousands of Chilean civilians were tortured, murdered, and disappeared by the Pinochet military junta. Chile under Pinochet was used as a testing grounds for the model of economic policy known as neoliberalism — a model developed in the halls of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, which centered on the sweeping privatization and austerity, which sought to increase the capitalists’ profit rates by gutting the welfare state and depriving workers of basic rights to assembly and organization. As Chile descended into autocracy, its poorest citizens suffered ever deepening inequalities and worsening poverty. The damage done by the Pinochet regime can still be observed in Chilean society, even three decades after the country’s transition back to democracy.
Fujimori was little more than a puppet of Western capital. His government received a $715 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development. The neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto, who received money from the notorious CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, became Fujimori’s chief economic advisor, his “personal representative,” and was often referred to as the “informal president.” De Soto helped institute “Fujishock” — the privatization of 250 industries that had been nationalized by the revolutionary military dictatorship, the devaluation of the country’s currency by 200%, causing nearly half the country to drop below the poverty line, the lifting of price regulations, a 300% tax increase, and the sale of large sections of the country’s economy directly to U.S. corporations. De Soto advocated for the wholesale collapse of Peru’s society to rid it of the “dead weight” of the poor.
To enact this horrific plan, Fujimori used his powers to dissolve the Congress, suspended the constitution and replaced it with one of his design, and ruled as a dictator from 1990 until 2000. The Fujimorists, led by his daughter Keiko, now dominate the Congress.
The character of the Peruvian Congress has not fundamentally changed since the time of the aristocratic republic. The old colonial planter-aristocracy has evolved into the modern-day classes of industrial capitalists and agricultural landlords. The dictatorship that once ruled Peru, a dictatorship of the old aristocracy, has transformed over the last two centuries into a dictatorship of U.S.-backed urban capitalists and rural landlords — but an assembly for the class-dictatorship of the oppressors, the Congress still remains.
Peru in 2020
Peruvian society has sharp class divides which map to the old Spanish racial stratification. Although the poverty rate has fallen since the days of Fujimori (down to a low of 20% in 2019), by 2020 it was on the rise again and has, in 2022, reached 25%. The urban elite, Peru’s comprador bourgeoisie, live almost entirely in Lima, and comprise roughly 3% of the total population. These capitalists are overwhelmingly white in a country where 60% of the population is Mestizo and 26% Indigenous. As opposed to the general poverty rate, the poverty rate of those whose mother’s tongue is Quechua, Aymara, or any other native language is at least 70%. White wage earners in Peru earn nearly 2.5 times the average wages of other national groups.
The cities also host petit-bourgeois professionals and domestic servants. There is a substantial campesino and agricultural worker population in the rural areas, and a large class of proletarian workers employed in extractive and manufacturing industries.
With the caveat that some of this information is now out of date, the agricultural labor force of Peru is 6% of the labor force; 0.5% employed in mining; 12.6% in manufacturing; 5% in construction; 26% in finance; 5% as domestic servants; and 44% in various other “services.” This breakdown is tellingly inexact — we do not know, for instance, anything about the informal economy of unreported work that thrives in the cities, nor can we discover the class-composition of the “services” encompassed by that broad term.
Peru is the world’s second-largest producer of copper, zinc, and silver and Latin America’s second-largest producer of gold. It is among the primary mineral-producing countries in the world. This wealth is siphoned off by the imperialist Euro-American bourgeoisie, who own the largest mining companies in Peru — Dynacor for instance, by far and away the largest mining concern in Peru, is a Canadian company. Its shareholders are Canadian, French, and American.
The Fujimori dictatorship established the so-called “Lima Consensus” to open the country to foreign capital and break the revolutionary national policies of the APRA. The Lima Consensus was cribbed by the Fujimori regime from the same playbook the CIA handed Augustin Pinochet thirty years earlier: extreme market deregulation, privatization of all industries, no or very low social spending, the invasion of Indigenous territories by mining and logging companies, and the slaughter of oil protestors in the Amazon.
In 2020, Peru was in the hands of the neoliberal comprador elite. They administered Peru for the benefit of their class and their Euro-American allies, having crushed the resistance of Indigenous groups, APRA, Communist guerillas, and other left-wing groups. The country’s Congress, which is its legislative body, has been more or less continuously held by right-fascist parties in alliance with Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori’s daughter), the leader of the fascist Popular Force.
Victory of the Left in the 2021 Elections
The 2021 Peruvian election saw Marxists, Social Democrats, and those fighting for Indigenous rights make gains in the Congress as the social base for Fujimorismo degraded. For two decades, the poorest of Peru have suffered under the Fujishock doctrine; despite Sendero Luminoso’s alienation of the campesinos and workers, the continuous assault on the laboring masses of Peru by the neoliberal comprador elite of Lima has seen a broad resurgence in left alliances across the country.
Pedro Castillo was a campesino who fought against Sendero Luminoso and led a series of teacher’s strikes for wages and improvement of conditions. He entered the presidential election under the Free Peru ticket. He has since met publicly with the Sendero Luminoso representatives from MOVADEF, their United Front organization. As Castillo won the presidential election (facing off against arch-fascist Keiko Fujimori in the second round), left-wing parties gained traction in the Congress for the first time in decades.
Free Peru won 37 seats, up from zero; Together for Peru won 5 seats up from zero. Still, the fascist and right-liberal parties retained the vast majority of Congress seats. Out of 130 seats, Popular Force held 24, Popular Renewal 13, and Popular Action 16. Liberal-reformists like Popular Action have historically aligned with the shifting Fujimorist majorities.
Castillo’s victory over Fujimori was narrow — a mere 44,000 votes. Since his accession to the presidency, certain sects of the U.S. and Western Marxist movement have denounced President Castillo as a social imperialist and called for intensified war in the countryside against the state. Nevertheless, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, AMLO of Mexico, Luis Arce of Bolivia, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Indigenous farmers organization CODECA of Guatemala, and numerous other left anti-capitalists have voiced their support for Pedro Castillo and denounced the Congressional coup regime of 7 December.
“Moral Incapacity” and the Peruvian Fascists
The traditionally aristocratic Congress of Peru has the constitutional power to recall its president — a power it reserves to prevent the kinds of national-left revolutionary dictatorships like that which held the country in the mid-1960s. The clause under which the Congress can recall the Peruvian president is in the case of “physical or moral incapacity” — a clear cipher, a transparent phrase designed to permit the removal of any moderately left-wing president who threatens the U.S.-comprador axis.
President Castillo, immediately upon accession, was battered by international outrage. While the Yankee-imperialist mouthpiece, the New York Times, hailed him as the “clearest repudiation of the country’s establishment,” the election triggered mass capital flight out of Peru. Capitalist credit-rating agency Fitch penalized Peru with a credit rating downgrade in response to the election.
The comprador right and their hardened fascist core immediately began preparations to combat Castillo. For his part, Castillo came out fighting: he appointed former National Liberation Army (ELN) fighter Héctor Béjar as his Foreign Minister. Béjar was immediately set upon by the Peruvian media and attacked for his statements that “the Shining Path was trained by the CIA.” The Congress began the process of launching a show-trial to impeach Béjar for his part in the ELN, casting him as a criminal. Béjar was asked to resign 19 days after the government was inaugurated to prevent him from speaking to the Congress and presenting a strong case for the working class and campesinos in Peru.
Labor Minister Iber Maraví was accused of having ties to the Shining Path and censured by the Congress. Keiko Fujimori attacked the president as the head of a “terrorist government.” Rather than permit Maraví and the rest of his government to be subject to increasing attacks from the ultra-right Congress, Castillo dissolved his cabinet.
On 6 October, 2021, in a misguided attempt to protect the fragile Free Peru presidency, Castillo appointed Mirtha Vásquez Prime Minister and a host of centrists and rightists into his cabinet. Free Peru itself began to support action against President Castillo as he ran to the right to avoid the threat of a confrontation with the Congress. On 20 November, 2021, Popular Force, Go on Country, and Popular Renewal attempted the first of three impeachments, but lacked the 87 votes needed to oust Castillo and reinstate a right-wing terror government. Right-wing violence has been rising as the ultra-rightists struggle to rid themselves of Castillo. The formation of La Resistencia is a direct response to the election; this paramilitary organization has threatened and harassed members of the Castillo administration and attacked both civilians and government officials.
Despite his attempt at avoiding the sword of the ultra-right Congress, Castillo and his supporters still struck at their economic base: On 20 November, for instance, the Castillo government refused to extend the operations of four mines in Ayacucho. On 3 November, the Castillo government began a land reform plan that, although it would not redistribute the land itself, would put an end to the “bosses and the landowners… eat[ing] from the sweat of the poor and the peasants.”
Twice before, the ultra-right compradors and fascists in the Congress have attempted to impeach Pedro Castillo under the “moral incapacity” clause. The Castillo government’s moderation toward the right actually left it more vulnerable to the third and final attempt at impeachment: isolated from its true and natural allies on the left, he was isolated and vulnerable to this last thrust. Rather than permit the fascist-dominated Congress to go forward with its plan, Castillo reversed a year of capitulationist backpedaling and made use of a Fujimori-era presidential power to dissolve the Congress itself. On 7 December, 2022, using legal powers of the president, he enacted a curfew, established an emergency government, and called for a Constituent Assembly to replace the Pinochet-like Fujimorist constitution.
Many of Castillo’s compromise rightist and centrist ministers resigned in protest. His rightist Vice President was sworn in the next day. Perhaps predictably, the Congress refused to be dissolved. The right across Peru has rallied together and, in a blatantly illegal maneuver, has removed President Castillo from office and placed him under arrest.
Power to the Pro-Castillo Forces
Immediately following the Congressional coup to oust Castillo, the country erupted in protest. Each day following the coup, protests of thousands to tens-of-thousands have rocked the country. On 14 December, Dina Boluarte, Castillo’s renegade vice president and current illegitimate coup-president of the country, declared a national state of emergency. The coup government has stripped democratic rights from the people of Peru: the rights to refuse troop quartering, freedom of movement, assembly, and personal freedom and security have all been suspended. On 15 December, the Peruvian Armed Forces opened fire on protestors in Ayacucho, killing 8 and injuring 52.
Even the Yankee-imperialist newswire Reuters reports that “Peru’s ‘forgotten people’ rage against political elite after Castillo arrest.” Despite his vacillating, Castillo represents the hopes of the racialized lower classes, the campesinos, the industrial workers, the seasonal workers, and the Inidgenous peoples fighting the Congress and the blood-soaked U.S., British, and French companies encroaching on their ancestral territories. Peru is now the focus of a continent-wide Pan-American struggle against European exploitation. The protests carry banners and placards that denounce Dina Boluarte, the traitor-minister, as an assassin, her hands dipped in the blood of Castillo and of the people.
From his cell, President Castillo wrote “I was chosen by the forgotten men and women of deep Peru, by the dispossessed who have been neglected for over 200 years.” The people have no faith in their ultra-right Congress, dominated by the heirs of Fujimori and Pinochet. The people have no faith in the courts of Peru, and only recently has their faith in the possibility of the great equalizing revolution been restored after decades of disillusion and abuse at the hands of certain so-called Communists behaving little better than the CIA’s own death squads. Although Castillo has been far from steadfast, he is now standing with his people, against the abuses of the racialized caste system inherited from the Spanish; Castillo stands with the people, against the capitalist exploiters. We, too, stand with the people of Peru!
We call for justice for the people of Peru, and death to her assassins; we call for the restoration of the rightfully-elected president of the country, and the immediate dissolution of the rebel Congress! Only in solidarity with the people can reform of the criminal abuses, those installed by the United States Empire and its puppet regimes, be purged from the government of Peru.
