The Chairman’s politics?

False flag operations are familiar tools of counter-insurgency strategy, undertaken by the state and its NGO allies, to discredit, disrupt and destroy progressive and radicals’ campaigns and movement. Even the accusations raised can have a disproportionate effect as seen in the aftermath of the arrest of the Peruvian leader Chairman Gonzalez, Abimael Guzmán. The fragmentation of the movement and its support base – domestically and internationally – were around political lines that coalesced on whether the call for a “Peace Accord” was seen as a state-sponsored hoax or a strategic call that was a rupture with the previous orientation of waging Protracted People’s War in Peru.

Figure 1 A defiant Elena Albertina Iparraguirre Revoredo, also known as Comrade Míriam, stands in prison stripes facing reporters and military in 1992

No doubt it was in the interest of the beleaguered Peruvian state to encourage the confusion and divisions within its revolutionary opponents, however that call could still be a genuine response to changed circumstances. There are well-rehearsed arguments from “brain-washing” to CIA manipulation, employed by those unwilling to accept that Guzman was the source for this strategic direction , however there did emerge those professing loyalty to the leadership of Chairman Gonzalez that mobilised politically in support of that alleged position. Less was heard of these forces in the non-Spanish speaking world as the line that it was a hoax received more support in the active international solidarity network, and rarely reported in the Left-wing media, in the absence of a solidarity network the silence descend with the desertion of the Avarkian-led supporters and disintegration of RIM. Political opponents argue they were inspired by the Right Opportunist Line within the PCP but still the campaign in support of the imprisoned Guzman, incarcerated in the maximum security prison of the naval base of Callao, on the island of San Lorenzo, off the coast of Lima, found expression within Peru through the activity of his defense team, a civil, peaceful successor movement overshadowing the PCP as its “political wing”, the Movimiento por Amnistía y Derechos Fundamentales (MOVADEF – The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights), from its initials in Spanish.

Figure 2 Members of MOVADEF hold a poster of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman during a protest in front of the Justice Palace in Lima on, July 25, 2012

Movadef denies being the political arm of the Shining Path.

Led by lawyers and Movadef’s co-founders, Manuel Fajardo and Alfredo Crespo, works for the release of the imprisoned senderistas, including the leader Abimael Guzmán. Introducing his new movement at a conference, Crespo said that it was made up of “leaders of social organizations, intellectuals, the families of jailed subversives, and artists, amongst others.” Elsewhere, Crespo described the movement as 30 percent ex-convicts, and 70 percent “young people.” He said that their political causes included the fight for labour rights, the protection of children, and freedom of expression.

Authorities have identified two organizations they suspect of being legal extensions of the Shining Path: principally (MOVADEF), a group of families of imprisoned guerrillas, and Conare, a union committee of radical teachers.

They chant slogans in support of Guzmán, saying he is a political prisoner who should be freed. They deny that terrorism existed in Peru, of around 650 still detained Movadef says they are political prisoners who fought to liberate the poor, and complain that history books side with the winners of the war.  Establish in 2008, local media claimed in 2011 MOVADEF received $179,000 from Shining Path’s Huallaga Valley cell to establish itself as a political movement by establishing 60 support committees across the country and, after organizing as a political party, obtaining registration to allow its participation in elections (El Comercio [Lima], April 11).  MOVADEF filed papers with Peru’s Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE – National Jury of Elections) seeking registration as a legitimate political party and describing its ideology as “Marxism-Leninism-Gonzalo thought.”  MOVADEF claimed to have mustered more than 350,000 signatures to support its political registration effort (Diario La Primera [Lima], January 23, 2012). The electoral authority denied the registration.

“What’s appropriate for today is a political fight without arms. We don’t think this is the right moment for an armed fight,” Alfredo Crespo, Guzman’s lawyer and a Movadef leader, arrested in the 2014 state crackdown that saw 28 leaders and other activist arrested and some charged with terrorist and drug offenses. Alfredo Crespo, also allegedly acted as Guzmán’s intermediary with Shining Path field commander Florindo Eleuterio Flores Hala (a.k.a. Camarada Artemio) before his arrest in 2012. Asked if he had sworn off violence, Crespo said: “This (unarmed) moment could last for quite a while. Besides, violence has always existed in Peru. Look at who applies violence now – the state!”

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“A key question is whether the group is in fact being used as a “front” by the Shining Path. One argument that supports this theory is a string of recent armed actions carried out by the guerrillas. On January 31, hours before Movadef renounced its effort to register as a political party, Shining Path guerrillas made an incursion into the town of Campanilla, in the region of San Martin. In an action reminiscent of the days of the conflict, although without hurting anyone, some 50 armed guerrillas arrived in trucks, rounded up the population and forced them to attend a political rally. This lasted about an hour and a half, while the guerrillas made speeches arguing for a “political solution” to the conflict.

They painted some 200 houses with the hammer and sickle, and distributed flyers around the area, calling for a ceasefire with the government and a general amnesty. Hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on February 1, armed guerrillas entered the town of Pucayacu, also in San Martin, and distributed more flyers. The next day, three more villages in the district of Campanilla were targeted, with guerrillas putting up banners calling for a general amnesty.

These actions, coinciding with the withdrawal of Movadef’s appeal, have been interpreted by some as propaganda work on behalf of the political movement. The Shining Path faction responsible is based in the Huallaga region of northern Peru, not far from where the attacks took place, and is considered to be the more ideological branch, and to be closer followers of Guzman. Peruvian analyst Jaime Antezana has argued that the incursions and the political party are both part of a new tack being taken by the guerrillas. He told RPP Noticias that the Shining Path’s new strategy was to strengthen the position of Movadef in order to promote Guzman’s “Gonzalo Thought” ideology, and try to bring about an amnesty to get him out of prison. For Antezana, the relationship between Movadef and the Shining Path is “straightforward, direct, and umbilical.” He presented documents to the Peruvian media which he said were issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (PCP-SL) in 2009, ordering the creation of a party to take part in elections, saying that “since 1993 the party has been living a new and fourth stage of the political struggle, without arms.”

https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/shining-path-political-party-opens-old-wounds-in-peru/

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Tried for the third time since his arrest in1992, this time for the 1992  Tarata car bombing in Lima in which 25 people died, Guzman’s attorney, Alfredo Crespo, said before the sentencing that Guzman believes lower-level rebels carried it out without his knowledge. On 11 September 2018, Guzman was sentenced to a second life term in prison.

Condemnation issued in the name of the PCP, reflecting support for the strategic reorientation others labelled Right Opportunist Line, continues to find expression on internet sites. The authenticity and authorship remains uncertain but the coherence of the argumentation suggests a genuine commitment to what they regard as their Chairman’s politics.

 

BACKGROUND ARTICLE : The Chairman’s Trials

 

Text & Documents

1992 OVER 150 YEARS OF THE WORLD PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

2000 FIGHT FOR THE POLITICAL SOLUTION

2000 KEEP ON FIGHTING FOR A PEACE AGREEMENT

2001 CONVENTION OF ORGANIZATIONS AND MASSES BY AN AUTHENTIC TRUTH COMMISSION

2001 Defend the Headquarters of Chairman Gonzalo

2002 DEFEND THE HISTORICAL TRANSCENDENCE OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR

2002 EVELOP THE SECOND WAVE OF THE PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT

2002 FIGHT FOR THE POLITICAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEMS ARISING FROM THE WAR

2002 LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU

2003 LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU (2)

2003 STATEMENT BY MRS ELENA IPARRAGUIRRE

2004 DEFEND THE HEAD OF PRESIDENT GONZALO!

2005 FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE POLITICAL PRISONERS

2006 I REJECT THE TERRORISM TRIALS IN PERU

2006 Interview with Dr Alfred Crespo

2007 Interview with Elena Iparraguirre

2007 Shining Path After Guzmán

2008 Letter from Mrs ELENA IPARRAGUIRE 

2016 LONG LIVE MAY FIRST

2016 ON THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION 

2016 ON THE 88TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU 

2016 TO THE PEOPLE AND THE PROLETARIAT OF PERU AND THE WORLD

2017 HOMAGE TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE HEROIC RESISTANCE!

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Previous posts of interest

To keep our red flag flying in Peru

To keep our red flag flying in Peru: 2 Chronology

To keep our red flag flying in Peru 3

To keep our red flag flying in Peru 4

The Gonzaloists are gathering  

 

 

125. Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits

It was by chance I finished reading the lives and struggles of Joan Hinton and Sid Engst on International Women’s Day. From her contribution at Los Alamos to the suburban farms of distant China in transformation, Joan’s talent and dedication shines through her life.

“Those who knew Hinton remained captivated by her. She was stubbornly orthodox, but with an exuberant laugh and unflagging vitality. At 88, she still played the violin and attended a weekly discussion group filled with food and politics. And on many mornings Hinton could be found on the farm that she and Engst tended for decades, wearing her Mao cap and checking on her dairy cows.” Maggie Jones, New York Times

In this a book based on an oral history project, the voice of Joan comes through strongly as Dao-Yuan Chou weaves the personal experiences of Joan and Sid into the fabric of developments in China before, and after liberation in 1949.

The Engst Family in Beijing, 1967 Fred Engst, Erwin Engst, Karen Engst, Joan Hinton, and Bill Engst (Photo courtesy of Bill Engst)

The author’s comments on this, the third edition of his work comments on what aspects of their rich and complicated lives might be relevant and useful rather than simply interesting , answering those who questioning the space allocated to both Joan’s and Sid’s early lives. That inclusion is important.

What is striking is not only the contrasts between their up bring in America and their subsequent lives in a developing China but the continuity of the actual people, their approach to life and perspectives on what was the right thing to do. Their ethical drive remained as strong to the end of the lives, disappointed and in disagreement with the post-Mao abandonment of the collective spirit that had sustained China in its socialist goals.

Their lives together date from 1948, when Joan Hinton, former physicist on the Manhattan Project, travelled to Shanghai to join her future husband Sid Engst, a radical-minded New England dairy farmer who had joined the Chinese Communists in their Yan’an base two years earlier. They settled, raised a family and made revolution in witnessing the transformation of China. Here the witness was also a participation.

Here is a biography that encompasses the sweep of the mass movements that punctuate twentieth century China with a targeting of the successes and errors at the grassroots as the turbulence of struggle is recounted with detail forensic observation about such episodes as how farm managers were bullied by bureaucrats into trying to meet impossible production targets during the Great Leap Forward. Their assessment of the years that follow doesn’t stray from the down-playing characterisation of lean, hungry years rather than the famine scenario of much of contemporary scholarship. Having been relocated to Beijing their detailed recollection of the faction-ridden Cultural Revolution in the chapter ‘Snake Spirits’ brings out the complexities of line struggles among the communists and sympathisers within the foreign community resident in the capital.

John Sexton’s earlier review recounts:

“In 1966 the family, now with three children, was transferred to Beijing and drawn into the whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution. Used to living alongside peasants, Joan and Sid chafed in the luxurious foreign ghetto of the Friendship Hotel. With a handful of colleagues, they authored a big-character poster, later personally endorsed by Mao Zedong, demanding that foreigners be treated as Chinese and allowed to join the struggle. Their wish was soon fulfilled only too well, when their friends David and Isabel Crook were arrested by one of the many Red Guard factions and locked up for 5 years.” (China.org.cn July 24, 2009)

Active in the ‘Bethune-Yanan Rebel Regiment’ that involved the foreign ‘experts’ working in Bejing institutions, Joan and Sid were part of September Eighth Fighting Group – for the date of Mao’s approval of their daziba – and actively involved before transferring to the Red Star Commune just outside Beijing.

History as biography is a well-established genre and the details herewithin realistically conveys the effort, frustration and joys of a life lived in pursuit of not a dream but building a future.

Dao-Yuan Chou (2019) Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits – The Lives and Struggles of Two Americans in Modern China. 3^rd edition Paris: Foreign Language Press

ISBN: 978-2-491182-02-1   Price: 8 EUR / 10 USD

 

 

Foreign Languages Press

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Joan’s brother, Bill Hinton1919-2004, another farmer and American activist, wrote some seminal rural studies still worth reading ~ Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village and later Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village, as well as Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University.

Her son, Yang Heping (Fred Engst) wrote a paper that she would have agreed with, “On the Relationship Between the Working Class and Its Party Under Socialism”, (2015) . It argues that the economic basis for the development of capitalist-roaders can be largely eliminated by abolishing “bureaucratic privileges” for Party members, and that mass organizations of the sort which developed in the Cultural Revolution can be institutionalized to criticize Party members and units in which capitalist-roaders start to develop.   PDF Format

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• Western Lives in China, the sympathetic foreigners under Mao, remains a developing subject of academic enquiry enliven by the personal contributions of the foreign community who lived through the transformation of China in the second half of the last century.  Link to East Is Read

China’s “Foreign Friends” enthusiastic international participants during the struggles of the 1930s and 40s and the ‘Red and Expert’ in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution have been the focus of studies such as:

Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreigner Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003

Brady, Anne-Marie Friend of China. The Myth of Alley Rewi, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.

Epstein, Israel My China Eye. Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist. Long River Press, 2000

Hamilton, John Maxwell, Edgar Snow: A Biography. Indiana University Press, 1988.

Beverley Hooper, Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976.  Hong Kong University Press 2016

MacKinnon, Janice and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. 1988

Porter, Edgar The People’s Doctor: George Hatem and China’s Revolution, University of Hawai Press, 1997.

Rittemberg, Sidney and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, Duke University Press, 2001

Strong, Tracy and B. Keyssar, Helene. Right in Her Soul: the Life of Anna Louise Strong. 1983

O’ Brien Neil L.O., An American Editor in Early Revolutionary China. John William Powell and the China Weekly/Monthly Review, Routledge, 2003

Wong, Jan, Red China Blues. My Long March from Mao to Now, Anchor Book, 1999.

Barlow, Tani E. Lowe Donald M., Teaching China’s Lost Generation: Foreign Experts in the PRC, China Books and Periodicals, 1987