Hugo Blanco Galdós

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hugo Blanco Galdós, 2019

Hugo Blanco Galdós (born November 5, 1934 in Cuzco ) is a Peruvian peasant and union leader , Trotskyist- oriented politician, former guerrilla fighter and political author. He played a leading role in the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) in land redistribution in the Andes.

Life

Hugo Blanco grew up in the Quechua village of Huanoquite ( Paruro Province , Cuzco Department ), bilingual with Spanish and Quechua . In his childhood he saw the hacendado brand a Peón on the buttocks with red-hot iron. He first came into contact with an indigenous peasant leader when he was ten .

Hugo Blanco studied in Cuzco at the Colegio Nacional de Ciencias and from 1954 in La Plata in Argentina agriculture. Here he came into contact with Trotskyism and took part in the resistance against the military coup against the government of Juan Perón in 1955 .

After his return to Peru, he joined the Labor Revolutionary Party ( Partido Obrero Revolucionario , POR) in Lima and took part in demonstrations during a visit by US Vice President Richard Nixon in 1958 . Due to increasing repression, the POR soon moved its headquarters to Cuzco.

As a representative of the newspaper sellers union (Sindicato Único de Vendedores de Periódicos) Blanco became a member of the regional union federation of Cuzco (Federación Departamental de Trabajadores del Cusco). He later joined the agricultural workers 'union in Chaupimayo (Sindicato de Campesinos de Chaupimayo) in the province of La Convención, as its delegate in March 1961 he co-founded the regional farmers' association of Cusco (Federación Departamental de Campesinos del Cusco) and was a member of the assembly of Peruvian farmers' association Confederación Campesina del Perú was elected.

In return for being allowed to cultivate a piece of land, the indigenous farmers had to work for the hacendado without pay on the haciendas. Blanco promoted the establishment of agricultural workers' unions. In 1962 the POR united with parts of the Peruvian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Peruano, PCP) and the Agrarian Revolutionary Party (Partido Agrario Revolucionario) to form the front of the Revolutionary Left (Frente de Izquierda Revolucionaria, FIR). The farmers in La Convención demanded an end to human rights violations and then began in 1962 to reclaim their lands by occupying land under the slogan Tierra o muerte (“Land or Death”). While no more work was done for the big landowner during the peasants' strike, the peasants worked on their own, occupied plots. De facto, under the leadership of the FIR, this led to the first regionally limited land reform in the history of Peru, in which the occupied lands were transferred back to the village communities. To finance the peasant movement, FIR fighters attacked a bank branch of the Banco de Crédito in Lima. The government took police action against the farmers and arrested FIR activists, but was unable to prevent the Hacendados from being driven out. Blanco, who played a leading role in the farmers 'actions, was elected general secretary of the farmers' association of the province of La Convención in 1962. President Manuel Prado y Ugarteche decreed the abolition of the payment of rent through labor, but this only partially fulfilled the demands of the farmers.

General Ricardo Pérez Godoy , who came to power in a military coup in July 1962 , decided to militarily suppress the peasant movement of Cusco, but at the same time passed a land reform law for the provinces of La Convención and Lares at the end of 1962 , which legalized the land grabbing of the peasants. Under the leadership of Hugo Blanco, farmers in Chaupimayo armed themselves and formed the guerrilla unit Brigada Remigio Huamán (named after a farmer who was shot by the police), but the group was given support by the land reform and the associated fulfillment of the farmers' demands in the region withdrawn. In May 1963 the group was broken up and Blanco was imprisoned. He was tried in a military court in Arequipa and charged with treason against the fatherland. He declined an offer of deportation on condition that he remained silent. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but the prosecution, which requested the death penalty , appealed. Worldwide supporters, including Amnesty International Switzerland, launched an international campaign against an impending death sentence, in which Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir played an important role. After three years of pre-trial detention, Hugo Blanco was finally sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1966 and taken to the prison island of El Frontón . There he wrote his book Tierra o Muerte ("Land or Death").

The reform-minded General Juan Velasco Alvarado , who came to power through a coup in 1968 , offered Hugo Blanco his freedom on the condition that he would help implement the land reform law passed by his government in 1969 for all of Peru . Other peasant leaders imprisoned up to then did so. Hugo Blanco refused, however, accusing the government that the estates of the expropriated landowners were not subordinated to the farming communities, but to the state bureaucracy. Nevertheless, Hugo Blanco was released in 1970 but deported to Mexico in 1971 because of his opposition . Here he published his book Tierra o Muerte in 1971. He moved on to Argentina, where he was imprisoned under the military government and then expelled to Chile . Under the government of the Unidad Popular under Salvador Allende, Blanco worked in the organization of the industrial belts (Cordones Industriales). After the putsch by Augusto Pinochet , the Swedish ambassador Harald Edelstam took him in and made political asylum possible for him in Sweden . Here he worked for some time at the Swedish development agency Sida , where he gave Spanish and Quechua lessons to prospective development workers. He later worked in an industrial company in Stockholm .

In 1976 Blanco returned to Peru, which was now ruled by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez . Here he stood for the party Frente Obrero Campesino, Estudiantil y Popular (FOCEP) in the elections to the constituent assembly and used his airtime on television for a strike call by the Central General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP) against social cuts. As a result, he was expelled to Argentina under the Condor Plan . In the elections, he won the majority of left wing votes, after which he was allowed to enter Peru again.

From 1980 to 1985, Blanco was a member of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Party of Workers ( Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores , PRT) and at the same time Secretary for Human Rights at the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) and a member of the Committee on Human Rights in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1983, when the armed conflict in Peru was at its height, he described General Clemente Noel , military chief of the Ayacucho region , as a murderer. Because of this he was expelled from the parliamentary session. From 1985 to 1990, when he was the organizational secretary of the CCP, 1,250,000 hectares of land in the Puno department were owned by indigenous village communities ( Quechua , Aymara ).

Later Blanco was active in the organization of peasant militias (Rondas Campesinas) in northern Peru and took part in a peasant strike in Pucallpa . From 1990 until the sudden dissolution of parliament by Alberto Fujimori in 1992, he was a member of the United Left ( Izquierda Unida ). After learning of murder plans from both the Peruvian State Security Service and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso in 1992, he fled to Mexico with his wife and two children, where he was granted political asylum. In 1997 he returned to Peru.

In 2002 Hugo Blanco suffered a brain hemorrhage while visiting a village community in the Cusco region. Thanks to international support, he was able to be treated in Mexico City, where he stayed in hospital until 2003.

Hugo Blanco is the director of the Cusco-based monthly newspaper Lucha Indígena / Llapa Runaq Hatariynin and is part of the editorial team of the international political magazine Sin Permiso, founded in 2006 .

Private life

Hugo Blanco married Vilma Valer Delgado from Apurimac in the 1950s , with whom he has a daughter. His eldest daughter Carmen Blanco Valer , born in 1959, is an environmental activist in Sweden. Hugo Blanco has a total of two daughters and four sons.

Works

  • Hugo Blanco: Tierra o muerte: las luchas campesinas en Perú. Siglo XXI Eds., Ciudad de México 1972.
  • Hugo Blanco: Workers and Peasants to Power! A Revolutionary Program for Peru. Pathfinder, New York 1978.
  • Hugo Blanco: Nosotros los Indios, 2003, German: We Indios. The struggle of the indigenous people against racist oppression and the destruction of their environment. New ISP publishing house, Karlsruhe 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Jackson Alexander: International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: a documented analysis of the movement. 1991. p. 645.
  2. ↑ Mexico granted political asylum to Peruvian senator. Latin American Business News Wire Notimex / Federal News Service, July 8, 1992.
  3. ^ Peruvian political crisis: summary of events, April 8, 1992, Notisur-South American & Caribbean Political Affairs Latin American Database / Latin American Institute, April 22, 1992.
personal data
SURNAME Blanco Galdós, Hugo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blanco, Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Peruvian union leader and politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Cuzco , Peru