Last month Hugo Blanco marked the beginning of his seventh year in prison. The thirty-four-year-old Trotskyist peasant leader has demonstrated in these difficult years the qualities of revolutionary will and dedication to the struggle of the oppressed that made his name an object of fear to the Peruvian oligarchy when he led the peasant masses Hugo Blanco grew up in Cuzco, where he saw at first hand the desperate poverty of the oppressed Indian masses who constitute the majority of the Peruvian population. From his youth he spoke Quechua, the Indian language, as well as Spanish. In the early nineteen-fifties, Blanco went to Argentina, where he studied agronomy and worked as an active union member in an American-owned meat-packing plant. When he returned to Peru, he helped to organize the giant demonstrations at the time of the visit of then-Vice-President Nixon in 1958. Forced to flee Lima, Hugo Blanco returned to Cuzco, where he and his comrades began to organize peasant unions.
Beginning with literacy campaigns and the establishment of hospitals, the union movement soon confronted the central problem: the tiny group of capitalist rulers who owned the vast bulk of the land. The peasants began peaceful occupations of land that had been taken from them by the landlords. Between 1961 and 1963 more than 300 such recuperations took place. The oligarchy used police, troops and private armed goons against the peasants. The unions in reply created armed self-defense units.
On May 30, 1963, after an extensive manhunt, Hugo Blanco was captured. On July 23, 1963, Che Guevara, while on a visit to Algiers, declared, "Hugo Blanco has set an The government did not dare bring Blanco to trial immediately for fear of the repercussions among the masses. It was not until August 1966 that the Belaunde regime felt secure enough to put him and twenty-eight of his comrades before a military tribunal in the remote village of Tacna. Blanco. was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His close associate, Pedro Candela, was given 22 years. The prosecution sought the death penalty on appeal. This was avoided only because of a worldwide campaign on Blanco's behalf that enlisted hundreds of intellectuals, trade-unionists and independent political figures, including such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell.
The new threat of the Peruvian junta to permanently silence this outstanding fighter will certainly provoke an outcry from Hugo Blanco's friends and supporters throughof La Convencion in their seizures of land from the hacendados [landlords] . example, a good example, and he struggled as much as he could." out the world. Comrades interested in more information should write to: IMG, 8, Toynbee St, London E.1.