Peruvian workers and peasants are shouting in the streets, on the barricades and on the picket lines: "The spilled blood will never be forgotten!”
Workers’ and Peasants’ Peru Stands Up Again
FORWARD! DO NOT STOP WAGING OUR BLOWS AGAINST THE WICKED FUJIMORIST- FTA REGIME!
For a national congress of rank and file delegates from the CGTP and from the organiza-tions of the peasants, the Amazonian exploited and the combative youth organizations. Let’s unite all the pickets in a national committee of self-defense to organize now the REVOLUTIONARY general strike to demolish the Fujimorist-FTA regime and overthrow Garcia. We must build up a Fighting Front to centralize our forces and impose the way to the re-volutionary general strike. Down with the bloodthirsty government of Alan Garcia and the Fujimorist regime! Unconditional freedom for all the political prisoners! Stop hunting the Amazonian fighters!
Down with the Stalinist traitors of the CGTP, PCP and Patria Roja leaderships! Down with the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution”! For a revolutionary provisional government of workers and peasants that breaks with imperialism! Give the land to the peasants and expropriate the expropriators! Latin American working class: Stand up alongside the Peruvian working class and ex-ploited in revolt! Say “Go!” to the beginning of the Peruvian revolution!
On the morning of June 5, the police tried to vacate Belaunde Road in the place called “Curva del Diablo,” close to Bagua in the Amazonas department. The struggle of the Amazonian ex-ploited brothers and sisters has been going on for 3 months. This struggle focused on the impo-sition of a set of laws that hand out the rainforest to the transnationals. These laws are part of the new legislation tailored to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed with the USA.
The struggle of the poor peasants, Amazonian indigenous people and settlers remains a struggle of the class with a deep anti-imperialist content, with democratic-revolutionary demands that attack the heart of the FTA-regime which is giving the Peruvian resources away and tying this oppressed nation to US imperialism. Unions in the Amazonian districts immediately supported the struggle during almost two months of successful strikes. The worker-peasant alliance was built up in the streets, in the struggle.
During April, May and June, there were oil well occupations which challenged the interests of the Peruvian bourgeoisie and their chief partners, the US, British, Spanish and French imperialists with their companies Hunt Oil, Repsol and Total. The bourgeois attack was unexpected, brutal and perfidious, as Rocca Autukai (one of the leaders of the revolts) declared some days later “The police won because that day we were leaving before 10 am; that had been the agreement. We were about to leave.” (IPS report, June 13, 2009) A police battalion arrived, supported by armored cars and two artillery-armed helicop-ters, while snipers were set up on the sides. While climbing a hill to get to a better place to kill the demonstrators, one of the sniper groups met a working-peasant picket which disarmed them and used the weapons to defend the blockade; thus they showed the right way to sieze armaments for the proletarians.
This right, just and heroic action couldn’t prevent the rest of the snipers and the armed helicop-ters from murdering over 100 peasants, only 6 of whom could be found. There were some lead-ers among them, which proves reveals the action of snipers and police intelligence. Santiago Manuin, leader of the struggle committee in Condorcanqui, tried to talk with the cops and was shot point blank, as were the rest of the blockers. The people of Bagua Chica, Bagua Grande and Jaen won the streets. They occupied and burned APRA’s and state offices. In Jaen they ran on top of the police stations, and the cops had to run over the roofs like frightened rats; however, they kept fusillading the exploited people from their new positions.
\“They only talk about the dead cops and say 5 indigenous people have been killed, but things are different. There are over 100 dead brothers and sisters” denounced Daysi Zapata, president of AIDESEP, which is the organization of Amazonian indigenous peoples (El PaÃs, Madrid, June 14, 2009). When the fighters at Petroperu`s 6 plant -where 20 cops were held as prisoners- heard of the killing, they decided to give “an eye for an eye” reply. The bourgeoisie and their hunting dogs used this event to point to the “savagery” of the fighters. Alan GarcÃa was the first one to call the fighters “savages” and the executed cops “democracy martyrs.”
As Trotskyists, we must say that taking hostages was not invented as a method by the working class and the exploited. To speak only of the last few decades, military dictatorships as well as “democratic” governments have detained and jailed without any evidence or right our leaders and most active fighters in order to destroy our struggle organizations and make them surrender.
During the dirty wars fought on us by the Belaúnde, GarcÃa and Fujimori administra-tions, any worker or peasant leader was a “terrorist,” and whole families were used as hostages; those governments went on threatening the exploited struggles by taking hundreds of hostages, jailing working leaders without evidence, or even killing them. Wasn’t it Garcia and Mansilla who killed Castilla, the miners’ leader? Wasn’t it APRA’s thugs who shot the members of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) who had surrendered in El Fronton? Wasn’t it Fujimori who massacred half of the leadership of the CGTP between 1991 and 1992? Isn’t it true that in all these years of democracy, each government has taken hostages under the cover of “legally” punishing the exploited for blocking, fighting and claiming what is rightfully theirs?
In these years of “democra-cy” under Paniagua, Toledo and Garcia’s command, the “democratic” army and police have murdered the best sons and daughters of the exploited people. Puno, Cusco, Pucallpa, Ancash and Casapalca are soaked in workers’ and peasants’ blood. How can these parties (all of them taking part in the murderous Fujimori´s regime of 1992-93) dare to call “murderers” and “savag-es” those fighters who are defending themselves? Why are these bloodthirsty jackals-–so used to feasting on the corpses of their victims--showing such hypocritical fastidiousness now?
Enough is enough! The Peruvian working class and peasants will not allow those gangs of bourgeois and transnationals, who sack the nation, who keep their power by spilling the blood of the exploited, to try to paint themselves as the victims. They are the murderers of Peruvian workers and peasants. As revolutionary socialists, we defend unconditionally the inviola-ble right of the masses to defend themselves from the murderous bourgeois state. We defend without hesitation their unrestricted right to rebellion. Bagua fighters had taken cops as hostages precisely as a guarantee, because they knew that if the government attacked it would not stop once it started. The government chose to declare war, so the exploited had no other choice but to take “an eye for an eye.” Would they let the enemies go free after they had killed elderly men and women, pregnant and unarmed women and children? Weren’t the Amazonian fighters eager to do everything possible to avoid the clash? Hadn’t theirs been a peaceful, defensive struggle for weeks, only occupying wells and land and blockading roads, but avoiding waging offensive blows? They could not allow such a serious defensive measure, such as taking cops as hostages to defend their lives, to end as a joke. In the face of barbaric repression, the fighters’ revenge is fair and beyond reproach.
The defense of our class brothers and sisters is superior to all illusions about the “justice” and “balance” of the state and regime which serve the exploiters. Only traitors like César Levana (CP leader), in the columns of the Bolivarian paper “La Primera,” can call this revenge “unacceptable.” Carmela Sifuentes (CGTP leader) in an ILO meeting “paid a tribute” to the cops who fell in combat! These people are the same traitors who consider as “criminals” the members of the Ilave commune who revolted in 2004. They are the same ones who praised the murderous general who surrendered in Moquegua in 2008. In the meantime, the “radical” Stalinists and the fake Trotskyists refuse to defend the right of the fighters to reply to repression with any means they want to.
As Trotsky said, the whole life is based on diverse forms of violence, on the opposition of one kind of violence against another, and to repudiate the liberating violence means supporting that of the oppressors who are currently governing the world. To condemn the violence of the exploited against the exploiters, as the treacherous misleaders (Stalinists, reformist of all stripes, and Trotskyist renegades included) do, means in fact to re-nounce revolution and the emancipation of the exploited.
This is Marxist ABCs, but all of those traitors have long renounced Marxism. After the army entered Bagua and with the zone already militarized, they declared a permanent curfew to prevent meetings or demonstrations of the workers and indigenous peasants. They established censorship and closed local radio stations so that no one could know how the army got rid of the bodies of our dead brothers and sisters, as was denounced in Lima by the leader of the Indigenous Student Movement to the National Radio Coordinator on June 6. As the Institute of Legal Defence denounced on June 11, the army kept the zone closed for 5 days and didn’t allow even the Red Cross to enter.
The army thus created a “military-political zone,” as in the worst years of the dirty war: They detained dozens of fighters, who were even pulled out of the hospitals and sent to the barracks and tortured. They chased fighters, who had to hide in the woods, faraway villages or churches. AIDESEP, which is the leader organization of the Amazonian peoples, was declared illegal and Alberto Pizango, its main leader, had to go underground and find political asylum in Nicaragua. Under the surveillance of the armed forces, the Amazonian fighters were forced to leave Bagua and go back to their towns in trucks. The cops and the army officers broke open the shelters, chasing the fighters, detaining the sick and wounded, or expelling them from Bagua.
They tried to humiliate them, calumniating them as being “savage murderers,” but Bagua’s exploited people recognized clearly their brothers and sisters, and even under the threat of machine guns, demonstrated their emotional support and empathy: “170 indigenous people lie as refugees in the Franciscan nun’s shelter. Many are wounded and sick. Inside the shelter, the natives are thoroughly searched by the police, who deprive them of their belongings, throw them to the floor, look for any ‘evidence’ to prove the alleged sedition… Those who are ‘clean’ are put on a truck, after being registered in the state prosecutor’s office and at the ombudsman’s, and sent back to their homes. As they climb on the trucks the natives are cheered and applauded as heroes by the public: ‘Keep on fighting, brothers and sisters!’ Some women with kids in their arms give them bags with fruit, cookies and water.” (El Comercio, Lima, June 13, 2009)
The ripples of Bagua’s events are spreading all over the country. The treacherous bureaucracy of the CGTP keeps the Lima workers separate from those in the rest of the country to prevent a revolutionary general strike which overthrows the government and imposes the demands of the exploited.
The responses of the masses to the massacre were outrage and rebellion. Immediately, the CGTP bureaucracy moved slightly to the left and declared a “national day of struggle” on June 11. That day was a demonstration of the workers’ strength, in spite of the overt boycott of the union bureaucracy.
From Thursday, June 11 to Tuesday, June 23, when an agreement was signed with the government, the workers and peasants in Andahuaylas imposed a general work stoppage. The governor-–actually a kind of “prefect,” a representative of the government--was hidden in the Andahuaylas garrison, while the police locked themselves in their police station. The struggle committee, integrating local unions and peasant organizations, was in fact the master in the city; a de facto dual power was instituted locally. The only point in the struggle committee’s program was demanding the resignation of Garcia and all his cabinet of ministers.
The workers and peasants of the province of Canchis tried to occupy the Cusco airport; they succeeded in blocking the departures from Cusco to Puno and Bolivia. In Cusco, the (popular) Council of Machiguenga-Urubamba River (COMARU) and the Revolutionary Agrarian Federa-tion of Cusco (FAR) tried to organize, with other organizations, a departmental indefinite strike in the Cusco region (including the city), but the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CP betrayed the workers once more, refusing to march with the Cuscan peasants in a strike on June 24.
A week before, a march of ethnic Awajun and Shipibos poor peasants, together with conscripted soldiers who had just been licensed, reached Pichanaki, in the Junin department, on their way to La Merced, declaring that their final goal was Lima (the capital). But when the government signed the agreement with the Amazonian workers and poor peasants, they stopped marching.
On June 11, the readiness of the workers and the middle classes of Lima to fight against the regime was clearly shown. In spite of the CGTP leadership’s call for “day of national struggle” with the aim of decompressing the fighting mood of the workers and peasants, and of dividing the workers and peasants in the province from the proletariat of the capital, 20,000 protestors-–construction workers, teachers and students--went into the streets in Lima.
The old union bureaucracy could not prevent the most militant protesters-–students and construction workers—from clashing with the horse-riding police, or from facing teargas grenades and police assaults as they tried to cross the barrier that separated them from the Parliament and government palaces for two hours. Though the agreements signed by the government have defused for the moment the struggle in the Amazonian rainforest region and in Andahuaylas, the struggles have not stopped. An ever increasing hatred against the wicked Fujimorist-FTA regime is gaining momentum.
At the end of June, peasants blocked the roads from Arequipa to Puno; in the province of Azan-gao-Puno a strike was declared and staged for 72 hours; poor peasants unions in Cajamarca, Ancash and Cusco threaten a generalized struggle if the mining companies deprive them of their land and water. Cocoa growers in La Convención, in the Cusco region, demand a better price for their crop from the state company Enaco. The poor peasants of Ashaninka Central in Ene River denounced the state concession of the new Paquitzapango Hydropower Central Project, which will deprive them of the water they need for their crops.
After a first period of resistance, the workers of the struggle committee of the province of La Oroya had to accept the treacherous Acta (agreement) signed on June 23 by the strikebreaker bureaucrat Luis Castillo with the imperialist bosses. Castillo, an old cadre of the CP, could do that because the Lambertists disguised him as “Trotskyist” for a few months. The national unions are demanding the repeal of the anti-labor laws; the port workers struggle in defense of their jobs.
Then came the combat of July 7, 8 and 9. During those days, the new “Bolivarian” freaks, the Front for Sovereignty and Life, which subordinated the CGTP and Aidesep to Humala, did eve-rything to stop the rise of the masses. However, overcoming the contention, the masses took effective mass actions that paralyzed several departments, such as Ayacucho. It is crystal clear that conditions for tearing down Alan Garcia and his whole government and demolishing his Fujimorist-FTA regime are more than ripe.
It would only be necessary to organize a powerful revolutionary strike, centralize the self-defense pickets, take control of the roads, and seize the possessions of the transnationals and the bourgeoisie. If this has not been achieved yet, it is not the fault of the exploited, for lack of conditions or determination for the struggle; it is because of the betrayal of the leaderships of the CGTP, CP, and Patria Roja, backed by the renegades of Trotskyism, who are clogging the road to the revo-lutionary general strike which could impose carry out the revolutionary overthrow of the govern-ment and the FTA regime.
The workers and peasants’ uprisings, the local quasi-insurrections, the revolts, have left the Fujimorist-FTA regime in crisis. What we have seen in Bagua is the opening of the civil war; the “normal” and “peaceful” relationships between the classes are broken. The classes have begun to clash directly. This civil war is developing in the provinces, but now threatens to hit directly in the capital, stepping up and becoming independent action of the masses that could open the way to the Peruvian revolution.
Before the threat of a revolution, there was an attempt to use a massacre to stop the way to revolution. The intelligence services, the Digenim, warned the government-–the administrator of the opprobrious regime--that there was a feeling of insurrection. To prevent this prospect, the government launched a preemptive attack with the massacre in Bagua, which was answered with the counterattack of the working class and the exploited masses. Before the cold blood of unarmed peasants, the exploited people answered with righteous, unassailable anger.
The Fujimorist regime of the FTA tried to stop the process of insurrection with iron and blood and to stay one step ahead of the mass eruption, but it could not foresee the heroic and effective answer of the masses. It was forced to retreat, to shelve the “laws of the jungle” against which the poor peasants revolted, to get a halt of the struggle from the leadership of the Aidesep.
But, as the former Prime Minister, Simons, said, it was “one step back to give two steps forward.” And they did so. While the leadership of the masses like Aidesep went into negotiations, the old trade union bureaucracy constrained the masses and decompressed their hatred with days of struggle on June 11 and July 7-9, dividing the struggles, and annulling the semi-dual power of some of the organizations, such as the Struggle Committee of Andahuaylas, by the subordina-tion to the Bolivarian bourgeosie (Humala), building up the “Front for sovereignty and life.”
Meanwhile, they set up a new cabinet with a majority of the APRA, the party in government. This shows the increasing Bonapartization of the regime, its armor, while it is still threatening the working class and the exploited masses. Alan Garcia himself wrote an article published in a right wing newspaper, calling “the majorities without voice, which are not represented by the ultra leftist minority” to defend democracy, in action, by any means. This is an open call to set up goon squads-–such as the “búfalos,” the APRA gangs--to confront the proletariat and the exploited masses.
The right wing of the bourgeoisie rejected joining a National Unity government, the first policy of the APRAist government, because the government of Garcia is eroded and if the masses rise into combat and in independent actions, they could overthrow it and begin the revolution.
The attempts of the APRA to rebuild the broken bourgeois front are stagnated. It uses Bonapartization as an answer before the accusations of “weakness” launched by the Fujimorists and the Social-Christians against the government of Garcia and the APRA, to show their imperialist lords that the APRA can save their businesses. Something is crystal clear, as the Wall Street Journal reported: The government-–and the whole regime, we add-- are in their worst crisis since… July 2006” (quoted by El Comercio de Lima, June 8, 2009). We are facing a Bonapartist government in crisis, which tries to shelter itself with the armed forces.
Meanwhile the Bolivarians, with Humala at their head, are preparing an orderly way out of the crisis. They are negotiating with Toledo-–an “indigenist” who has signed the FTA with the Yankees--a future transitional government in case Garcia is overthrown. This way, the Bolivarians are showing their subordination to Obama. The have to demonstrate to the Yankee embassy that their government would not touch the interests of the Yankees in Peru. That is why they converse with the rabble that signed the FTA!
The broken Peruvian bourgeoisie is discussing how to save themselves and how to save the interests of the imperialist lords. But without a defeat or a deviation of the struggle of the working class, partial measures will not resolve anything in favor of the exploiters. And the Peruvian workers must know that the defeat that they may suffer is not only here at this time, but also in Honduras, if the coup finally triumphs, or if it finishes strangling the masses with a counterrevo-lutionary pact, as in Bolivia; and in Cuba, with the restoration of capitalism, which is the worst defeat for which the imperialists, the Bolivarians, Castro and the treacherous leaderships of the continent are preparing.
In order for events here to develop in a way favorable for the masses, the working class and the poor peasants have to defeat the politics of the CP and Patria Roja, who, in the face of the huge struggle of the exploited masses, not only have defended the Fujimorist regime-–who feed them with privileges, while thousands of pariahs are starving--but are preventing the beginning of the Peruvian revolution. They do as much as possible to help the restoration of capitalism in Cuba, they prepare new defeats for the working class as in Honduras, where the Bolivarians, the re-formist left and the renegades of Trotskyism, centralized by the World Social Forum, try to sub-mit the working class to the bourgeois alternative of Zelaya.
Peru of the workers and the poor peasants stands upImperialist pillaging has left Peru, that is, its workers and poor peasants, completely ruined. The imperialism-induced FTA, imposed by its lackeys the Peruvian bourgeoisie and the Fujimorist regime, means transforming Peru into a true big “maquila” (sweatshop) and a source of raw materials for the transnationals. The bankruptcy of the imperialist capitalist world economy, with its epicenter in the US in recession today, has hit very heavily those countries in Latin America that are trebly tied with submission chains to US imperialism through the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). This is the case in Mexico, the Centro-American countries, Peru, Chile, and Colombia, among others.
The crisis has not only depressed the international price of raw materials that these countries export, primarily to the US or to the Pacific market, such as minerals, oil, etc. It also means that the imperialist transnationals which have settled their maquilas in those countries, today are closing plants, suspending and laying off workers, completely unrestrained-–like Doe Run company has done in the metallurgical complex of La Oroya in Peru--while US imperialism intensifies the pilfering of those nations to extract up to the last drop of blood from them.
The present situation in Peru is only the most advanced outpost in the combat of the Latin American workers and exploited against the submission to the FTA, against the intensified imperialist pilfering and against the imperialist chains that strangle those nations and suffocate the worker and peasant masses.
Today the Peruvian exploited are rising up against the UK-US imperialist companies such as Doe Run, Barrick and the rest of the mining companies, which make millions and millions every day by super exploiting semi-enslaved proletarians-–more than 70% of them are subcontracted and unregistered workers, with no rights or benefits--making them work long work hours and die like insects every day; they are even denied a proper burial, entombed as they are in the pits or blown to pieces by the dynamite explosions in the bottom of the mines without any investment in infrastructure.
The workers’ wages are below the ground, while the profits of the capitalists are reaching the skies. For the exploited there are neither decent wealth health benefits nor education systems, and the ever-rising cost of living is a lash permanently whipping the masses. In the rural areas, the FTA has brought about the complete ruin of the poor peasants. The oil transnationals--the imperialist bloodsuckers of Hunt Oil, Repsol, Total-Petrobras–-the mining, chemical, pharmaceutical companies, the usurer sharks of the imperialist banks with the help of their junior partners, the regional “Bolivarian” bourgeoisies who administer the crumbs from the sacking of the nation’s resources--and the agrarian-trading bourgeoisies, are all determined to take the most and best part of the lands, dispossessing the ruined peasants, and those rascals do not even stop at massacring them to achieve that aim.
While the ruined peasants leave their starving families working on a tiny plot of land that cannot even support their miserable subsistence, by the thousands they move to the city shantytowns and are used by the bourgeoisie as an enormous industrial reserve army that manages to survive by going sporadically in and out of precarious jobs-–if they are lucky enough to get any-– in the productive process. Meanwhile, millions are condemned to abject misery and social decomposition, and the bourgeoisie takes advantage of them to man its narco-industry/traffic, prostitution, death squads, etc.
So, in the country there is an overt and brash sacking and appropriation of lands on the part of the transnationals. Imposing the FTA on Peru and other Latin American countries meant a heavy concentration of land in the hands of the transnationals, even liquidating the miserable subsistence economy of the poor peasants who have not yet lost their tiny plots. A rural proletariat coexists alongside these very poor peasants, brutally overexploited by the food and seed transnationals and the landowners dedicated to the production of food and industrial crops.
These thousands of rural workers have been abandoned by the CGTP leadership, which refuses to organize them in its unions, leaving them to their fate in conditions of absolute modern slavery. This is Peru in submission to the imperialist domination of the FTA: pillaged by the transnationals, which extract the strength of the proletarians in exchange for miserable wages; with its lands and natural resources appropriated by the oil and mining companies; with hundreds of thousands of ruined peasants who emigrate to the cities trying to survive; and with an army of rural workers working like slaves from dawn to sunset.
These are the conditions that have pushed the Peruvian proletarians and poor peasants to the present uprising. That’s why in the countryside the rural workers are heading the revolts and drawing in the ruined peasants, becoming the natural nexus (by facilitating the incorporation of the oil, mine, urban, etc. workers,) for a revolutionary worker-peasant alliance.
The proletariat, leading the ruined and expropriated poor peasants, is the only social force that can confront and defeat the imperialist transnationals, the native bourgeoisie and its state. This is the social basis of the mass combats uprisings, the strength that began to move and which pushes towards a revolutionary outburst.
On the other hand, the middle-class peasant--who is tied to the transnationals by many links and exploits the rural worker, who sends his/her children to the universities trying in this way to climb the social ladder, i.e., the rural petty bourgeois--is the social basis of Humala and his party and of the class collaboration organs like the “regional fronts.” It is the rich peasant who wants to retain some crumbs from the pilfering of the nation by the transnationals, and that is why he/she makes claims demanding “equity” in the sharing of the oil and mining royalties.
This sector tries to become a national bourgeoisie that haggles with imperialism over the spoils of the nation. From the departmental governments, this sector tries to take advantage of the rage of the ruined peasant and the impoverished urban middle classes to control the rural worker, and uses this rage to put pressure on Garcia’s central government, with the aim of receiving its own portion in the plundering of the nation.
But in Peru, as in every semi-colonial or colonial country, the two fundamentally opposed classes are the proletariat and imperialism. Only the Peruvian proletariat acting as chief of the oppressed country can take the majority of the country, that is, the poor peasants, out of ruin by raising in the streets a program, giving a response to the question of the land, and to the question of the liberation of the nation from the imperialist yoke, by sealing the workers’-peasant alliance. Because of its role in production, it is the proletariat who can expropriate the factories to give tractors and technology to the ruined peasants; it is the proletariat who can expropriate without compensation the usurer banks that ruin the poor peasants, declare null and void all their debts and give them cheap credit to run their plots; it is the proletariat who can impose the monopoly on foreign trade and guarantee collective farms to produce food and all kinds of necessary crops efficiently under heavy investment of the state in equipment and technology.
To impose this course, the proletariat must have at its head a truly revolutionary leadership to guarantee the worker-peasant alliance, preparing the way for the imposition of a revolutionary workers-peasants’ government. In order to achieve this, the current rebellion must not be stopped; far to the contrary, it must be deepened and centralized to make a decisive blow against the enemy. The treacherous leader-ship of the proletariat which is entrenched within the CGTP is trying to prevent this prospective outcome. It is imperative to defeat this leadership!
It is imperative to conquer without delay a congress of the rank and file workers and poor peasants that prepares a great action of the masses for a revolutionary general strike to defeat the government of murderous Garcia and to destroy the Fujimorist-FTA regime, and in this way to impose: expropriation without compen-sation nationalization under workers control of the oil and mining transnationals!
Expropriation without compensation of the new agro-exporter landowners, for the benefit of the poor peasants! Expropriation without compensation of the usurer banks and creation of a unique state bank under the control of the workers to impose the immediate annulment of all the debts of the ruined peasants and to give them cheap credit! Collective farms with strong investment from the state! Down with the FTA and all the political and economic agreements, treaties and accords that tie the nation to imperialism! Deep Peru, worker and peasant Peru is starting to stand up--let’s not stop it!
The Bolivarian bourgeoisie, supported by the Stalinist leadership of the CGTP, is working to contain the masses. Down with the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution”! It is imperative to make the worker organizations break with the bourgeoisie and advance the way to socialist revolution!
The open civil war in the provinces left the bourgeois power in crisis. Immediately, the partners of the party government, together with the opposition of Humala, asked for the resignation of the entire cabinet of ministers. The bourgeoisie began to shiver in panic; it was the exact moment when a revolutionary leadership would have chosen to raise the entire worker-peasant Peru to strike the definitive blow.
But once more the union bureaucracy of the CGTP, the PCP and Pa-tria Roja (Maoists) alongside the entire reformist “left” came out in defense of the regime, and delayed the response of the masses to the following week, putting up all kinds of obstacles to the centralization of their forces. First, the bureaucracy of the CGTP called for a national strike as late as July 8, which is a long month after the massacre of our class brothers and sisters in Bagua.
These traitors want to convince the exploited that their problems can be resolved by moving this or that minis-ter, but by leaving intact the whole government and the corrupt slave-owners’ institutions, and without destroying the murderous officers’ caste of the Fujimorist army, without expelling the transnationals, without breaking with imperialism, and without imposing the power of the ex-ploited masses.
So the bureaucracy and the reformist leaderships try to save time to prevent that looming volca-no of the Peruvian workers’ and peasants’ rage from erupting, and its revolutionary lava from destroying the citadel of the capitalists’ power and all their institutions. The leaders and spokespeople of the so called “Bolivarian Revolution” see very clearly that if the Peruvian revolution starts and manages to achieve its first victory by sweeping away the Fujimorist-FTA regime, all the counterrevolutionary pacts and agreements on the continent be-tween the Bolivarian governments-–junior partners of the French imperialist government and the transnationals, all of them supported by the World Social Forum—as well as the governments that are direct agents of US imperialism in Latin America, would be in danger.
We have seen these pacts at work in the embrace between Chavez and Uribe over the spilled blood of the Colombian resistance massacred with the applause of all of those governments. These pacts are also at work in Venezuela to expropriate the anti-imperialist fight of the masses; in Oaxaca, Mexico, to isolate the workers-peasants’ Commune; and to prevent the struggle of the Latin American exploited from rising up in a revolt of the most exploited sector of the US proletariat fighting against Obama’s government and its wars of occupation.
These pacts are those counterrevolutionary pacts that have subordinated the US proletariat to bloodthirsty Obama; they are part of the politics driven by Fidel Castro, the World Social Forum and Kirchner to abort the revolutionary combat started by the Argentinean masses in 2001; the same counterrevolutionary pact is today acting in Bolivia, where Evo Morales makes pacts with fascism to defeat the proletarian revolution started in 2003-2005. These counterrevolutionary pacts pave the way for a full and “final” blow to the international proletariat and all exploited people: the consummation of capitalist restoration in Cuba through the hands of Castro and Obama.
The revolutionary combat of the Peruvian masses today calls all of these counterrevolutionary displays into question. That is why the treacherous leaderships of the international proletariat are concentrating their forces to prevent the beginning of the Peruvian revolution, which would mean the re-opening of a revolutionary process all over Latin America, after the expropriation by the “Bolivarian Revolution.”
It is not accidental that Humala is now talking about meeting Toledo-–that alleged “pro-indigenous” former Peruvian “Indian” president who signed the FTA and was devoted to mas-sacring workers and peasants during his government --and perhaps building an alliance with him. Humala is getting ready to abort the struggle of the proletarians in the cities and of the poor peasants and the rural workers in the countryside, submitting the exploited masses to the bour-geoisie through the trap of “indigenismo.”
He is preparing to use the spilled blood of the workers and peasants to enhance the business deals of the Bolivarian bourgeois gang, the agent of the French transnationals that scramble with the US monopolies of the FTA for the spoils of the Peruvian nation. To reach his goal, former soldier Humala has to lean on the leadership of the CGTP to prevent the revolutionary outburst of the proletarians in Lima, which could be the starting point for a re-volutionary general strike that could dethrone the government of Alan Garcia and his Fujimorist regime. Humala is an enemy of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution!
For his part, Evo Morales, after having sent a letter to the summit of the Peoples in Puno (Peru), last May, is calling for a fight for the “second independence” (?), and from his position as one of the commanders of the “Bolivarian revolution” and representative of the counterrevolutionary pacts on the continent, is declaring hypocritically that “what happened in Peru is the genocide caused by the FTA, the privatizations, the sell-out of the Amazon Rainforest of South America to the transnationals” (Agencia EFE, June 13, 2009). Cynic!
Morales, who expropriated the Bolivian Revolution, who signed a pact with the Media Luna fascists, and who ferociously attacked the Huanuni mineworkers three times…dares to speak about “genocide” in Peru! He is merely trying to hide the fact that he himself has his hands soaked in the blood of Bolivian miners, workers and peasants! He who has kneeled down before Obama asking him to “re-establish a historical relationship,” which is to say, asking not to be left out –-he and his bourgeois fraction--of the business deals in exchange for keeping the counterrevolutionary pact between MAS (Mo-rales’ party,) and the fascists, now speaks of “second independence”… for Peru! A thousand times’ cynical rascal!
We, the internationalists who sign this declaration, want to warn the masses about the “Bolivarian Revolution,” that Humala and his lackeys of the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and its servants of the reformist left are getting ready to prevent a revolutionary over throw of the government and are eager to make another “peaceful” transition pact and conquer for the Peruvian bourgeoisie a Bolivarian government on the basis of spilling workers’ and peasants’ blood.
We are not surprised: We have already seen the Bolivarians making pacts with fascism in Bolivia and with Uribe-–US imperialism’s gendarme--in Colombia; we have also seen Bolivarians in the governments administering the imperialist Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), as is the case with the Sandinista government of Ortega in Nicaragua and the Frente Farabundo Marti of National Liberation (FMLN, the former petty bourgeois pro-Castroite guerril-las,) government in El Salvador.
Down with the “Bolivarian Revolution”! Forward to the workers’ and peasants’ revolution! No to a new “provisional government” of the Peruvian bourgeoisie like that of Paniagua in 2000 (after Fujimori-Montesinos’ fall,) that spared the Fujimorist regime and paved the way for the govern-ment of Toledo and the imposition of the FTA! For a revolutionary provisional government of direct democracy and self-defense organizations of the fighting workers and peasants!
The exploited have an immediate task: Revolutionary general strike NOW! To conquer bread for the people, jobs for all the workers, land for the poor peasants; expelling the transnationals, breaking with the FTA and striking down the murderous government of Garcia and the Fujimorist regime! The workers’ and peasants’ alliance in the streets and in the struggle against the police and the army is based primarily on the program that was carried out by the masses: Stop the exploitation by the transnationals and their servants! Down with the Fujimorist regime and with Garcia’s government, which embodies this regime today! The poor peasant, instinctively, turns her or his head toward the only ally she or he has: the urban working class.
That’s the reason for the marches to the cities, the setting up of joint fighting committees that have guaranteed the occupation of the oil wells, attacking the imperialist interests for two months. This has also meant the breaking of the peaceful relationship between the classes; on one side the imperialists and their junior partners, the Peruvian bourgeoisie; on the other side, the workers and the rural exploited. The clash, the civil war, became unavoidable.
After two months of fighting, the AIDESEP has suspended the Amazonian strike after signing an agreement (“Acta”) with the government, which is no more than wet ink on paper. How many times has the government signed acts pledging to meet the peoples’ demands? The regime, knowing that it is too weak “to teach a lesson” to the workers and the exploited people, seeks a little more time to be able to re-arm, divide the struggles and deactivate them by means of cheap demagoguery.
And while the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and the reformist “left” leaning on the middle class peasants, make the workers and the exploited people accept the betrayal of the Actas, APRA’s government (Garcia belongs to the traditional bourgeois APRA party, NT) and the Fujimorist-FTA regime get more time to reconstruct the bourgeois front.
So the government is arming itself and calling for the genocidal officers’ body of the army to take control of the departments where the workers are still fighting or are threatening to re-start their fighting. It has militarized Cusco, Apurimac and other departments. The mass-murderous officers’ body, the so called “Vladi-generals” (Vladimir Montesinos was an infamous secret police chief who in the times of Fujimori and under his orders created a parallel army within the army, devoted to the persecution and torture of the oppositionists, especially of thousands of workers, students, professors, and “leftists” in general, and also amassed, together with Fujimori and other cronies, huge fortunes through a web of contracts, bribes, extortion, slander, cheap yellow media campaigns and private crimes, NT), have revealed themselves as the patrons of the Fujimorist-FTA regime.
Meanwhile, the government is deepening its Bonapartist characteristics; it leans on the armed forces and threatens the bourgeois opposition, from social Christians to Humalistas, saying it is going to dissolve the congress if Prime Minister Yehudi Simon receives a censure vote. The results of the activities of the CGTP’s leaders have been seen: for weeks, they have left the peasants and rural workers isolated in the forest, to be massacred by the police and the army.
The revolutionary program must be developed for how to centralize and transform the semi-insurrectionist local rebellions, hard strikes by sector, mass mobilizations accompanied by at-tacks on private property, etc.; i.e., all of those half deaf; half-dumb, half-mute uprisings into a powerful mass action to overthrow the government, the Fujimorist-FTA regime, and destroy the murderous Peruvian bourgeois state.
For a revolutionary general strike NOW to conquer the bread, the jobs, and the land for the poor peasants; and to expel the transnationals, to break with the FTA and defeat the government of Garcia and his Fujimorist regime!
For a revolutionary general strike NOW, so that the fight of the exploited masses does not stop; for bringing justice for the martyred comrades murdered by the bourgeois state!
From the fighting committees, from the union rank and file assemblies, from the pickets of the rural workers, from the mobilizations…We have to impose on the CGTP so that it breaks with the bourgeoisie, and to recover it and put it to the service of the struggle of the workers, defeating the misleading union bureaucracy and imposing the Revolutionary General Strike for the achievement of all our demands.
In this way, and by initiating and organizing an action that unifies all our forces and demands, we exploited must organize a powerful WORKERS’ CONGRESS OF RANK AND FILE DELE-GATES OF ALL THE FACTORIES, WORKPLACES AND MINES FROM ALL OVER PERU; WITH DELEGATES REPRESENTING RURAL WORKERS, THE TRUE AND FIRMEST ALLY OF THE URBAN WORKING CLASS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, A CONGRESS WITH DELEGATES FROM THE POOR PEASANTS, THOSE WHO SCARCELY SUBSIST ON THEIR PRODUCTION OF SMALL PLOTS OF RUINED LAND.
It is imperative to achieve a workers’ and peasants’ parliament that represents the largest majority of the Peruvian people, which centralizes the self-defense committees and pickets in a unitary NATIONAL WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ SELF-DEFENSE COMMITTEE. Facing the threat to the fighters in Andahuaylas and Cusco of being massacred, we have to set up this national congress right there in the south of the country.
It is necessary to set up dual power, that is, the power of the exploited confronting the power of the transnationals and their government, in order to go forward on the path to defeating the government and its Fujimorist regime, to impose the break with imperial-ism, and to expropriate the transnationals and give the land to the peasants, a task that can only be guaranteed by a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ provisional govern-ment.
Set in motion the workers’ and peasants’ revolution! The actions of the masses must not stop! Impose the Revolutionary General Strike! Centralize the exploited in a national workers’ and peasants’ congress in order to reach victory! Down with Garcia! Down with the armored Fujimor-ist regime! Out with the transnationals!
Down with the class collaborationist leadership of the CGTP! Down with all the union bureaucracies! Long live workers’ democracy!The Stalinist leadership of the CGTP and the different variants of reformism, fake Trotskyists and Castroites, have put all their weight behind the effort of preventing this breakthrough, keep-ing the combat of the masses in the provinces divided from the fight of the proletarians and the youth in Lima, the Peruvian capital. Their policy is to subordinate the masses to Humala and the Bolivarian bourgeoisies.
Down with the leadership of the CGTP! Down with all the union bureaucracies! It is clear that the spontaneity of the Peruvian masses has been a thousand times more efficacious and perspicacious than the political cowardice of all the reformist general staffs put together; far from calling on the masses to carry out any of these actions, the treacherous leader-ships become frightened and run to help the bourgeoisie and its institutions.
In their spontaneity, the masses have demonstrated an enormous degree of consciousness: independent actions, attacks on bourgeois property, committees of self defense against the government and the FTA, against the sacking of the transnationals, and for the land to the poor peasants. This is the starting point and the way to be developed in order to defeat the class enemy and its lackeys in the streets.
But this enormous spontaneity of the masses has a big limitation. If the combat of the exploited is not centralized by creating their own national organ of direct democracy, a dual power regime to open the way to the triumph of the revolution will not emerge, and then the bourgeoisie, supported by the treacherous leaderships of the proletariat, will re-organize its forces and defeat the struggle of the masses.
It is imperative to conquer implement workers’ democracy. This means forming committees in the factories, workplaces, etc., throughout Peru. With the method of Assembly we have to carry out the building of factory, mine, workplace, etc. committees and organize the forces of the rural workers, with one delegate for every 50 workers, to organize the absolute majority of the Peru-vian working class.
With self-determination and with the method of workers’ democracy, the class will be able to put its most remarkable and combative leaders at its head. The fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight to defeat the union bureaucracies, and from the fight to achieve the independence of the unions and of all the workers’ organizations from the state and from all the political forces of the bourgeoisie.
For a revolutionary program to impose forge the alliance of workers and poor peasants in the streetsIn order to lead the worker-peasant alliance in the streets, the workers have to unite our ranks, guaranteeing our demands and making our exploiters pay for them. Misery and starvation are reaching previously unheard-of levels. Peru is officially in recession. The capitalists are not even capable of guaranteeing us the opportunity to earn our daily crumbs. It is necessary to unite the workers’ ranks in the one and only cry: Generalized wage increas-es!
A minimum movable wage that covers the necessities of the families and goes up according to inflation! Decent jobs for everybody!
A sliding scale of wages and work hours to share all available work among all capable hands! All the workers must be regis-tered on the permanent payrolls of all the companies!
It is necessary to set up unions for the rural workers who are brutally exploited by the transnationals!
In response to the misery and starvation in the countryside, where the poor peasants are op-pressed and expropriated by the commercial middlemen, the new agro-exporting landowners, the imperialist banks’ usurers and the oil and mining companies we call: For Nationalization of the land in order to give productive plots of land, cheap credit and technology to the rural exploited!
For collective farms with heavy investment by the State under the control of the rural workers! Annul all the debts the poor peasants have taken with the bank usurers!
Expropriation of the banks without compensation, and for the creation of a unique state bank to guarantee credit, cheap machines and fertilizers to the poor peasants!
It is imperative to expropriate the wicked Peruvian bourgeoisie without compensation and to nationalize those factories and enterprises under workers’ control. Expropriate the Romeros, the Benavides, the Chlimpers, etc., as well as the “Bolivarian” bosses--like those of Conveagro--who super-exploit the poor peasants. Expropriate the regional bosses who take part in the sacking of our resources as junior partners of the imperialists through mining or oil rents.
Expropriate without compensation any factory or workplace that closes or sacks its workers! I.e., expropriate without compensation and under workers’ control the entire textile industry, which has fired thousands of workers!
We must recover La Oroya from the claws of imperialist Doe Run, which is on the brink of firing all of its workers!
For factory-, mine- and workplace-committees that guarantee production occupying all the plants, pits and shops!
The bosses say: “There is no money!” No money for wage increases, or to keep the jobs untouched, to meet the peasants’ demands, and to give health and education to our children… THEY ARE LYING! There IS ENOUGH MONEY, AND MORE!
But the imperialists are carrying it out of the country, helped by their junior partners, the Peruvian bosses!
It is necessary to kick the imperialist transnationals out of the country, expropriating them without compensation and under workers’ control. It is necessary to expropriate Yanacocha, Barrick, Hunt Oil, Doe Run, Repsol, Total-Petrobras.
This is the way to liberate the nation from the imperialist yoke. The only government that can guarantee completely and effectively these demands of the exploited masses is a government of the workers and poor peasants based on the self-organization and armament of the proletariat. This is the only government that can guarantee a break with imperialism and the agrarian revolution.
A very tiny minority of bourgeois shareholders, bankers, managers and straw-men of the imperialist transnationals gangs exert a ferocious dictatorship against the large majority of the ex-ploited of the Peruvian nation. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poor peasants, will be able to create the most democratic government, one that is a genuine repre-sentative of the wide majority of the Peruvian nation, and solve the most urgent demands of the exploited people. No doubt it would become a stronghold of the socialist revolution in Latin America and the world. All the forces of the Trotskyists and revolutionary workers are aimed at the starting, deepening and triumph of the worker-socialist revolution in Peru.
Against the repression of the murderous bourgeois state and its Fujimorist regime: The self-defense pickets must be generalized and centralized to form a workers-peasants’ militia!
For this huge, heroic and very necessary task, we need our own national workers’-peasants’ self-defense. Our enemies, the US, Spanish, and French imperialists and their junior partners, the Peruvian bosses, will not abandon the battlefield without a fight. Bagua has shown that, in spite of all those who do not want to recognize it.
The enemy is sharpening their weapons; they call on their auxiliary corps for help, the “buffalos” (the bloodthirsty thugs of the old union bureaucracy of the APRA party); they put them on the march on June 16 in front of the CGTP headquarters in Lima, under the attentive gaze of blood-thirsty Mantilla (Garcia’s secret police chief.) This gives them the legitimacy to act by applying the law that allows for the “simple citizens’ right to take someone under arrest” who is thought to be behaving “incorrectly.” Workers and poor peasants love peace, but in order to free ourselves and to end exploitation we are obliged to use violence and reply to iron with steel.
“Using violence,” the well-known treacherous leaders will say, “would leave us in a false position in the eyes of the people.” To disprove this fallacy, it is sufficient to remember: how many peaceful national marches have the construction workers staged, and how much support from the people have they won?
Compare this to the fight of the Amazon workers and poor peasants. Is it not true that the “wild” and “violent” Amazon fighters have won the empathy and the support of the exploited people and even of the well-off middle classes in the cities, as is shown by the thousands of private university students (only the children of the rich can go to those universi-ties,) who held a rally on June 11 in Lima and other cities (Trujillo, Chiclayo, etc.,) in support of them?
This means that to “go for broke,” i.e., using revolutionary methods, such as occu-pation of imperialist plants, self-defense pickets, etc., is the sure way to victory, and also the way to win over the rest of the exploited and the middle classes’ respect and support. In contrast, these same middle classes indifferently passed by each peaceful February rally of the construction workers’ federation in front of the offices of the World Labor Organization or the Ministry of Labor.
But the traitors don’t stop talking. In “La Primera,” the rag subsidized by petrodollars, Cesar Le-vano calls for the union bureaucracy and the “Bolivarians” to smash the working class fighters. He calls the so-called “workers guard” of the CP to give a good beating to the “infiltrated people” who fought back against the police battalions in Lima on June 11.
Another additional reason to throw down the old Stalinist union bureaucracy: instead of organizing revenge for the proletarian blood that was spilled, they plan a massacre against the fighters. We cannot fight with the threat of the servants of the bosses, this fifth-column shooting us from behind. It is imperative to guarantee our and our families’ lives. Every struggle we begin will have to confront the army’s guns or the handguns and the batons of the “buffaloes;” in addition to this, we will be chased and attacked by the union bureaucracy and its thugs.
Against the wild repression of the hounds sent by the bosses and imperialism, we must unite all the pickets in a unique Workers’ and Peasants’ National Self-Defense Committee. The “buffaloes” are a relatively minor nuisance: we can defeat them easily if we are determined to do so. The real problem lies in the army. The bourgeois armed forces are the essential support of the bosses’ state.
There are fake revolutionary clowns (like “Lucha Marxista” and “Tribuna clasista”) that believe the armed forces can be dissolved by decree, showing that they are frightened reformists despite their red phrases**. There are reformists like Mario Huaman (member of the Frente Unitario Revolucionario), or the ML19 or the PST-LIT, who say that we ought to befriend the police, and call for their “rights” to win them over as “allies.” Don’t pay at-tention to them, comrades.
All these “organizers of defeats” tell lies and poison the consciousness of the workers. The way to win over the soldier, to win his support, was been clearly pointed out long ago by that strategist of the October insurrection and creator of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, in his book
The History of the Russian Revolution: “…The more the soldiers in their mass are convinced that the rebels are really rebelling-that this is not a demonstration after which they will have to go back to the barracks and report, that this is a struggle to the death, that the people may win if they join them, and that this winning will not only guarantee impunity, but alleviate the lot of all-the more they realize this, the more willing they are to turn aside their bayonets, or go over with them to the people. In other words, the revolutionaries can create a break in the soldiers’ mood only if they themselves are actually ready to seize the victory at any price whatever, even the price of blood. And the highest deter-mination never can, or will, remain unarmed.(…) The street fighting began with the disarming of the hated Pharaohs (police), their revolvers passing into the hands of the rebels. The revolver by itself is a weak, almost toy-like weapon against the muskets, rifles, machine guns and cannon of the enemy. But are these weapons genuinely in the hands of the enemy? To settle this question the workers demanded arms. It was a psychological question. But even in an insurrection psychic processes are inseparable from material ones. The way to the soldier’s rifle leads through the revolver taken from the Pharaoh.” -- Leon Trotsky,
The History of the Russian Revolution, Volume One: The Overth-row of Czarism, Chapter 7: Five Days (February 23-27, 1917),written in 1930.
The workers and peasants’ congress must centralize the already existing self-defense pickets in a Workers’ and Peasants’ National Self-Defense Committee against the murderous, anti-exploited-people caste of Fujimorist officers commanding the Peruvian army. For the revolu-tionary general strike it is imperative that we can count on organs to defend us and be able to show to the rank and file soldiers, who are our class brothers under military rule, that we are ready and have decided to go to the end. Only then will the soldier put aside his doubts, choose to support his class brothers and sisters and join the struggle against the regime that is starving the people and selling out the nation.
It is necessary to call for the formation of rank and file soldiers’ committees that disavow the officers’ caste and send their soldier delegates to the workers’ and peasants’ congress. Destroy the murderous officers’ caste of the Fujimorist Peruvian army! Form workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ committees! Governments have come and gone these past few years, but the core of the Fujimorist regime hasn’t changed.
The recent “pageantry” of Fujimori’s trial was the cover for the impunity enjoyed by the murderous regime and its components. The anti-working class repressive forces strike here and there and continue going thoroughly unpunished, the courts are mere offices of the transnationals and the bourgeois parliament a servile body where corrupt hand-raisers legitimate everything imperialism asks for. Every struggle of the exploited is answered by the regime with bullets and jail.
Freedom for the more than 8000 political prisoners who live locked away and are tortured in the dungeons of the Fujimorist regime! In order to achieve justice for our working class, peasant and student martyrs: Workers’ and popular tribunals that punish the murderers of the workers and the poor peasants! For the dissolution of the entire state repressive apparatus! For the dissolution of the bosses’ justice and its judges, who are on the payrolls of the transnationals!
For a new revolutionary regroupment of the vanguard to centralize our forces and pave the way for the revolutionary general strike!
Thus, it is imperative to organize a superior and centralized action of the masses that will be able to win with one fist the demands of the exploited. To achieve what the exploited need, it is imperative to centralize right now the struggle committees already in existence, which were born in the heat of combat and which are at the head of the most militant and dedicated sections of the proletarians and poor peasants. It is imperative to set up a Fighting Front to guarantee the road to the revolutionary general strike in order to win the bread, the wages, the jobs, and the land, to kick the transnationals out of the country and to defeat the government and its Fujimorist regime.
The Andahuaylas Struggle Committee, which is centralizing the workers and poor pea-sants of the region, who are on a war footing; the Bagua fighting organizations and all those who are also struggling all over the Amazon region; the joint struggle committee of the metalworkers and the exploited people of La Oroya; the combative unions and strug-gle committees of Moquegua, etc. have gained all the authority to call right now for the formation of rank and file assemblies of all the unions and fighting organizations of workers and poor peasants, to set up a Fighting Front to prevent a new betrayal and centralize the forces of the exploited to march on Lima without delay and open the road to a general strike to achieve all of our demands.
We have to take advantage of the call for a national strike on July 8 and organize without delay the revolutionary general strike lead-ing up to the downfall of Garcia government and the Fujimorist-FTA regime. The left, which claims to be for the working class and socialism, must break right now their sub-ordination to the bourgeoisie of Humala and to the union bureaucracy, and dedicate all of their forces to the service of creating a Fighting Front now.
They speak in their papers and statements about “the urgent task of unifying the workers’ struggles with those of the Amazonian Indians to make Garcia go away.” But in fact, they stand for unity only to subordinate our fighting organizations to the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisie. Thus, currents such as El Militante propose the formation of a Fighting Command together with the Nationalist, that is, together with the national Bolivarian bourgeoisie, which tries to use the workers’ and peasants’ blood in the service of their business deals as agents of French impe-rialism.
In the same way, the LIT vindicates the formation of the Front for the Defense of Life and Sovereignty, a new class collaborationist organ headed by the Nationalist Party together with the regional “indigenous” bourgeoisie.
Meanwhile, currents like the Argentinean PTS copy the same politics of the LIT (with a left-colored version), demanding a wide and democratic coordination of the rank and file unions, the indigenous and peasant organizations… with the regional fronts headed by the regional bourgeoisie and Humala.
These are the left wing of the World Social Forum and its policies of class collaboration. All of them, breaking with the Trotskyist program and with the Permanent Revolution theory, adopt openly the “Maoist theory” of the “main contradiction,” which says that above the antagonism between proletarians and bourgeoisie, there is the antagonism or contradiction of “nation vs. imperialism”; this fake “theory” claims that the national bourgeoisie that poses as “nationalist” (i.e., defenders of the oppressed nation) in oppressed countries like Peru, is capable of playing a progressive role, so that this “left” subordinates to that bourgeoisie. This is the root of their appeals for the formation of “anti-government,” “anti-Garcia,” “anti neo-liberal” fronts.
Their politics serve to subordinate the proletarians to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie of Humala. Enough is enough! This policy of subordination to the bourgeoisie ruined the Peruvian proleta-rians’ prospects many times in the revolutionary uprising of workers and peasants in the late ‘70s. The Peruvian masses, turning to the left, went to the FOCEP (Worker-Peasant-Student-Peoples’ Front), which was led by currents that claimed to be Trotskyist, with renowned left leader Hugo Blanco at their head.
But those currents put all their strength and the authority won before the workers into the service of the bourgeois regime, renouncing the development of the “defense fronts”-–true embryos of soviets that in those years were mushrooming all over Peru. Instead, they placed all of their bets on the constituent assembly. Far from using the constituent assembly as a platform to expand and centralize the organs of direct democracy of the masses and the workers’ militia, they subordinated to the constituent assembly the entire revolutionary drive of the exploited masses.
This policy prevented the proletariat from being the chief of the alliance between workers and peasants. This alliance-–submerged in total impotence--finally broke up and allowed the total decomposition of the conditions for revolution.
Today, the renegades of Trotskyism retrace once more their steps from those days. Break with your subordination to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie! We call on the left organizations that claim to be for the working class and the exploited people, the Movimiento Cumbre de los Pueblos (Movement of the Summit of the Peoples), which influ-ences the Amazonian organizations; the PST-LIT in Loreto; the Liga Socialista (Socialist League) of Cusco, which influences the construction workers and students in that city; the Partido de la Clase Trabajadora (Working Class Party) influential with the miners’ rank and file, and on the Lambayeque regional of the CGTP; the FUR (Revolutionary United Front) that influences the university students in Lima; the wide tendency Huaynalaya, which is the opposition to the SUTEP (teachers’ union) leadership and is present in the universities.
We call on all of them to break their subordination to the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, and begin working to centralize and unify democratically our fighting organizations to set up a Fighting Front that will put all of its forces to the service of defeating the union bureaucracy of the CGTP and creat-ing a workers’ and peasants’ rank and file congress. They criticize the bureaucratic leadership of the CGTP; they say they stand for the unity of the masses.
Well, we call on them to do the walking like they do the talking. If they don’t, they will be exposed before the eyes of the proletarians and poor peasants. This “left” will prove to be not interested in using their influence to defeat the CGTP bureaucracy. Instead, they will be seen as avid runners in the race for its replacement by a new “left” bureaucracy, and, if necessary, the bringing of Hugo Blanco to their head again to support Humala’s Bolivarian bourgeoisie alongside the Stalinists--who backed Toledo so that he could sign the FTA—just like today when they back Garcia against & despite the outrage of the exploited.
We internationalists do not trust the leaders of the parties of the renegades of Trotskyism. They have been backing and supporting the farcical Bolivarian revolution which has been so ruinous for the international proletariat. However, we do trust the honest workers and youth in their rank and file; we trust their strength and their eagerness to fight for the victory of the proletarian revo-lution. So we call on them to build a new revolutionary regroupment formation of the vanguard to defeat the treacherous leadership of the CGTP; and to set up the dual power of workers and peasants; to go forward to a revolutionary general strike to defeat the government and the re-gime and open the way for the second Peruvian revolution.
The fight to set up a revolutionary leadership for the Peruvian proletariat is becoming red hot
The world crisis has shown that the reformists, from social democrats and Stalinists to fake Trotskyists, are used by their masters-–who pay for their privileges, their high salaries in the unions and parliaments--for constraining the fight of the masses who are trying to reply to the imperialist attack with socialist revolutions. That is why to the usual work of the union bureaucracy of the PC, Patria Roja and SP in the CGTP heights, to support the government and the Fujimorist regime, new reformist parties are now set up.
These become a new obstacle to the centralization of the workers and the people in organs of direct democracy and self defense, on the way to seizing power. The FUR, the “Cumbre de los Pueblos” (Summit of the Peoples) Movement, the Party of the Working Class, etc., are only reproducing the schema of the “anti-capitalist parties” in the service of the regime which has been exposed many times in Latin America, and is repeated today in the imperialist countries, with the NPA of O. Besancenot in France and the rest of the con-traptions of the so-called “European anti-capitalist left.”
Putting themselves to the left of the old CPs and SPs, they cover the latter’s left side to prevent the masses as long as possible from throwing down these treacherous leaderships and, in the meantime, they get ready to be the next reformist leaderships.
The Trotskyist renegades play a principal role in the formation of these new reformist parties, having turned themselves into Castroite-Stalinists, as they have broken with the program and the principles of the Fourth International of 1938. It is enough to say that the Lambertites, who are the leadership of the Partido de la Clase Trabajadora in Peru, are supporting Luis Castillo, showing him as a consistent revolutionary. (Castillo is the general secretary of the mine and metal workers federation, and a strike-breaker who sold out and be-trayed the miners of Marcona a few months ago, and who is now betraying and selling out the miners of Doe Run-La Oroya).
We are against the politics of the renegades of Trotskyism who were the cause of cruel defeats for the proletarians and the poor peasants in the late ‘70s. When these renegades are plotting, together with the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, a similar trap to that which ruined the masses in those years, and are preparing for a bourgeois renewal in the government-–and even for the old trap of a new Constituent Assembly–-to strangle the struggle of the exploited, the fight of the interna-tionalist Trotskyists to give the Peruvian working class the revolutionary leadership that it de-serves and needs to triumph is becoming red hot.
Our forces are still weak, but the program we fight for is strong. Gathering together around the lessons of the hottest developments of the world class struggle-–the Bolivian revolution, the Greek struggle, the struggles of the proletarians in the French colonies, the Palestinian resis-tance, etc.--we are conquering fighting for a program that, today and in the future, allows us to establish the necessary links with the revolutionary fighters all over the country to build a revolu-tionary internationalist fighting party with them.
A new generation of revolutionaries already exists. Years of struggle that combine both the eco-nomic and the political struggle, the minimal demands and the fight against the regime, give to this new generation of fighters the class consciousness, ferocity and hatred against the exploiters that are necessary to carry the masses forward. That’s why the bourgeois say in fear that this new generation of revolutionaries does not believe in the solution of “their demands via the procedures established by the state… no routines are built for negotiation, they do not respect the standards of institutionalized politics” (La República, Lima, June 14, 2009).
What this young generation of revolutionaries needs is an immaculate flag around which to organize. The Trotskyists of the FLTI put our modest forces to the service of gathering together the Peru-vian revolutionary workers and youth. However, this will not be possible without a ruthless fight against the old CPs and the new “anti-capitalist parties.” As we have said, we know that we have only the force of a small nucleus of revolutionary internationalists.
But these forces are put to the service of setting up in every corner of the country direct democracy, self-determination and self-defense organs of the fighting workers and exploited, expanding them and centralizing them at a national level. We know that in those organs, under the vigilant eyes of the masses, both leaders and programs are put to the test at every moment, and very soon traitors and reformists are exposed. The wolves in lamb’s skin who prepare to strangle the fight of the masses are unmasked.
Even a small nucleus of revolutionaries can quickly increase its forces because in those organs the masses can understand the correctness of our program and our strategy through their own experience and get rid of the treacherous leaders. The condition for that change is that the revolutionaries tell the masses frankly at each step who their allies are and who their enemies are, and do not stop our ruthless fight, even for an instant, against every overt or covert enemy of the proletariat.
But the building up of a revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist party of the Peruvian prole-tariat is not a “national” task, just as the action of the treacherous and reformist leaderships is not “national”--on the contrary, they are systematically and very precisely centralized on a continental level, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, in the meetings of the World Social Forum, in its encounters and summits, under the blessing of Chavez, the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisies and the Cuban restorationist Castroite bureaucracy.
A revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist leadership of the Peruvian working class will only be able to be born as an inseparable part of the fight to put on its feet a revolutionary general staff that unifies the class-conscious and revolutionary workers of the world, in the backward countries as well as in the imperialist powers, to defeat the counterrevolutionary general staffs, guided by the legacy and the program of the Fourth International of 1938.
We have to re-group at an international level all the revolutionaries who show the same ferocity, audacity and central-ity shown by the counterrevolutionary general staffs and their hirelings within the workers’ movement: reformists, Stalinists, social democrats, and former Trotskyists. We come from a common internationalist congress of the Trotskyists of the South African WIVL, the HRS from the US, comrades from Sao Paulo who come from a split with the sister organiza-tion of the PTS in Brazil; the Núcleo Revolucionario Internacionalista (Internationalist Revolutionary Nucleus) of Argentina, together with groups in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, Chile and Peru that have integrated the FLT. That congress discussed and resolved the setting up of the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction, or ILTF.
This is a small but important milestone on the way of Trotskyists marching towards building up a revolutionary General Staff, an international center like the one of the Third International under Lenin or of the Fourth Interna-tional in 1938. We call upon all honest revolutionary fighters to join us!
July, 2009
NOTES * The Digemin, General Direction (Leading Office) of the Interior (Home Security) Ministry, “is considered the most powerful intelligence organ in the country. It receives the support of the US Embassy and generates strategic intelligence in all the areas” (Caretas Magazine, Lima, June 11, 2009). Under the government of Alan Garcia, AgustÃn Mantilla came back to the intelligence services. Mantilla, Garcia’s right hand, is widely known for organizing death squads in the APRA government of 1985-1990 (first Garcia administration). ** “For the elimination of the bourgeois army and police through the seizing of power” (“Tribuna clasista,” February, 2009). That is, they propose the seizing of power in a peaceful way, without destroying the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie. ---------------------
Box 1:
The meaning of the struggle of the Peruvian proletariat for the Latin American working classThe global economic crisis of imperialist financial capital has clearly demonstrated, before the eyes of the exploited, the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist system. The proletarians have responded to the attack by the bourgeoisie--imperialist as well as semi-colonial and colonial, who seek to make the workers, exploited and oppressed peoples in the world pay for the crisis--with enormous revolutionary battles in different areas of the planet. Before the specter of the proletarian revolution, the international bourgeoisies have centralized the forces of the world labor aristocracies and bureaucracies and their reformist parties in order to prevent a true gene-ralized revolutionary uprising of the world masses that could make the exploiters pay for the crisis they have caused.
Therefore, only for the moment, the reformist leaderships of the proletariat and their parties have succeeded in containing the masses in their revolutionary struggles in Greece, France, Madagascar, Martinique and Guadeloupe, to name only a few. The world bourgeoisie, frightened by the revolutionary action of the masses in the midst of the crisis, leans on the help of the treacherous leaderships of the world proletariat. The bourgeoisie has sharpened its senses and is giving new counterrevolutionary blows. We have seen this in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we are seeing it in Honduras today. Imperialism is reacting all the way down the line.
We are facing a world situation which has a decisive confrontation between the classes in the works, because not only the entire world proletariat but also some imperialist power/s must pay for the cost of the crisis. Under these conditions, we are witnessing revolutionary flashes on the part of the masses. On the edges of the enormous contradictions of the world situation, there are fissures that creak and break, incapable of containing the hatred and the legitimate reaction of the masses facing such terrible conditions of exploitation and unheard-of suffering.
Today, the breach is opened in Peru, where workers and peasants try to stand up and fight back. The international character of the mass struggles in Peru is shown by the fact that the Peruvian workers and poor peasants are questioning everything. From their barricade combats, violent confrontations, land and oil well occupations, from their strikes and pickets, the Peruvian masses are telling the international proletariat that under the conditions imposed by the capitalists’ bankruptcy, if one wants to achieve anything, even something as elemental as daily bread, jobs, wages, land, education and health care, the masses are obliged to fight for everything against the transnationals and imperialism, against their puppet governments and regimes, and against the capitalists’ property.
Therefore, the struggle of the Peruvian masses lives today in the factory sit-ins with bosses and managers taken as hostages that we saw in France; the workers and youth barricades in Greece; the worker and peasant militias of Madagascar; the revolutionary resistance struggles like those in Palestine and the Middle East; the mass struggles for freedom from imperialist co-lonialism in Guadeloupe and Martinique; and in the struggle of the workers and exploited masses in Honduras against the coup of Micheletti and the Yankee transnationals. It cannot be denied that the coup in Honduras, a maquila of the Yankees, like Peru, is another answer of Yankee imperialism to the possible rebellion of one of its quasi-colonies of the FTA, Peru.
Today all of these struggles are alive in the rebellion of the working class and the peasants in Peru. The forces of the Latin American proletariat that try to face the farcical “Bolivarian revolu-tion” forces, to be able to break all the counterrevolutionary pacts and agreements between the Bolivarian bourgeoisie and imperialism designed to defeat the working class, resist and nestle there. The Peruvian workers and peasants in revolt have in their hands the key for the Bolivian proletariat to stand up again and recover their fighting organizations like the COB from the hands of the treacherous class collaborationist bureaucracy, breaking with Evo Morales and smashing fascism.
If these forces can develop in a revolutionary direction, they will question the counterrevolutio-nary international politics of the Cuban Castroite bureaucracy. That is why the Castro brothers and their restorationist gang support Humala in Peru; just because they have to prevent a revo-lutionary process that questions the settlement of the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution,” which blocked the victory of the proletarian revolution on the continent, concentrating their counterre-volutionary forces in Argentina, Ecuador and fundamentally in Bolivia, to make the bourgeoisies in crisis prevail in spite of the revolutionary assaults of the masses. The Castroites support Humala because the eventual opening of the Peruvian revolution would mean an enormous impulse for the Cuban workers and peasants to revolt against the process of capitalist restoration that has been started by the Castros and is marching on in the isle led by them and by the imperialist butcher Obama.
As we have said, today the Peruvian workers and poor peasants are showing the exploited all over the planet that under the conditions of capitalist bankruptcy, to achieve even the most mi-nimal demand it is necessary to fight for the whole: for revolution.
Therefore, Peru puts into question the kernel of the politics and the strategies of the World Social Forum and its left wing, the renegades of Trotskyism who openly speak out for class collaboration, such as in the Encu-entro Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Trabajadores (Latin American and Caribbean Encounter of Workers = ELAC) led by the Morenoite LIT-CI to strangle the left wing of the proletariat, from the Latin American to the North American vanguard, represented by Local 10 of the ILWU, the Dockworkers of San Francisco who led the struggle against the imperialist war and the struggle for the rights of the most exploited workers, the blacks and the immigrants.
The fight of the Peruvian masses must be the point where the Latin American working class digs in and stops retreating in order to be able to impose a true counteroffensive of the masses that exposes definitively and reduces to fragments the farcical “Bolivarian Revolution,” and re-opens the way to the proletarian revolution. This is the decisive importance of the Peruvian de-velopments for the international proletariat. The Latin American and world working class must stand up alongside the Peruvian exploited!
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Box 2
The most internationalist task for the Peruvian proletariat: To defeat the coup in Honduras, to destroy the regime of the FTA
The Peruvian workers and exploited masses are tied to the yoke of Yankee imperialism like our working class Honduran brothers and sisters. They must rise up for the defeat of the coup in Honduras by the workers and the exploited masses with proletarian methods: A general Strike to overthrow the dictatorship and all the institutions where the coup was prepared and launched. For the destruction of the Honduran parliament and general staff! It was the Yankee imperialists who organized the coup. For the expropriation without payment and under workers’ control of the maquilas and the mines of the Yankee butchers!
For the destruction of the Yankee military base and for the defeat of the marines! Let’s build up workers’ and poor peasants’ committees to organize the revolutionary general strike. From the committees and the militias the soldiers could be called to change sides and join their class brothers and sisters. The tragedy is that our leaderships subordinate us to the bourgeoisies, Bolivarian or not, and to Obama and the “democratic front” set up by them, supposedly to “fight against the coup," when it was Yankee imperialism itself which organized the coup and the dictatorship imposed with blood and fire.
The vanguard of the workers and the exploited masses must impose the break of our fighting organizations with this “democratic front.” Let’s break with Zelaya, Chavez, Lula and Obama! Let’s call upon the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana), the oil workers’ trade unions of Ecuador, the Conlutas, Local 10 of the ILWU, and other trade unions and leaders who met in the ELAC last year, to break with the “democratic front” and to organize a continental general strike for the victory of our Honduran class brothers and sisters! In Peru, the workers and exploited masses will give an important push to that task by uprising and demolishing the Fujimorist regime of the FTA: The Peruvian revolution must be set in mo-tion!
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Box 3
The LIT and its PSTU, with CONLUTAS and the ELAC, grovel at the feet of Lula, Humala and the bloodstained monopolies The PST, Peruvian section of the LIT, calls on the exploited masses to “reaffirm the unity achieved in the Front for Life and Sovereignty, uniting the workers and popular demands and to give the government a due date to meet these demands, by the CGTP’s approbation of the Na-tional Strike for next July7-8-9.” The Front for Life and Sovereignty is a movement organized by the Nationalist Party of Humala alongside the regional “indigenous” bourgeoisie who, in their confrontation with Alan Garcia, aim to carry the exploited masses to the feet of the oppositionist bourgeoisie.
Once more the LIT is supporting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie, this time in Peru. However, its job is far from being completed. The LIT and its mother party, the Brazilian PSTU, which conduct CONLUTAS and the ELAC, reproduce the statement of the PST and do not say even a word about the enormous interests of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, junior partner to the imperialist mo-nopolies that are sacking Peru and are threatened by the uprising of the masses.
Threatened because Total-Petrobras, the construction companies like Odebrecht, Camargo Correa, Andrade Gutierrez, Queiroz Galvao, the OAS Company, together with Eletrobras (ener-gy); steelmaker Gerdau; Cia Vale do Rio Doce (iron mining), Ocean Air (Airline); Natura (cos-metics based on rainforest species); AmBev (drinks); Votorantim (cellulose, paper and mining) and Azaleia (shoes)-–to name only a bunch of the most important ones--which are sacking the gas, oil, mining and other resources of the Peruvian Amazon; they also have in their hands the infrastructure business like the inter-oceanic highway, 1000 km of roads that connect Brazil with the Pacific Ocean ports; the enlarging of the Callao port on the Peruvian Pacific coast; the hy-droelectric power plants that are constructed as well as those in project, etc.
The CONLUTAS and its ELAC, under the leadership of the PSTU/LIT-–with their miserable si-lence--are covering up the business deals of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, junior partners of the imperialist monopolies settled in the MERCOSUR/MERCOSUL, of French Total in the first place-- have their tentacles firmly engaged grabbing Peru, as well as in Ecuador and Bolivia. This yellow bureaucracy with all their forces is preventing the Brazilian proletariat from going to the streets to fight to help their class brothers and sisters who have revolted in Amazonia, on the other side of the common border, against the same monopolies that enslave the Brazilian proletarians for the sake of making them pay for the crisis created by imperialism
These renegades of Trotskyism who have usurped the flags of the Fourth international for decades, they are the ones who prevent the exploited in the great urban working class concentrations in Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, etc., from taking into their own hands their internationalist tasks and launching their war cry: Expropriate without compensation and under workers’ control Petrobras, the construction companies, the Gerdau, and all the companies that are sacking Peru, Brazil, etc.!
Set up assemblies of all the workers, land-less peasants and combative students’ organizations to break their subordination to Lula, PT, CUT and to pronounce immediately about the Peru events and the internationalist tasks for the Brazilian exploited! So CONLUTAS and the ELAC—which have not even promoted a minute of a solidarity strike with the fighting masses who were massacred by the lackey Peruvian government, though they lead hundreds of workers’ organizations (unions, factory committees, movements, grass-roots working class organizations, etc.) on the continent--do not fight on the side of the struggles of the Peruvian workers and peasants.
On the contrary, they are an additional obstacle which prevents the re-opening of revolution in South America, and they take special care to impede the reopening of the Bolivian revolution. CONLUTAS and the ELAC, in the hands of PSTU/LIT, are covering the backs of the slave-owing Brazilian bourgeoisie and the monopolies that have their hands soaked in the blood of the Peruvian exploited; because there were the Brazilian bosses and their imperialist chiefs who, from Brasilia, financed the massacre perpetrated in Bagua by the murderous lackey Alan Gar-cia; now, from their Folha de Sao Paulo – they commend not to be too vocal “for the moment Brazil must not comment on the crisis in Peru, but the situation is being followed by the interna-tional advisers of the Planalto...." (= Brasilia) (Folha de Sao Paulo, Fávia Marreiro, June 11, 2009)
The Morenoites, taking advantage of all the weight of the organizations they control and their political influence, are building a new fence around the struggle of the exploited Peruvian masses-–in the same way they did with the Bolivian revolution—by helping the Bolivarian lea-derships defeat the struggle of the Peruvian proletarians and peasants against imperialism and its Peruvian and Brazilian lackeys, and keeping the power in their hands.
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NOTE THIS BOX IS DRAFTED BY THE HRS FOR DISCUSSION IT IS NOT THE OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE FLTI. Box 4
The Internationalists' Duty to the Indigenous Amazonian Peoples; Defending Biodiversity is Defending Humanity From Barbarism! We cannot remain silent about Capital's destruction of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru and Brazil or about its dire consequences for all of humanity. The indigenous masses shed their blood fighting to expel the imperialists and their local Garcia regime puppets from the Amazonas Department, igniting class battles across Peru. The indigenous peoples demand protection for the rain forest and the protection and preservation of its biodiversity. We must take their de-mands and inscribe them on our own banner. Droughts of increasing duration are drying out the Amazon region. As it dries up it can less and less support the lives of the indigenous peoples. A dry Amazon will bring death and catastrophes for the entire human race. We can track the approach of this barbarism by the disappearance of flowering plants here, the extinction of certain animals there. The imperialists and their local partners and errand boys are responsible for this destruction. This is a monstrous crime against the working class of the entire world, a depraved indifference to human life on a scale impossible to quantify. Peru is the right place and now is the best time to wreck their destructive invasion! We say KILL IMPERIALISM, NOT THE AMAZON! DRIVE THE IMPERIALISTS AND THEIR LOCAL CAPITALIST HENCHMEN OUT OF THE AMAZON AND OFF OF THE CONTINENT! FOR A WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' GOVERNMENT TO DEFEND THE AMAZON'S BIODIVERSITY!
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