Peru: Down with the Fujimorist Regime!

 

The defeat of Fujimori Jn and her fascist-leaning party in July 2021, by Pedro Castillo of Perú Libre, a middle-class electoral movement, part of the right-wing reformist movement, was short lived. Dina Boluarte replaced Castillo as President  on December 7, 2022. She was sworn in as the country's first female president following Congress's impeachment of Castillo, who was arrested after attempting to dissolve the legislature. Boluarte set out to create a Fujimorist regime of the far right that has continuously held power since, in an attempt to prop-up the fiction of parliamentary democracy to prepare the way for a fascist coup. By the end of 2025, the international situation had become pre-revolutionary - the ruling classes must resort to fascism to survive, while the working masses must take state power. Here we reprint two articles from Permanent Revolution, Peru, which documents the impact on Peru over this period of the relative decline of US imperialism and the task for workers of the hemisphere to organize an international revolutionary party for what we call the New American Revolution.  (ILTT)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peru: Down with Parliament and Down with Boluarte! 

Boluarte replaces Castillo on 7 December 2022 [ILTT]

Just four days later, the shooting of two young men by police in Andahuaylas became the bloody baptism of Dina Boluarte's government. It didn't take long for her to resemble the successive presidents known for their brutality. While Castillo had strengthened his already neoliberal and repressive government with Aníbal Torres, a Belaunde sympathizer and former collaborator of dictator Fujimori at the University of San Marcos, Boluarte decided to entrust the government to Pedro Angulo, an ultra-neoliberal linked to Kuczynski's extremist circles, whose first task will be to intensify repression through the regional states of emergency declared for this purpose, in collaboration with Alberto Otárola, Humala's former minister. 

The dictatorship sought by Castillo through his failed coup of December 7th would have constituted another stage in this phase. Gassing, beating, arresting, and killing are, for any government that administers a capitalist state for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, an unavoidable necessity. “The government will massacre again, because its true allies are the military and police; the far right will continue to impose the path of a coup d'état, a reactionary coup d'état that will inevitably come about sooner or later, one way or another, if the independent mobilization of workers fails to get rid of Castillo.” (Permanent Revolution, May 24, 2022) And indeed, the attempted coup took place.

A victim of despair, Castillo was unable to confront two enemies more dangerous than the votes of the Congressional majority: the exposure of the corrupt network of family friendships he had fostered and the deteriorating living conditions of the majority of the population. A 9% year-on-year inflation rate, entire sectors with declining indices such as mining, agriculture, and fishing—all the hallmarks of an inexorable slide toward poverty. In these circumstances, Castillo opted for the policies of all his predecessors: in Washington, he reaffirmed his loyalty to transnational magnates, declaring, "We will give them peace of mind ", and praising "support for private enterprise ", while simultaneously submitting to Congress a "consensus" proposal that called for greater police powers and the establishment of a bicameral legislature.

 

Confronted from the outset with popular opposition to his obvious right-wing leanings, Castillo had to make some minor concessions to the working class and regional minorities in order to avoid alienating all sectors. This situation was exploited by the union and political bureaucracy of the pseudo-left to indulge in a cynical Castillism, which constituted a serious subjective and organizational obstacle for a mobilized segment of the masses that rejected the worst reactionary forces represented in Congress but failed to grasp the full reactionary dimension of the government. It took these leaders fifteen months to change course. They did voice some criticism of the executive branch, but they continued to defend it. The threat of a fascist coup served as a pretext to paralyze the workers' and people's movement and condemn it to repeated defeat at the hands of the bourgeoisie and transnational bosses. Luis Villanueva, general secretary of the FTCCP [the construction federation of the CGTP, the majority labor union] and of the so-called Peruvian "Communist " Party, agreed with Oscar Caipo, president of CONFIEP [the employers' organization], to maintain the deplorable situation of workers at CADE [the class collaboration organization]. The PCP and PC-Patria Roja leadership of the CGTP praised the imperialist Organization of American States and its pseudo-democratic charade, placing themselves at its service just as they had during the Fujimori dictatorship. This entire pro-capitalist caste within the movement of the exploited is the standard-bearer of the fallacious "participatory democracy " and the enemy of the proletarian class.

 

Roadblocks, mobilizations, and clashes are currently taking place in many regions against the far-right forces that dominate Congress, seeking to paralyze this organ of capitalist domination in order to force new general elections. But elections in this pseudo-democracy will never bring about the real and historic political defeat of the class enemy, and the workers do not yet have an organ to oppose the bourgeois parliament. This organ must be a People's National Assembly that represents all the oppressed and fights to seize power in the country. People's assemblies, struggle committees, and self-defense committees in every district and province are the means to build this power, without which there will be no present or future with justice and freedom. Let us organize ourselves into a revolutionary party and fight for a new workers' state!

 

An unlimited general strike to seize a government of the workers, peasants and the people!

 

December 12, 2022

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peru: Re-organising, confronting the Regime and Defeating it!

By October 2025, the working peoples’ vanguard and youth of the country had become exasperated by the Fujimorist regime under Boluarte and her associates, and rose up in protests to bring down the bourgeois regime. Highly discredited by the acute crisis, Congress dismissed Boluarte and handed power to Jeri with the task of suppressing the masses and maintaining the same regime until the change of government on July 28, now under growing pressure of the terminal crisis and Trump’s regime attempts to counter China's inroads in the hemisphere, regaining control of Peru, shutting the backdoor of the Americas to its BRIC rivals. (ILTT) 

From Boluarte to Jerí, the regime that emerged from the Fujimorist coup celebrated its third anniversary by imposing a succession of puppets on the people and extending the state of emergency in the capital for 30 days, as a guarantee against any popular response to its project of widespread impoverishment.

The regime of corporate and political mafias rules a country that has been mired for decades in plunder, corruption, crime, toxic mining, drug trafficking, rampant deforestation, and now extortion and mercenary activities, all at its whim. What concrete responses does it offer to the worsening needs of the working masses? For example, the imminent decree for a " definitive restructuring " of the privatization of Petroperú, dismantled in the 1990s by the dictatorship of Fujimori Sr., the precursor to the current dictatorship. Petroperú was relentlessly sabotaged by the ruling class to justify its privatization. For example, by spending billions of soles on the purchase of vehicles and military equipment, such as aircraft and combat submarines—the latter under a contract with South Korea, a key player in the American imperialist order in Asia. This is something the upper class does not neglect in order to maintain its power-sharing relationship with the corrupt and murderous military establishment.

 

Trump himself sent a proposal to the US Congress to designate Peru as a non-NATO strategic ally, in accordance with agreements the United States has with Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and Chile on security and defense, trade, drug trafficking, and migration. Foreign Ministers Marco Rubio (United States) and Hugo de Zela (Peru) met in Washington earlier this month to declare a “convergence of regional security and defense priorities ” stemming from the new national security strategy approved by the US government. The following week, a US delegation of “security specialists” arrived in Lima with the mission of “advising” the government of Jerí and strengthening strategic cooperation.

 

In short, Trump and his fascist team secured the active support of the Peruvian state for their intense policy aimed at creating a scenario of world war between the Western (NATO) and Eastern (China-Russia) imperialist blocs. " Deepening economic and trade relations " and " promoting new investment opportunities in strategic sectors such as critical minerals and infrastructure " were logically part of this renewed bourgeois subservience, according to the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement, while 2,000 kilometers from its own shores, the US Coast Guard seized ships laden with Venezuelan oil and its air force had already murdered over a hundred ship crew members with the direct complicity of the puppet governments of the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and the imperialist Netherlands through its overseas provinces (Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire).

 

The bourgeoisie and its dominant far-right wing hope to easily boast of the constitutionality of their regime after the elections next April, having resorted to the shameless trick of restoring the bicameral system explicitly rejected in the 2018 referendum. At the same time, they will seek to re-establish a clear majority in Congress, which will continue to include a significant number of direct representatives of its various mafias. But that's not all. The bourgeoisie also still needs an institutional buffer for its reactionary plans, which the various leaderships of the popular trade union bureaucracies and the proletarian and petty-bourgeois political apparatuses provide with considerable opportunism. Immersed, as always, in the electoral carnival, the entire pseudo-liberal left vies with pathetic enjoyment for the attention of an oppressed people whom it has deserted for almost a century, this time under three different neo-liberal guises: neo-Ollantism, Castillism and progressivism.

 

The languishing vestiges of traditional Stalinism, represented in the mass movement by the CGTP's high bureaucracy, bear historical responsibility for the defeat of the uprising in the South and other Central and Northern provinces in 2023. They refused, as they have throughout their history of betrayal, to lead the working class and the exploited toward the overthrow of the existing regime and the establishment of a revolutionary proletarian power that would crush the murderous ruling class. The indifference or rejection they have repeatedly faced from the most conscious and combative sectors of the workforce is once again being expressed, including at the ballot box.

 

Down with the Fujimori dictatorship, lackey of imperialism.

Let us strengthen the mass movement to build genuine organs of class power.

Unitary struggle committees, popular assemblies, defense fronts, self-defense columns… towards a national people's assembly.

Let us forge the revolutionary party of the workers' vanguard.

Workers' and people's government!

 

December 30 2025

 

[Note: The ILTT does not use the term 'people' but rather 'workers' when referring to assemblies, or governments. For us, 'workers' is inclusive of all those who labor for a living, (e.g., domestic workers, the unemployed, peasants etc and, of course, those employed in wage labor.]

https://luchamarxista.blogspot.com/2022/12/

https://luchamarxista.blogspot.com/2025/12/

 

 

 

On the Current World Situation

 

The current world situation is pre-revolutionary. The bourgeoisie cannot govern through democracy and must resort to fascism, and the working class cannot live without world socialist revolution. How we will get there becomes the urgent question of reviving the revolutionary party and the program to end fascism and build socialism. We present our vision of how the conjuncture is caused by a terminal crisis, leading to wars and counter-revolutions, driven by rivalry between the two imperialist blocs for leadership in the distribution of the global economy. Next, we present our program for a new revolutionary international, the only alternative that can resolve the crisis of leadership, paving the way for socialist revolution and restoring the balance between nature and society.

Terminal crisis means that capitalism has reached the limits of its capacity to generate sufficient profits to accumulate capital. Concretely, this means a fall in labor productivity caused by an increase in organic composition (an increase in the capital/value ratio), where constant capital, which does not increase capital, surpasses variable capital, which increases value. Hence the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, the LTRPF. This law is uneven, affecting the most advanced capitals (USA and EU) before those that have recently emerged, such as China and Russia, where the cost/value (C/V) ratio has not yet drastically imposed the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Therefore, competition between imperialist powers favors those that produce sufficient value to increase profits at the expense of those that can no longer produce sufficient value to prevent the fall in the rate of profit. 

The LTRPF expresses itself as the struggle for total value produced. The winners can increase profits by economically outperforming the losers. The losers (the US and the EU) are forced to resort to war, economically, politically, and militarily. This law has developed and intensified since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, when growing economic and political rivalry inevitably led the US to go to war against “radical Islam” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Furthermore, after 2008, the US began targeting its existential rivals, the emerging powers Russia and China.

The capitalist crisis leads to the destruction of productive forces worldwide and widespread attacks by bourgeois governments against workers. As a result, enormous migratory waves emerge across all continents, working conditions deteriorate, the environment is irreversibly destroyed, the bourgeois democratic regime is in crisis, and fascist groups emerge, attempting to channel mass dissatisfaction. We can see that the terminal crisis forces a zero-sum (potentially nuclear) military confrontation between the declining West and the rising East.

The pursuit of natural resources and commercial and technological monopolies is fueling a new neocolonial race to destroy and disintegrate entire peoples and territories. It is in this context that we understand the genocide in Palestine, the bombings against Venezuela, the wars in Africa sponsored by imperialist powers, the threats against Colombia, etc.

Faced with terminal crises and the destruction of the conditions for the existence of capital, the task falls to the proletariat (all those who need to work to survive, whether urban or rural, manual or intellectual, etc.), the only class with the potential to unite, organize, and defeat dying capitalism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie had already exhausted its historical mission of overthrowing the Ancient Regime when, in Europe in 1848, it joined forces with the remnants of the aristocracy to block the rise of the working class. Since then, the proletariat has been the only class capable of undertaking the historical task of eliminating both reactionary classes with a program of permanent revolution – completing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution as part of the proletarian revolution.

The Bolshevik Revolution was the ultimate test of permanent revolution to date, and yet its example did not lead to other proletarian revolutions. More critically, the failure of the German Revolution was a failure of revolutionary leadership in the absence of a Leninist party and program. This historical defeat was exploited by bourgeois reactionaries to pave the fascist path and destroy what remained of the revolution. We face wars and counter-revolutions in which the failure of revolutionary leadership has allowed the contradiction between nature and society to explode into eco-catastrophe and genocide, which can only end in socialism or barbarism.

Building a new international revolutionary party and program is an urgent task, but it cannot be done overnight without preparing the foundations for both. The party is the democratic organization of the most advanced workers, who debate the program for the revolution and then unite to put it to the test in practice. In the current pre-revolutionary conjuncture, in which there are small Marxist revolutionary groups (mainly, but not necessarily, Trotskyist), it is necessary to seek consensus on the fundamental principles of the program, raising demands that can be put into practice to test their effectiveness, for better or for worse.

What are these basic principles? First, who can join the party? Only the working class has the power to make the revolution. No other class is revolutionary, and the petty bourgeois who choose to join the revolution must prove their worth in practice. Party membership is based on agreement with the democratically defined program, which is then tested in the class struggle and corrected by the same process of democratic debate and majority vote. The method behind the program is transitional; it raises immediate demands to meet the elementary needs of survival, from jobs, wages, health and housing, to united fronts against fascism and wars that end with the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the creation of a socialist workers' state.

We have applied Lenin and Trotsky's program on the war against imperialism. In imperialist countries, the main enemy is at home; we call upon the workers to turn their weapons against the ruling class. In oppressed countries, we are building an international united front against imperialism to crush the Stalinist/Maoist popular front with imperialism. We are forming military blocs without offering political support to the bourgeoisies whose interests align with imperialism, against the socialist revolution. We are fighting to assume leadership in the war to defeat imperialism in both the East and the West and pave the way for national self-determination.

We follow Trotsky, who advocated accepting military aid from rival imperialisms, unless they are engaged in direct inter-imperialist war over oppressed countries, in  which case we apply revolutionary defeatism.

None of these demands for a permanent revolution can be met by capitalism in terminal crisis, while fascism seeks to destroy the proletariat. It labels workers as national enemies and starves, imprisons, and murders them. The fascist reaction has put workers' tactics to the test. For example, fascists cannot be defeated by votes or pacifist protests. Workers must be armed and organized to defeat state forces and their paramilitary groups. In this process, workers' demands will escalate, moving from basic defense to strikes, armed pickets, militias, and political strikes. Only when the fascists are defeated and the workers have power in the streets can the socialist goal of destroying the bourgeois state be achieved and replaced by a workers' government and a workers' state.

In this situation, we revolutionaries have an obligation to undertake efforts to build an Anti-Imperialist Front on a global level; to create international committees of struggle that can support the struggle of oppressed peoples against neocolonialism from a revolutionary and socialist perspective; to build a permanent support network for the struggle of the working class in an active internationalism; to conduct joint campaigns against the Imperialist War; and to create the conditions for overcoming the crisis of revolutionary leadership through concrete units in the class struggle.

• Revolutionary Workers Group - GTR
• Revolutionary Workers' Alliance - ART
• International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency - TLTI