Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Conclusions of the Armed Struggle Process

Communist Party of Peru

March 19841

I. Conception

First Milestone. Defense of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

Second Milestone. Uphold, Defend, and Apply Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

Third Milestone. Maoism. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Guiding Thought.

II. Policy

First Milestone. Definition of initiating the armed struggle.

Second Milestone. Establishment of the General Political Line and Military Line as its center.

Third Milestone. Third Moment and development of the militarization of the Party through actions.

Fourth Milestone. General crisis of bureaucrat-capitalism and democratic path began to rise in armed struggle developing guerrilla warfare and seizing base areas. Main contradiction: New State Old State.

III. Agrarian Policy

First Milestone. Lesson of peasant struggle: Without armed struggle directed by the Party, action results in evolution within agrarian laws.

Second Milestone. Agrarian tactic: fight the evolution of feudalism aiming at associative property and conjuring the non-associative property. Neutralize the rich peasantry, win over the middle peasantry, and support the poor peasantry. Overflow, invasions.

Third Milestone. Class struggle in the countryside: Relationship between the peasant problem–the land problem–armed struggle–Power. All under the direction of the Party. Harvests, invasions.

Fourth Milestone. Agrarian tactics in the armed struggle: Land for those who work it through confiscation, clearing land and establishing base areas with armed struggle.

Throughout the armed struggle, peasant labor has been used as the basis and military work as a guide. Agrarian policy, tactics and the class line in the agrarian war have been applied. Harvesting, invasion and collective sowing. Destroying semi-feudal relations by applying devastation, directing the spearhead to dislocate the power of the bosses, striking bosses. Taking into account the polarization in the countryside.

IV. Building

First Milestone. Rethinking the organizational system.

Second Milestone. Strategic Plan for the Militarization of the Communist Parties.

Third Milestone. Organizational guideline. General readjustment of the Party to focus on the military.

Fourth Milestone. Development of the Strategic Plan for the Militarization of the Communist Parties.

Building development plan, the two networks in the countryside and the city.

Guerrilla zone systems and base area system.

All-powerful Party leadership and concentric management of the three instruments. General Party reorganization. Need for ideological, political, and organizational consolidation.

V. United Front

Second Milestone. Approaches of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and the United Front.

Third Milestone. Committee for the Distribution of Power. People’s Committee. Area where Power is questioned. Guerrilla Zone, Operations Zone, action points, Base Areas.

Fourth Milestone. Clandestine People’s Committee. Revolutionary Front for the Defense of the People. Organizing Committee of the base and New-Democratic People’s Republic. Three functions and five positions.

VI. Leadership

First Milestone. Chairmanship of the Political Bureau and the Central Committee.

Second Milestone. The leadership of Comrade Gonzalo is sanctioned.

Third Milestone. Law of leadership.

Fourth Milestone. One-person leadership and collective leadership. Dictatorship of the proletariat. Chairmanship of the Party, Chairmanship of the Military Commission and Chairmanship of the Organizing Committee of the New-Democratic People’s Republic.

VII. Two-Line Struggle

First Milestone. Commitment of the Ninth Plenum: defend and apply the agreements, crush any attempt to recall and sweep away all opposition within or outside the Party. Crush the right opportunist line:

Second Milestone. Fight against the right-wing line in gestation and development.

Third Milestone. Fight against headless rightism. Cure the disease to save the patient.

Fourth Milestone. Contradictions within the people Root of the problems: the new and remnants of the old. Rightism as the main danger.

VIII. Military Line

First Milestone. Political Strategy: Agreement to Initiate the Armed Struggle.

Second Milestone. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and the People’s War in the country. Political Strategy.

Third Milestone. The three elements of the military line. Laws of the beginning of the armed struggle. Main policy.

Fourth Milestone. Develop guerrilla warfare by opening and developing Guerrilla Zones and seizing Base Areas. Laws of the development of guerrilla warfare and Laws of the Base Area. Its main policies. Development of the broad, highly mobile guerrilla warfare.

IX. Strategy and Tactics

Second Milestone. Military Strategic Plan and defensive strategy: Countryside; main, city complement. Revolutionary war as a unit.

Third Milestone. Plan for the initiation of the armed struggle, mainly guerrilla.

Fourth Milestone. - Guerrilla Warfare Development Plan. Opening guerrilla zones based on Base Areas.

Implementation of strategically centralized and tactically decentralized plans that promote the development of the armed struggle through quantitative and qualitative leaps from the simple to the complex, applied with initiative, flexibility and planning. Taking into account the carrying out of offensive operations within the defensive war, quick decision battles within the protracted war and exterior lines operations within the interior lines. Managing Chairman Mao’s guerrilla tactics and today the superior form of civil war: encirclement and annihilation campaigns and counter-campaigns of encirclement and annihilation.

X. Army Building

First Milestone. Form military cadres. Form own groups for armed action.

Second Milestone. Commitment to forge the First Company in practice.

Third Milestone. From groups to direct crowds to detachments and platoons in function of Companies. Organize the militias.

Fourth Milestone. Action of the Companies targeting battalions Special detachments in function of urban guerrilla.

People’s Guerrilla Army: main forces, local forces, and base forces.

Regarding Actions

The Four Forms of Action:

I. Guerrilla Action

Leap in the First Campaign to Defend, Develop, and Build Sivia, Minascucho. Ambush on Armed Forces vehicles. Surprise attacks.

Limitation: Develop more, no counterambush is applied; aim at patrols; forces are surprised: Omasi, Manallascac, Tuco.

Taking of towns:

Advances.

Qualitative and quantitative leaps from the beginning (Push [Pujas]) to the seizure of Bases; from small to medium.

Limitation: Vinchos (Central Regional Committee) let reactionaries group together and arrest them for not camouflaging themselves and not doing good reconnaissance, they failed to annihilate.

Advances.

Reverence for the Armed Forces is beginning to be lost and responce with great decision. Andahuylas, Aranhuay, Milucha, Sacsamarca, Huacasancos. Combined forces or troops.

Limitation: They are surprised and do not make response plans, they disband. Ocoril, Pujas.

Destructions and counter-restorations; strikes at critical points and overtakings:

Advances

The guerrilla begins to handle itself with wide mobility, encirclement and annihilation campaigns and counter-campaigns of encirclement and annihilation. Umaru.

Limitation: Strike and escape; avoid strikes at the main point of the Base; manifestation of wandering Lucanas. Develop further the wide guerrilla war of high mobility. Resolve movements in stealth and by platoons.

Escape

Advances

CRAS Ayacucho escape policy

Limitation: Problems with the basic principle of high-level war planning, lack of understanding.

Riots, street fighting tactics

Advances

In the capital of the country, simultaneously at 13 points and a wide area with successive blows. There has been progress in uniting armed struggle with the people’s struggle for rights.

Resistance centers.

Limitation: Develop them around proletarian struggles.

II. Sabotage

Advances

San Martín de Porres, Southern, Oil pipeline, light and microwave towers, Hogar SA, Bayer, cotton bales, sugarcane fields. Three-part plan.

Limitation: Not hitting social-imperialism, greater sabotage is needed. More roadblocks.

III. Selective Terrorism

Advances

IV. Psychological Warfare

Advances

Limitation: In the city, the proletariat is not targeted.

Advances:

From mobilizing hundreds of people to mobilizing 50,000 peasants only in the Main Regional Committee during the “Defeat”

It is mainly armed

Limitation: Proletariat and poor masses of the city.

The Five Steps

  1. Actions

  2. Detachments

    Night march, regular march and forced march.

  3. Planning

  4. Execution

  5. Evaluation

Achievements

  1. In the political ideology. We are based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, guiding thought. Guiding thought is the main thing because it is the application and development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. With guiding thought we have reconstituted the party, we have started the armed struggle and today we are unleashing it by seizing base areas through main policies, general political line and military line as a center.

  2. In building: Concentric building of the three instruments of the revolution: Party–Armed Forces–United Front through the development of armed struggle.

    In Party. With a new type of party, the militarization of the party is developed through actions directing the revolutionary war and handling the three instruments.

    In Armed Forces, emerging from the main form of struggle, the actions and the main form of organization, the People’s Guerrilla Army as an Army of a new type.

    In Front, creation and seizure based on support, People’s Committees, Revolutionary Front for the Defense of the People, Revolutionary Movement for the Defense of the People, People’s Republic of New Democracy.

  3. In Leadership, establishment of the direction of the revolution with the presidency of Comrade Gonzalo, which is a guarantee of triumph and expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  4. Plan, correct establishment and management of the plans of armed struggle maintaining superior strategy. Today, specification of the campaigns of encirclement and annihilation and counter-campaigns of encirclement and annihilation. Five steps.

  5. Armed Action, we specify the specific laws of the People’s War breaking political and military plans of the enemy, Police Forces and one year with the Armed Forces. Based on our own efforts and supporting ourselves in the struggle of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world.

  6. On the Two-Line Struggle, we handle the contradictions between the Left and the Right, the divergences in the Left as contradictions within the people, averting the split and making 90% of the militancy advance through the rectification campaign, raising the unity of the Party in function of the armed struggle. Fight rightism as the main danger.

Conclusions of the Armed Struggle Process

I. Conception

Fourth Milestone

Maoism-Marxism-Leninism-Maoism

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, guiding thought.

II. Politics

Third Milestone

General crisis of bureaucrat-capitalism and democratic path begins to rise in armed struggle, developing guerrilla warfare and seizing base areas. Main contradiction. New state. Old state.

III. Agrarian Policy

Fourth Milestone

Agrarian tactics in the armed struggle: land for those who work it through confiscation, clearing land and establishing base areas with armed struggle.

Raze: Destroy feudal relations to dismantle the productive process, harvests, invasions with mainly guerrilla actions.

Polarization: Problem of politics, revolutionary peasantry and conservative peasantry, collective sowing.

IV. Building

Fourth Milestone

Development of the strategic plan of communist militarization.

Construction development plan.

The two networks in the countryside and city.

System of guerrilla zones and system of base areas.

Omnipotent direction of the party and concentric management of the three instruments, general reorganization of the party, need for ideological, political, and organizational consolidation.

Failure to adjust to the construction of the two networks and concentric management. Problems in the 5 needs: democratic centralism, clandestinity, secrecy, surveillance and discipline. Preparation and establishment of the bases for the path of the people’s war in the country.

The beginning. Great struggle to begin the armed struggle generating armed actions and armed forces linked to the peasantry. Main form of struggle and main form of organization.

The development of guerrilla warfare through three steps:

1) Opening guerrilla zones

2) Developing guerrilla zones

3) Concretization of the new order specified in people’s committees, laws of guerrilla warfare, development of guerrilla warfare as a strategy.

In the longest period through which our weak forces become strong by creating base areas and annihilating the enemy’s forces.

Restoration and counter-restoration.

I. Strategy and Tactics

Fourth Milestone

Plan to develop guerrilla warfare, open guerrilla zones based on base areas.

Plan to deploy guerrilla warfare. The three moments:

1) Seize weapons and means

2) Remove the countryside by promoting guerrilla actions.

3) Stir to advance towards Base Areas, link

Three-part plan in cities

Zonal plan, reestablishment and counter-reestablishment.

II. Army Building

Fourth Milestone

Action of the companies targeting battalions. Detachments

People’s guerrilla army: main force, local force, and base force.

Regarding Actions; The Four Forms of Struggle

I. Guerrilla Action

II. Sabotages

III. Selective Terrorism

IV. Psychological Warfare

The Five Steps

  1. Actions

  2. Detachments

  3. Planning

  4. Execution

  5. Evaluation

Achievements

I. Ideological-Political

We are based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, guiding thought. The guiding thought is the main thing because it is the application and development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. With the guiding thought we have reconstituted the party, we have started armed struggle and today we develop it by seizing base areas through top politicians. General political line and military line as the center.

II. Building

Concentric construction of the first three instruments of the revolution: Party-Armed Forces-United Front through the development of armed struggle.

In the party, with PNT the militarization of the party is developed through actions directing the revolutionary war and handling the three instruments.

In the armed forces, emergence of the main form of struggle, the actions and the main form of organization, the people’s guerrilla exercise as a new type of army.

In the front, creation and seizure of base areas, people’s committees, revolutionary front for the defense of the people, New-Democratic People’s Republic.

III. Leadership

Establishment of the direction of the revolution with the presidency of c. Gonzalo which is a guarantee of triumph and expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

IV. Plan

Correct establishment and management of the plans of armed struggle, maintaining superior strategy, today specification of the encirclement and annihilation campaigns and counter-campaigns of encirclement and annihilation. Five steps.

V. Armed Action

Let us concretize the specific laws of the people’s war by breaking the political and military plans of the enemy, police forces and… with the armed forces. Basing ourselves on our own efforts and relying on the struggle of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world.

VI. On Two-Line Struggle

We handle the contradictions between left and right and the divergences on the left as contradictions within the people, averting the split and making 90% of the M(ilitants) advance through the rectification campaign, raising the unity of the party in function of the armed struggle, combating rightism as the main danger.

Introduction

We are committed to solving the problem of war. The problem of power, of revolutionary power, is not just any power, it is that of the proletariat, the class of which we are the vanguard, in whose ideology we are based, the class which we serve and serve and will serve.

The People’s War in Peru

This revolutionary war for which the blood of the people and communists is running in torrents, this people’s war is but a part, a piece of the world revolution, because as Marx taught us, we fight in various parts of the world and we will do so within and in function of the world revolution.

These are our orientations and they will continue to be so. We emphasize this, the inseparable link with the world revolution because the historical circumstances, the concatenation of events that is history itself, has placed on our shoulders the communists in Peru, raising, defending and applying Maoism, fighting in the first line as the advance guard of this glorious revolutionary process that the proletariat leads.

The facts themselves have determined that our revolution is an example, a torch, a great bonfire that is showing the face of the earth the power of our invincible ideology: M-L-M, principally Maoism (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China fulfilled an infinitely greater task: they were the center and base of the world revolution) this to better understand our greater and higher responsibility.

We are not only changing our country but we are real hope, filled with the invincibility of the ideology of the proletariat. Two reasons that we must take into account:

  1. We are the true transformers of our country

  2. We are the shock brigade of the world revolution

Very important.

The quota is a small part of the Peruvian revolution and of the world revolution, it is our revolution, the greater part is caused by the reaction and the lesser part by us. They form lakes, we soak only handkerchiefs.

The Third Round is a complete success, in this way what we agreed has become a shocking fact that deeply shakes the foundations of the reactionary state of Peru and at the same time its persecution in other lands is ever greater and growing. The main thing has surpassed the inflection and is superior to the 2nd Round.

On historical optimism (see IISP)

Our starting point must endorse the historical optimism that we as the Party of the proletariat must always express because being creators of the new order is nascent freedom that we have shaped by destroying the old through thousands of newly concrete actions in almost all our country in facts that have hit the reaction hard that have made this Government tremble particularly, the most starvation and most genocidal Government, the most demagogic Government, which we with armed action are demonstrating for what it is.

We communists do not believe in a reactionary dictatorship, we only believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat created and sustained by arms and directed by the Communist Party of Peru (CPP).

Our predictions are being fulfilled (see IIISP) and success for the Third Campaign, Third Campaign part of the PC of the GS within the great PE of CB.5

People’s Committee, Main Achievement of the Third Campaign

Chairman Mao. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” “All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

We start from a single ideological base which is historical optimism, which is at the same time concretized, embodied, converted into a developed fact as a transforming action that is demolishing more and more the old order and generating the new order, the new power guided by the Party in representation of the proletariat and linked to the poor peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie in synthesis a joint dictatorship with the other classes that concur to the same goal, it is not about historical optimism in the abstract but in a concrete fact with our hands mainly with our conception of M-L-M, principally Maoism and guided by the guiding thought, which is the application of this universal truth to the specific condition of our reality of this homeland of ours that is Peru.

One of the objectives is to unite ourselves by strengthening historical optimism, promoting optimism as a transformative weapon of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, Guiding Thought class optimism. We are carrying out the most profound upheaval (as some reactionaries say, deep upheavals that have not been seen since the times of Viceroy Toledo, 400 years ago). We need to start from that opt historical optimism made concrete, embodied, reverberating throughout the world, far from us all weakness; opt historical optimism with our ardent growth, beating, reverberating throughout the world.

The Problem of Mass Work

It is a difficult and complex problem, easy to understand and difficult to apply.

Marx: “The masses make history.” The Party directs them, it cannot do more, the masses must be moved in order to sweep away the old order and not the haggling that constrains them to oppression, to break the vicious cycle of exploitation:

Marx: Easy union in the economic struggle, difficult [hierra] in the political struggle.

In more than 90 years of movements, criteria of opportunism, revisionism, of the W (work) of masses have been generated. However, because we develop the people’s war, we must open the way in a resolute way towards the proletariat, towards the working class, because it is our class to expand IM (incorporation of the masses) with peasants, mainly poor peasants, to open the way to the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the intelligentsia. Chairman Mao “Without the participation of the intellectuals victory in the revolution is impossible.”6 Lenin said: “Mass work is the constant, violence is exercised when appropriate,” but we must see the context, more than 60 years ago, Lenin was not alive during the SOWR (strategic offensive of the world revolution), but he is the initiator of the new times and warned us that the old world was going to sink into the most diverse wars, we develop in the period of 50-100 years; thus speaks Chairman Mao. The problem of war is more on the agenda and in the coming years it will be more and more.

Chairman Mao, this powerfully proletarian who is not only an individual contribution, but a M-L condensation, has given us the laws of people’s war.

Our modest experience, which is not individual either and which is in the depths of the post-war period, WWII, leads us to the Countryside–City War, the unique Marxist tactic.

Differentiating the superficial crust from the deep masses that emerge from the bottom, blowing to smithereens everything that opposes it.

Our experience poses questions for us. We are advancing in this. It is not going to be resolved overnight. It is going to require enormous efforts. The new is born in the midst of difficulties and is not born complete and perfect. We can go blindly groping. There is no need to lament, analyze the problems. Apply solutions and then see how reality, life denies or affirms them, corrects or eliminates them.

We are considering the need for an investigation of the mass work of the Party in the people’s war.

We are moving forward in the face of a complex problem, this is decisive, the entire proletariat will never be able to be organized under capitalism, but we have to open ourselves to the proletariat in order to win over the mind, the action of a part of us, if we do not develop peasant work, if we do not open ourselves to the PB, to the intelligentsia, more so now that there is so much demagogy, we will not be able to develop the people’s war.

In summary: the party work, the 3rd and 4th round, has advanced and has developed and poses a problem for us, how to develop and develop party life in people’s war, we have the task of RGP, we are in ideological-political-organizational consolidation. The idea of mass work in the Party must strengthen us in the people’s war.

International Relations

A great step also in the incorporation into the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) because we are rejoining the International Communist Movement more directly, the problem is MLthought or MLM. The PCI7 proposes a campaign to support the CPP’s people’s war, and proposes that the RIM publish CPP documents during the armed struggle. The RIM proposes to study CPP documents during the reconstitution and Military Junta Government. The CPP proposes to debate and study the CPP document 5 Years of People’s War. We win, that is beneficial.

Problem, that is not true, everything has its process, our people’s war has great prestige. In the world the revisionists spread that to maintain the revolution we must be linked to “Socialism” (of the USSR) we are demonstrating that this is false (because we have self-sustenance and self-determination) we are demonstrating that there is a need to develop our own thought, the facts show that there is a need to apply MLM and to generate our own thought, a guiding thought that is the application of the universal conception to reality itself. History shows that guiding thought has always been generated, although not as a universal development like MLM.

The problems are ideological and political and they translate into leadership problems, we have experienced it in small parts…

Feeling the internationalism of countries so far away that it extends from Asia through Europe to the U.S.

No revolution develops without proletarian internationalism, which is not a problem of solidarity, being part of a unit, a class, the proletariat, an ideology, Marxism, which is only a process developing in great struggles. On the international level. We have advanced, it is the rumble of the cannons that makes the deaf hear and the blind see.

Recognition to the PCI, the RIM and to those who support the campaign. The most important achievement is the Third Campaign8 we do not underestimate the achievement of internal life nor the international contribution, we say that this is completely of armed action.


  1. This is a slightly revised version of the translation hosted at https://theworker.news/2024/12/04/in-celebration-of-chairman-gonzalos-birthday-and-pla-day-peru-peoples-movement/. Edits have been made for readability.↩︎

  2. Translator, The Worker: Initiation of Armed Struggle 1980.↩︎

  3. RedLibrary: “CRAS” stands for Social Readaptation Center [Centro de Readaptación Social].↩︎

  4. Translator, The Worker: feudal landlord power.↩︎

  5. RedLibrary: What the acronyms PC, GS, PE, CB, and IISP/IIISP stand for are unknown. As such, they are left in Spanish.↩︎

  6. RedLibrary: Chairman Mao Zedong, Recruit Large Numbers of Intellectuals, December 1, 1939.↩︎

  7. RedLibrary: What PCI stands for is unknown, potentially Communist Party of India.↩︎

  8. Peru People’s Movement: Third Great Leap Campaign, part of the Plan to Seize Bases, which was being finalized in April 1986.↩︎