FIGHT AND RESIST, REPUDIATE THE GENOCIDAL REGIME'S ELECTIONS AND FURTHER DEVELOP THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

Communist Party of Peru, Bases

February 1985

When its existence is threatened, the exploiting class always resorts to violence. As soon as it foresees revolution, it strives to annihilate it through violence... It uses violence also to repress the revolutionary people from the moment in which they launch themselves to the seizure of power

Chairman Mao Zedong

Ayacuchan people!

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU greets you and pays homage today during republication, glorious feats of combat, you stand as a heroic and invincible bastion of the armed struggle, of the peasant war that is shaking the reactionary Peruvian state to its deepest roots.

FIVE YEARS OF COMBAT

It has been almost five years since May 17th, 1980, when from the very bowels of your unbearable poverty and burning rebelliousness defiantly raised the hope that took shape in burning flames: the armed struggle. A handful of children of our homeland and your flesh and blood dared to take up arms in order to demolish the old order of exploitation and create a new world that is genuinely for the people, since all that exists is nothing but growing misery and oppression.

Time, fleeting but eventful, has left us with both resounding victories and sobering setbacks along its winding road; and in the end, the positive side has immense and definitive weight: More than twenty thousand actions, from simple armed agitations to excellent and developed guerrilla actions; our party has multiplied its strength several times over; a People’s Guerrilla Army formed by miles of men and women, mainly courageous poor peasants in more than two years of struggle against the reactionary armed forces; and the most important, the new power is concretized in hundreds of people’s committees that exercise state functions, the support bases that are in formation and advance in the structuration of a New-Democratic People’s Republic.

Everything comes from the barrel of guns, from the armed struggle the new and the popular is emerging, destroying the old, the reactionary. Let’s emphasize that our major advances have been won precisely in those two years of direct participation of the armed forces of the expired and rotten Peruvian state.

REPRESSION, GENOCIDE, AND ELECTIONS

Because of its class nature, of a landlord-bureaucrat dictatorship subjected to Yankee imperialism especially, the state has responded to the armed struggle with persecution and political repression, following the black politics of “burn all, kill all, loot all.” Thus, in addition to the above, the detention, the torture, the punishment, the annihilation, and the slaughter began to prey on our people, filling concentration camps with our children and spilling torrents of their blood. But this could not and cannot break us, and the concentration camps were converted into shining trenches of combat, and for every one that fell, a hundred rose up and intensified the fight until the people’s committees were created, the same bases of new power.

This is why at the end of 1982 the reactionary armed forces directly entered, mainly occupying Ayacucho. An armed force has the class character and the fortitude of the state that it defends; and this is an affirmation proven by its own actions: first they used mesnadas, (gamonalillos and lacayos), protected and directed by the reactionary army and under the threat of death pressured on the masses to kill so-called “terrorists”; resulting in cowardly and sinister massacres, including massacres of journalists. When their plan was broken, they resorted to genocide, before and after the municipal elections, and the so-called “disappearances” that are nothing but unpunished and infamous assassinations.

But even with their “new plans,” they could not separate us from the masses, resorting to the razing of people and crops, and the theft of the peasantry to try to form imitations of sinister “strategic villages,” seeking to re-establish gamonal power sustained by the reactionary armed forces and attempting to subject part of the masses to a barracks order of militarized corporativization.

And for this they have carried out sinister offensives, true genocidal carnage, systematic and repeated actions that have taken thousands of lives. But for all of this, you, Ayacuchan people, have endured it and continue to endure it because historically you are courageous and know that the armed struggle you sustain, mainly you, with your broad, your shelter, your effort, and your blood is the definitive struggle for our emancipation, for the repayment of the people through the peasant war ardently led by the party. But since neither the destruction, the persecution, the torture, and the genocide can break you, heroic people of the heroic masses, combatant people of just causes; today they take to your raging revolutionary lands the representative of the Vatican State, the Pope, head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the powerful Roman Curia, which has nothing to do in essence with the religious sentiments of the people other than to lord over them in order to use them for the benefit of their power, of their eagerness to impose a theocracy that defends the old order. And what has the Pope done in Ayacucho? Bless the murderous guns, consecrate the sinister graves, protect the torture, and above all exclupate the infamous Cains, starting with the political-military chief Mori Orzo and his embellished minions; and even more so incite the government and its henchmen to destroy us prompty and effectively. This is the essence, the rest are old words like those that claim that the root of our armed struggle is sin, which today as yesterday is nothing but the defense of the order of exploitation and oppression; and in particular the defense of the starving and genocidal politics of the Belaúnde government, because it is the President who heads the counter-revolution.

Now, the Papist offensive is over, the electoral show business will unfold. The old order of misery and blood necessitates that the people select those who should oppress them in the name of so-called “representative democracy” of the sacred order of the landlord-bureaucrat dictatorship, presently parliamentary in appearance but really focused on the Executive, in its bureaucracy and even more so in its repressive forces, especially the armed forces.

It is worth asking what the people have received in five years of so-called “democracy,” what about the false “democrat Belaúnde” and his group, what about the so-called “opposition.” In summary, what the people have actually received from this false two-sided coin is: Nothing! Nothing but misery and blood. So why vote? To once again sustain a new government of misery and blood? No! We cannot vote because to vote is to endorse a regime of misery and blood, and even more so voting is to help maintain and defend a regime whose class character can only generate more hunger and genocide; and this will not change for as long as we do not disappear this black and old history that has been starving the people for centuries and sucking their blood under the armed protection of its imperialist master. Can an Ayacuchan vote in the next elections? No! To vote is to endorse misery and genocide, the bloodbath imposed on Ayacucho; moreover, it would be helpful to establish a new demagogic whose class reality imposes on it to be more hungry and more genocidal.

Ayacuchan! Father, mother, wife, brother, sister, boy, girl, relative of the vilely assassinated and disappeared, can you vote? Do you want to kill your loved ones again? NO!! They cannot do it, the blood of the dead would boil in your soil and the corpses would twist in your head, because you would be killing them yourself and raising the murderous dagger to spill the blood of your own children! No, in Peru and even more so in Ayacucho one can only not vote; let reaction solve your problems, let it elaborate its plans of apocalyptic horsemen of hunger and genocide. This is their problem, it’s not ours. We cannot vote!! We cannot betray! The Ayacuchan people have never been traitors.

DEVELOP THE ARMED STRUGGLE

The armed struggle was born and took root in the historically combated furious strength of the Ayacuchan people; there they have achieved their greatest successes and taken laurels from death itself. Therefore the armed struggle burns loudly and triumphantly against the silence and distortion of the cowardly defectors and the perverse and cynical campaign of the reaction; and what yesterday was a fire is today a bonfire in Ayacucho, expands against wind and storm towards the Center, North, and South, towards the eyebrow of the jungle and points of our own coast. The liberating fire intensifies and expands and will continue to expand, burning more and more until the peasant war led by the party is completed, the invincible people’s war that teaches us Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, guiding thought.

People of Ayacucho! Ayacuchan peasant, laborer, worker, woman, youth! Remember, there are only two powers on Earth: the reactionary armed force and the disorganized people; but our people are not disorganized anymore, today they are a growing people that is organizing itself in an armed fashion through its own revolutionary war and its invincibility will be realized because it is subject to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the only great true science on Earth and tested weapon of transformation, because it has a communist party that guides it, because it relies on the masses, mainly peasants and because, in addition, it has international revolutionary support, especially the support of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.

And, Ayacuchan comrade, combatant, companion, you all know this! Because you have seen it and see it daily before your very eyes, you live it in your own participation. You are, therefore, a witness before Peru and the world! And you, like no other people here and until today, have given so much warm and generous blood; and because your mind, your will, your feelings cry out before the face of our homeland and the Earth: Everything is illusory except power!