Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 00:42:11 +0000
Subject: M-G: PERU: MRTA HOSTAGE GAME ENDS IN CAPITULATION


  THE PEOPLE'S WAR IS THE ONLY REVOLUTION IN PERU
            MRTA HOSTAGE GAME ENDS IN CAPITULATION

The little known armed group called the MRTA hit the mainstream world
media headline when more than twenty of its members seized the
Japanese Embassy last December 17, 1996. More than 600 hostages, among
them a least 20 senior Peruvian counterinsurgency experts and members
of the military (three generals a dozen of military officers and few
"faceless judges"), five middle level USAID/CIA operatives (most of
them were promptly released.)There were also government officials
including three ministers, foreign diplomats, more than 20 Japanese
businessmen and close relatives of Fujimori (who were also released).
The first indication of MRTA's weakness was when it called for the
immediate release of 400 of their members jailed, threatening to
execute their hostages beginning with the Minister of Justice on New
Year's day if their demands were not met. That was only deception. New
Years day has come and gone, and none of the MRTA members was
released. At the same time the MRTA willfully released 20 hostages,
all the U.S. and European hostages, including the sister and mother of
the dictator.

To please the regime and yanqui imperialism that were threatening  to
storm the compound, in its first communicate MRTA attacked the
People's War as "terrorist" portraying itself as "the good guerrilla."
It welcome the government's appointment of mediators headed by the
Spaniard Juan Luis Cipriani, an organizer of paramilitary peasants,
who is known in Ayacucho as the "killer priest."

The MRTA is a spent force in Peru where a genuine revolutionary
movement exists led by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP). The hostage
crisis is revealing because it highlights the differences between the
PCP that forges the New Power through the generation of People's
Committees in the countryside and mass organizations in the cities. On
the other hand, the MRTA sometimes generates media highlights with
occasional bank robberies and kidnaping for ransom, alternating these
isolated actions with calls for "peace talks" and its insertion in the
landlord-bureaucratic State. 

The MRTA has strong links with the Peruvian establishment. Its leader,
Victor Polay was an APRA militant and close friend of Garcia Perez
(APRA is a party of the big bourgeoisie.) MRTA members are mostly
petty bourgeois elements who during the regime of Garcia Perez
traveled to Cuba to be trained and armed. The purpose was clear, to
carry on the struggle to neutralize the advances of the People's War
led by the PCP which was in its fifth year of successful armed
struggle.

After more than three months, it still holds 73 hostages. The MRTA
demand is the release of 400 prisoners (it was reported they would
settle for few of them); safe passage to one of its basis in the
jungle (this is also rhetoric since MRTA has no a significant base,
and the reality is that they want to return to its original sponsor
Cuba and negotiate "peace" with the tyrant from there); the payment of
"war tax" (a ransom that will be probably given by the Japanese
government); and the change of the drastic "economic policy" (it was
reported by Gestion, a Lima's paper whose owner was a hostage, that
MRTA agrees with the regime's neoliberal policies such as the
privatization program) to a slower pace.

The demand for the release of all political prisoners of war
(including of those of MRTA)is correct. However, the reactionary
distinction of few hundred MRTA prisoners calling them "the good
guerrilla" and the approximately 10,000 political prisoners of war of
the PCP being labeled as the "bad guerrillas" must be denounced. The
world knows that the 23,000 peruvians killed so far in the civil war
were at the hands of the genocidal armed forces of Fujimori.

The government's and/or Vatican head mediator Juan Cipriani has
indicated that this selective procedure will be done by means of
systematic review of trials and immunity laws tailored by the
subservient parliament. So, by means of this procedure the time for
those prisoners who capitulate will be reduced and those prisoners who
keep up their principles will be continued to be annihilated and/or
starved to death.

The Peruvian armed forces have committed many genocides in the
prisons. The most notorious ones are the murder of 300 Maoist
combatants in the jail El Fronton in 1986, and the killing of 100
prisoners of war in Cantogrande in 1992. Despite this, the PCP has
successfully freed prisoners over the years. In Ayacucho in 1982 the
entire jail was emptied when a Maoist contingent led by Edith Lagos
took over of the city. In Cusco, the jail of Quenqoro was seized by
the guerrillas and dozens of prisoners were freed, and in the North in
the mid 1980's comrade Norah (heroine of the Party and the revolution)
led successfully several attacks to the prisons liberating several
comrades from the claps of the enemy. This is the substantial
difference of the PCP with the vacillating and double-dealing "armed
revisionist" MRTA. 

===============Published by the New Flag
30-08 Broadway, suite 159
Queens, NY 11106
E-mail: lquispe-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org
Read the documents of the PCP in English and Spanish
at http://www.blythe.org/peru-pcp


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