From: Luis Quispe <lquispe-AT-blythe.org>
Subject: PERU: "MOTHER COURAGE" (Part 1 of 2)
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 13:43:57 -0500 (EST)
Cc: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu


                      THE MOTHER COURAGE
                         Part 1 of 2

Maria Elena Moyano ("Mother Courage") was a city official in the
Shantytown of Villa El Salvador, on the dusty southern outskirts of
Peru's capital Lima. She was a vice-mayor who administered a network
of self-managed businesses, including soup kitchens. The Communist
Party of Peru (PCP) leading the People's Front "Revolutionary Defense
Movement" has a strong political presence in Villa EL Salvador
(300,000 people) and continuously clashes with the powerful State
political machine headed in 1992 by Moyano and in 1996 by Michel
Azcueta, a Spanish nationalized Peruvian.

The people charged Moyano with serious crimes for many years. She
has been denounced by local people for misappropriating the funds of
the charity programs intended for the relief of the hungry. She
countered by charging anyone who dared to criticize her with
membership in the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), develop lists of
"suspected terrorists," and their subsequent arrest by the political police
(SIN, Dincote.)  As a result, hundreds of women, men and even
children were arrested, tortured, and assassinated by the military. 
Among them were 15 members of the PCP. Moyano was instrumental
in organizing urban paramilitary (the rondas) with the purpose of
breaking the strikes and defending the interests of Peru's ruling class.

The PCP has thoroughly investigated those charges for about two years.
A year long campaign of denouncements were carried out in El Diario
and local community papers. Moyano countered by expanding her
counterrevolutionary activities to other districts of Lima calling for an
"anti-terrorist front" and working hand-in-hand with the military.
Moyano's political party, the Movement for Socialist Affirmation
(MAS), was a legal "left" outfit whose very existence was based on
being an organized link between the Shantytown poor and their
oppressors. The MAS party represented the right wing of the so-called
"United Left" coalition. MAS supported today's dictator Alberto
Fujimori in his 1990 presidential campaign! Two members of MAS
held ministerial posts, one of them was Gloria Helfer, the first minister
of education in Fujimori's government. 

The public activities of Moyano were known, but how did the PCP
learn the details of Moyano's dirty work at the service of the Peruvian
intelligence services? The PCP's intelligence is the thousand eyes and
ears of the people. Gordon McCormick of the U.S. Naval Military
Academy in Monterrey, CA, and USDOD Consultant has an answer:
"...Sendero has been so effective at infiltrating the police and military
in Peru, it even planted key aids to the Chief of Army Intelligence..."
[Intelligence Report, Parade Magazine, March 6, 1994.]  On February
15, 1992, as the whole Lima area was paralyzed by a historic armed
strike, a woman fighter from the PCP delivered the ultimate
punishment. Moyano was executed.

Since the execution of Moyano, enemies of the revolution in Peru and
the world have made Moyano into their symbol. The Church hierarchy
portrays Moyano as a "model grassroots activist." Like morticians who
paint and reshape the faces of corpses, opportunists and revisionists
remade Moyano into a "feminist leader." Fujimori and his top military
called "Mother Courage" and "one of the best generals of the war
against subversion" Senderologists cried for her departure and the
government sent the vice-president and several cabinet members to her
wake. It was a great loss for the counter-revolution. People in Peru
asked, since when in the republican history of Peru has the loss of a
black "popular leader" been deeply missed by the big Peruvian
bourgeoisie and imperialism? 

U.S. LIBERAL OUTLETS "THE NATION", "NACLA," AND         
TROSTKITE SWP:ALLIES OF COUNTERREVOLUTION IN PERU.

"Nacla" revealed its anti-Communist campaign with regard to Peru with
the January 1991 publication. It dedicated the complete issue to defame
the Communist Party of Peru. The central articles were written by 5
Senderologists: Ivan Degregori, Nelson Manrique, and the apprentices
Renique and Jo-Marie Burt. A brief interview to Luis Arce Borja by
Anita Fokkema was grossly adulterated and another "mild" article by
academic feminist Carol Andreas was rejected three times by Mark
Fried (Editor of Nacla) for being "too sympathetic to the PCP."
Thereafter, Nacla has employed Renique as its "expert on Sendero" and
has reported widely on the life, passion and death of "Mother Courage"
(who was Renique's former boss in Peru), Nacla has been consistent in
its denunciations of supposed attacks of "terrorism" against
"democracy" in our country.  

Several articles were also published in The Nation by the "free lance,"
pseudo-journalist, and trafficker of Third World struggles (e.g., Central
America) and Consultant on Peru for America's Watch, Robin Kirk.
She has used the pages of The Nation to launch a myriad of
unsubstantiated slanders against the People's War. On May 17, 1992
The Nation also published an ad: "Peru's Shining Path: a Deadly
Road." The ad was signed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax
Christi/USA and others. The first paragraph of the ad stated: "Maria
Elena Moyano was a feminist, a progressive activist, a gifted
African-Peruvian working class leader. She founded a women's group
that set up dozens of communal kitchens to feed her desperately poor
community. In 1989, Moyano as elected vice mayor of that community.
On February 15, 1992, she was shot to death and her body dynamited
in front of her horrified family and friends. Her killers? The Shining
Path ... Since Shining Path took up arms in 1980, the vast majority of
its victims have been the very people the group pretends to be fighting
for: peasants and poor urban dwellers. It has also murdered religious
and development workers, bombed schools, homes and non-military
targets." In sum, the Nation's message was that a crazy group has
killed a saint, a veritable "Mother Theresa." The same ad was
published in Spanish by the pro-government papers La Republica and
"El Peruano" in Peru.

 
Readers of the Nation's ad may have wondered: "These people are
killing leftists. If Moyano was a people's heroine, then those who killed
her must be heartless terrorists who don't deserve support from
progressive people in the world." Fortunately, facts are stubborn things
and people are not so simple minded that can be fooled by the
reactionary propaganda against the revolution. 

OPERATION BEANS AND BULLETS.

Lima, Peru's capital, is surrounded by a sea of oppressed people.
Millions of proletarians and former peasants, driven from the country
side by poverty and military oppression, built sprawling Shantytowns
surrounding the capital. These immigrants along with others who came
during the last 3 decades are now the vast majority of the population in
Lima.

The ruling class of Peru has long understood that these Shantytowns
represented a danger to the system. For twenty five years, various
bourgeois political parties have worked to build pro-government
networks in these towns. Literally every political institution of the old
society the military, the church, the extreme right-wing parties and the
reformist "left"-uses food giveaways to buy votes and political loyalty.
In Peru, the game of turning hunger into reactionary political
organization is called clientelismo or asistencialismo "hand outs."

These political parties are only "funneling" funds that originally came
>from outside imperialist forces. They receive financing from the
governments of the United States, Holland, Spain, Germany, Canada
and other countries. Many times the money arrives directly through the
NGOs and also through Caritas (Catholic Church), Ofasa (Adventist
Church), USAID (Division of Food for Development, directed by
operatives in the U.S. Embassy in Lima), the World Bank, the UN,
and other institutions of imperialism and the rest of the powers.

The army conducts raking operations, such as robbery, brutally raping
women, shortly after these military operations, they hand out food to
try to pacify them. This has been part of the counterinsurgency
campaign known as a low intensity warfare. In the US, the people who
traffick with the needs of the people are often called "poverty pimps."
Similarly, in Villa El Salvador, Melena Moyano was a "poverty pimp"
that distributed food with political goals and counterinsurgency
purposes. A network of 1,174 kitchens served almost 500,000 meals a
day. The PCP is not against the soup kitchens and hand outs that our
people rightfully deserve. The PCP is firmly opposed to the political
manipulation of those who blackmail the hungry to mobilize them
against the revolution. Within this large organization, two conflicting
class trends contend and collide: The Cafeterias are a center of
collective organizing among the masses, especially among women, but
at the same time, the Cafeterias were the basis for a corrupt political
machine tied to the Church, the old State, and its various parties, ad
well as to foreign imperialist powers.

During the Fujimori regime, most of the legal left parties were coopted
and rewarded with funding by the government and international NGOs
to try to organize the masses by providing them hand outs (e.g., food
and used clothes.) Those who refused to be coopted were regarded as
subversive, arrested, or killed. However, this process began in the late
1980's when Left Unity's Alfonso Barrantes was mayor of Lima, at
which time he secured foreign funding for a Glass of Milk program.

Melena Moyano was no "grassroots organizer." She was a big-time
bureaucratic back who controlled this big Cafeteria system, including
warehouses, cheese factories and an extensive patronage system, all on
the basis of her political connections and her political line. Moyano, in
particular, was extremely conscious and forceful about trying to use the
Cafeteria networks to defeat revolutionary activity among the people.
She openly bragged to the reactionary press: "This country would have
exploded long ago if it had not been for the solidarity work of the
Popular Organizations." [Caretas, February 17, 1992.]

Moyano was a government official in a progovernment party who
consciously and openly saw her role as suppressing explosions among
the people. Supporters of Moyano deny she was connected with
corruption. But the fact of the matter is that the corruption surrounding
these kitchens had gotten so extreme that the Catholic Church had
pulled out, leaving it in the hands of municipal officials like Moyano.
Nowadays (1996), old friends and colleagues of Moyano in the Left
Unity such as Teresa Aparcana, Adela Timoteo, Dora Iturragan,
Eulalia Gomez, Doris Velarde are being tried for the crimes of
embellezment of funds, corruption, bribery [El Comercio, February 22,
1996.]

After Moyano's death, the Proletarian Movement of the Shantytowns
(Movimiento Clasista Barrial), an organization developed by the PCP,
issued a communique which described Moyano's economic crimes:

"From the very beginning, she found her niche in the state apparatus
under the pretext of struggling for the people; creating and imposing
new and crippling taxes on the small merchants and street vendors;
creating the `people's inspectors' in charge of forcefully collecting
commissions; she only generated more abuse and corruption. She
cashed in on land sales in the seventh district in order to finance her
electoral campaign in her wild and ambitious race for a seat in
parliament. She had for herself: a cheese factory (Villa Cheeses), a
grain factory, as well as other hidden businesses. . ." [El Diario
Internacional,  April 1992.]

Continued Part 2 of 2...


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