From: Luis Quispe <lquispe-AT-blythe.org>
Subject: Paramilitaries in Countersinsurgency.
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 22:59:55 -0400 (EDT)



PARAMILITARY PEASANT RONDAS & NUCLEATIONS: PARAPETS FOR THE
GENOCIDAL ARMY THAT THE PEOPLE'S WAR HAS BEEN TEARING DOWN.

U.S. imperialism persists in its failed counterinsurgency policy
of using masses against masses, and in the countryside using the
peasants, as ramparts of Fujimori's genocidal armed forces.

>From the time the armed forces intervened to directly combat the
People's War in 1983, they began to group peasant communities
into settlements under their control, near the military garrisons
and organize them into paramilitary, in Peru called Civil Self-
Defense Committees (Rondas), which are reminiscent of the
settlements organized by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Guatemala
and Malaysia. Although the counterinsurgency tactics carried out
in Vietnam and Guatemala correspond to the same U.S. guidance of
Low Intensity Warfare, the Peruvian case is more complex, and in
some aspects also different. Since 1983 when the genocidal armed
forces began to ravage peasant communities and villages in the
Sierra and Jungle strips, at the same time they devote themselves
to building human settlements (nucleations) and concentration
camps where everybody (men, women, elderly and children) are
armed with crude weapons and forced to confront the Maoist
guerrillas, who are better provisioned and armed with the just
and correct ideology of the proletariat.

The policy of confronting masses against masses was seen
initially in southern portions (Sierra) of the country. Now that
the People's War has vigorously expanded nationwide, the
reactionaries have also expanded their paramilitary, for example
in Northern Peru and the jungle region (e.g., Huallaga).  The
tactic of the genocidal army to build their anti-guerrilla bases
is as follows: in a given town and/or community, the counter-
insurgent forces gather together all the survivors from the
various settlements scorched or wiped out by the genocidal armed
forces. The peasants, selected to prevent Maoist infiltration,
are compelled to do forced tasks including the building of houses
for the soldiers and a series of military fortifications. The
women serve the reactionary troops. They are compelled to abandon
their own families so that they can cook and feed the criminals.
Women are used as servants and even as sexual objects by these
butchers.

For a period of time of about three or four months, the peasants
are trained physically, with scarce nutrition provided by the
same Army or a non-governmental organization (NGO) working with
the military (which in many cases causes them to contract
diseases such as Tuberculosis). The Army devises a watch system
for the rondas. In their search for guerrillas, the genocidal
armed forces parapet themselves behind the members of the rondas.
For example, they force them to walk "in point," first in the
column,  exposing them as cannon fodder, highly- vulnerable in
any ambush by the Maoists. The purpose is two fold:

1) to cowardly preserve their forces using the rondas as buffer,
2) if the Maoists attack the rondas, the NGOs working with the
military (e.g., fake human rights groups) or the military itself,
accuses the PCP of "killing peasants." 

After the training period, the military selects the most servile
among the ronderos, as "authorities" in the settlement.
Generally, these are the landowning peasants or their relatives.

Crudely armed and lately with rear-loading shotguns, they are
abandoned to their fate, after a few months of being "trained" by
the military. The counterinsurgency base the army had build in
that particular town is withdrawn and placed elsewhere, where the
procedure is repeated.

Although they know the terrain superbly, the poorly armed
ronderos, besides defending an unjust cause, will become the
target of the people's policy of reestablishing the New Power in
the countryside. After studying the problem originated in the
people by the counterinsurgency forces, the PCP decided to
destroy such nucleations. First it crashes the clandestine work
of the reactionaries, and provokes the desertion of those who
remained in the rondas forced by the reactionary guns. Second,
while taking over and destroying the nucleation, it aims against
the most recalcitrant and reactionary elements who consciously
and deliberately support the genocidal army and the regime. All
the chiefs, infiltrated military elements, and advisors working
within the rondas are annihilated.

For each concentration camp and system of counter-revolutionary
rondas that imperialism builds in the country, the PCP destroys
two bases of ronderos, causing the disbandment of other
nucleations not yet attacked.

Many times the Maoists who conduct their own infiltration in the
reactionary rondas, cause serious casualties to the genocidal
army. Many ambushes to military convoys have taken place inside
the ronda bases themselves. For this reason, the worst fear of
the genocidal Army; is that their nucleations may be destroyed
>from within, especially by those peasants who are forced to join
the rondas, and are aware of the unjust role of the reactionary
rondas, and how the army uses them as cannon fodder, in patrols
and other operatives.

The counterrevolutionary experience of imperialism in the world
shows us that it forces the peasants to conform shock groups to
oppose the advance of the People's War. In Malaya (Southeast
Asia), for example, this reactionary tactic was performed by the
imperialist occupation forces, who managed to promote in the
population a rampant slaughtering, by virtue of which the
peasantry and natives generally were used as cannon fodder, and
then transformed into parapets, for the genocidal armed forces.

The strategy of "rural villages" in Malaysia meant for these
Asian people the death of more than 17,000 of their Children. As
in Peru, the counter-insurgent forces entered the communities and
towns, where supposedly there was a strong guerrilla presence to
murder the suspected revolutionaries and set up concentration
camps.

This counter-insurgent method was applied in Malaysia in a period
similar to the current period in Peru: at a time when imperialism
and reaction wanted to recover territory and political presence
among the population.

In the case of Malaysia, rural rondas formed by the counter-
revolutionary Army became relatively permanent, because the
Malaysian Communist Party erroneously led a revolutionary war
without properly building up support bases. Finally, they fell on
roguism and walked to their defeat.

     THE PEASANT: MAIN ALLY OF THE PROLETARIAT

In Peru, revisionism hasn't lost a chance to ride on the
struggles of the peasantry. They have a bureaucratic "control"
over the tainted Peruvian Confederation of Peasants (CCP) and the
National Agrarian Confederation (CNA). The history of struggles
in Peru shows that whenever the peasants are immersed in a sharp
and asphyxiating crisis, they have launched protests against the
sinister corporative and pro-imperialist plans of the
reactionaries. At the same time, expert traffickers such as Hugo
Blanco, Juan Rojas, Luna Vargas, Lucas Cachay and others have 
tried to place themselves as leaders of the mass movements,
arguing falsely before the reactionary press that they represent
the peasantry sector. There is also a case worthy of ridicule,
which has an aberrant and unbelievable nature. Ricardo Letts, a
former member of Vanguardia Revolucionaria (a pseudo-Maoist group
in the 70's) and a former PUM/United Left legislator, has tried
many times to "lead" the peasants, which is obviously an
unnatural relationship, since he is a wealthy landowner, from one
of the biggest and exploiting families linked to the comprador
bourgeoisie. Among his relatives is the banker and industrialist,
Jorge Picasso Pera~na, a crony of Fujimori.

This sinuous character, then a paleface "representative of the
peasants" boasts of keeping "good relations" with the wage slaves
in his own feud, a plantation of olive in the Department of Ica.
He attempted to brush off the class differences, which in this
case, is to show who has possession of the means of production,
and who must sell their labor power under its true worth, so as
to feed themselves and their families.

Taking advantage of his agroindustrial emporium, Mr. Letts
pretended to present himself as "an example" before medium and
rich peasants. Fanning his social tendency to INDIVIDUALISM, this
revisionist pretended to show, that the peasants support
evolution out of semi-feudalism in the countryside, so that they
can attain a higher economic status, while poor peasants, who are
the overwhelming majority in the Andes, languish in the shade of
exploitation and semi-feudalism, plowing infertile lands in the
best of cases.

Traffickers and traitors of the ilk of Letts, Hugo Blanco,
Cachay, and Luna Vargas, have no position with regard to the
reactionary decrees issued by the regime. Rojas, Luna Vargas and
others are spread out on the field, fulfilling the revisionist
programme. Others, like the left-overs of the defunct pro-
Albanian Party of Labor, consider that the PCP does not destroy
the landowning property but "nourishes it," "vigorizes it" and
"creates capitalism." They uphold that worn out "Trotskyte
theory" that distributing land to the poor peasants propitiates
individual property in the countryside instead of collective
property.

What these revisionists will never be able to understand, is that 
in a semi-feudal country like Peru, where there are no longer 
whip brandishing feudal lords, yet the feudal exploitation and 
serfdom of colonial times persist; the peasantry, mainly the
poor, still have not liberated themselves from feudal ties. They
haven't managed to attain individual property, in the capitalist
system, which is a necessary step for the rural economy to be
socialized.

The peasantry would never be able to liberate themselves while
they still carry all those chains and infra-structural
disadvantages which are preserved by the semi-feudal conditions,
for which reason, they must go through a State of New Democracy,
and from there progress to socialism.

The problem of land ownership is vital in the current stage of
the Democratic Revolution. The PCP solves this problem
brilliantly. First, by confiscating the land of the big
landowner, and second by distributing this land among the poor
peasants, constructing new forms of agricultural and commercial
relations, of individual and collective ownership of the land;
collective planting and crops. Thus, they are preparing the
peasantry for the next coming stage, which is the socialization
of the countryside in the State of New Democracy.

At the same time, it sustains and more so, fuses together the
poor peasantry in the worker-peasant alliance that is
indispensable for the conquest of power by the proletariat, and
the people in general.

================================Published by The New Flag
30-08 Broadway, Suite 159
Queens, NY 11106
E-Mail:lquispe-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org
Visit the PCP Web page:
http://www.blythe.org/peru-pcp
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