File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1996/96-08-marxism/96-08-20.010, message 71


From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-blythe.org>
Subject: MIM summary on Quispe
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 11:44:04 -0400 (EDT)


Summary of the case against Agent Quispe

As readers of MIM Notes and Maoist Sojourner know, MIM and others have been
working to expose a police provocateur who goes by the name of Luis Quispe
among other names, and who poses as a leading supporter of the Communist
Party of Peru. MIM has been asked, "What is the evidence or proof that Luis
Quispe is a police agent?" The questioner was a prisoner who apparently had
not received the June 1996 Maoist Sojourner on this question, due to prison
censorship. The question provides us with an opportunity to sum up the
existing evidence regarding Agent Quispe. This is a summation; the June
1996 Maoist Sojourner is more comprehensive. Some of what is in that issue
can also be found in the June 15, 1996 MIM Notes.

SPLIT AND WRECK

1. In May of this year, Agent Quispe made the public mistake on the
Internet of calling for the overthrow of Luis Arce Borja, the editor of El
Diario Internacional, for no reasons of any political importance. On May
15, 1996, Agent Quispe wrote on the Internet's "Marxism list" in reference
to Luis Arce Borja and Adolfo Olaechea: "TWO LINE STRUGGLE AGAINST
OPPORTUNISM: OVERTHROW THE 'AMBASSADORS' OF FUJIMORI"

2. In August 1994, at a forum in New England in which MIM was a
participant, Agent Quispe stated clearly that the letters purported to be
>from Comrade Gonzalo regarding peace talks were real. Later, behind MIM's
back, Agent Quispe told people to call MIM counterrevolutionary for
repeating what he had just said.

3. Agent Quispe lied to us about the RCP to try to provoke unprincipled
attacks from us on the RCP.

a. He told us that he knew the RCP's newspaper was going to come out in
favor of peace accords in the next issue, so MIM should write a tough
article attacking the RCP on this basis.

b. A "sugar-coated bullet": he told us that the PCP was prepared to honor
MIM as part of the "red fraction" of the RIM, and claimed that the RCP-USA
blocked the Peruvians when they tried to make this official in RIM.

4. Agent Quispe tried to goad us into attacking the Communist Party of the
Philippines.

While Agent Quispe has been largely exposed, he continues in his attempts
to split the International Communist Movement, its components and its
allies.

INTELLIGENCE-GATHERING

Agent Quispe gained credentials by doing translating work and editing of
the New Flag, then used these credentials to gather information on a wide
variety of organizations in North America including MIM. This piece of
evidence is backed up by the following:

1. Agent Quispe worked in an unprincipled Menshevik way with any
subjectively leftist organization he could: MIM, RCP, WWP, CPUSA,
Committees of Correspondence, etc., etc., etc. This is something the real
PCP or MPP would never do. When we still worked with Agent Quispe, we
criticized this apparent Menshevism as a political error. So why did Agent
Quispe continue this practice in the face of criticism? Because it served
the objectives of a police agent who seeks to gather as much information as
possible on as many groups and individuals as possible.

2. Agent Quispe later told us straight up that he was "investigating" us.

3. It is clear that Agent Quispe gathers information because he releases
this information, usually mixed in with disinformation, and often in such a
way as to try to foster disunity among the supporters and potential
supporters of the PCP.

FORGERY

Agent Quispe fabricated the positions of MIM for his own purposes. He
created documents out of thin air in order to misrepresent several people
not in MIM. This is documented in the June 1996 Maoist Sojourner. Targets
of forgery by Agent Quispe have included the RCP, a CPUSA member, and an
East Coast professor.

DOUBLE-DEALING

Agent Quispe had the double-dealing practice of praising MIM to the skies
in front of our faces while denouncing MIM as "counterrevolutionary" in
front of an audience of members of the reformist Committees of
Correspondence where they thought MIM would not notice. A member of the
audience Agent Quispe spoke to got a copy of his comments to MIM, because
it seemed strange to the Committees of Correspondence that this person was
calling MIM "counterrevolutionary." Double-dealing is a key part of Agent
Quispe's repertoire, most infamously in his history of first praising Luis
Arce Borja in a bid for acceptance and access to information before calling
for Luis Arce Borja's "overthrow" for no reason of political importance. On
May 3, Agent Quispe started a provocation by asking if someone previously
in his own camp was "a plant of the intelligence services?" The suddenness
of this change of opinion shows in that weeks earlier, Quispe was trying to
defend the same person in the same camp to MIM.

SNITCH WORK

1. Currently he is misleading a defense campaign for a Peruvian exile in
New York who is threatened with deportation and execution, apparently
because Agent Quispe fingered him. The question of misleadership is
addressed in the June 1996 Maoist Sojourner. On the question of fingering
Calero, not long before Calero was threatened with deportation, Agent
Quispe boastfully announced on the Marxism-list that one of his phony
"MPP-USA"'s supposed members was wanted by the Peruvian authorities, and
described the details of this supposed "MPP-USA" member's case: the crime
he was charged with and the location in Peru from which he came. When
Calero was thereafter arrested and the facts of his case became publicly
known, it turned out that the facts of his case matched precisely those
details previously announced by Agent Quispe. Talk about dry-snitching!
Currently, Agent Quispe is fairly pathetically trying to cover his tracks
by exploiting the fact that he didn't name a name when he fingered Calero.
Agent Quispe's defense is essentially that it wasn't Calero he was
fingering; he was fingering someone else! In related news, Agent Quispe's
friend Dan Axtell recently admitted that he had contact with Calero before
Calero's arrest.

2. Throughout his Internet offensive, Agent Quispe named names of people in
Peru.

POLITICAL INCONSISTENCIES

1. Agent Quispe correctly opposed hegemonism on the one hand, but on the
other hand demanded it by demanding that we take a stand right away on
questions relating to conditions in Peru.

2. Sometimes Agent Quispe correctly criticized the line that defending
Gonzalo is principal over defending the revolution in Peru, while falsely
attributing this line to MIM. Other times, Agent Quispe was uncritically
quoting the RIM incorrectly saying that "the principal task is to 'move
heaven and earth to save the life of Chairman Gonzalo.'" When criticized
for printing this without criticism, Agent Quispe refused to retract or
correct the statement.

THE INTERNET OFFENSIVE AND SOME BACKGROUND

late 1993: Canto Grande prison outside Lima: Capitulationist document
issued: "Outline for a Basic Document." This document calls for ending the
People's War, disbanding the People's Guerrilla Army, and dissolving the
People's Committees and the base areas of the People's New Democratic
Republic. By writing this, this document's authors purged themselves from
the PCP. A struggle between the PCP and the authors of this document is not
a struggle within the Party.

late 1995: Co-RIM releases A World to Win #21, which calls the Canto Grande
authors "leaders of the Right Opportunist Line" (p. 64), part of a
"two-line struggle within the ranks" of the PCP (p. 1).

May 1: "MPP-Malmoe" in Malmoe, Sweden distributes a leaflet which uses the
PCP's name to defend the Avakianist Co-RIM, and to attack Luis Arce Borja
for criticizing the Co-RIM.

May 2: A Swedish Marxism-list participant reports on the contents of the
"MPP-Malmoe" pamphlet.

May 2: Agent Quispe defends the "MPP-Malmoe" and the newsletter Sol Rojo,
while asking "IS [Luis Arce Borja supporter] OLAECHEA A PLANT OF THE
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES?"

May 4: Agent Quispe attacks
Luis Arce Borja. Throughout Agent Quispe's Internet offensive, and starting
with this post, Agent Quispe names names of people in Peru.

May 9: Agent Quispe calls El Diario Internacional "fake," says "Down the
opportunists snitches Olaechea and Arce Borja!" Also on May 9, Agent Quispe
writes, "CHARLATAN OLAECHEA AND THE 'MOTHER COURAGE' ARCE BORJA WILL BE
JUSTLY JUDGED BY THE PEOPLE, ONLY THE PEOPLE TRY AND PUNISH THE SNITCHES
AND PROVOCATORS."

May 10: Agent Quispe exposes himself as an anti-Semite or as an agent
provocateur trying to make PCP supporters look like anti-Semites in order
to discredit them. While accusing someone of being a cop, Agent Quispe
deflected a question by writing: "SORRY, WE CANNOT HELP YOU ON THAT, ASK
YOUR SUPERIORS...IF THEY CANNOT HELP YOU ASK YOUR PRIEST OR RABBI. MOST
LIKELY THE SECOND." Labelling an enemy as Jewish as an added slam has
nothing in common with communism.

May 15: Agent Quispe writes in reference to Luis Arce Borja and Adolfo
Olaechea: "TWO LINE STRUGGLE AGAINST OPPORTUNISM: OVERTHROW THE
'AMBASSADORS' OF FUJIMORI" Agent Quispe criticizes Luis Arce Borja on the
basis of the contents of the March 1993 issue of El Diario Internacional,
despite having worked with Luis Arce Borja for at least two years after
March 1993 without raising such objections.

DEFENSE OF CAPITULATION, DEFENSE OF AVAKIAN

Agent Quispe's rationale for the "overthrow" of Luis Arce Borja is pretty
thin. As discussed above, the Avakianist (crypto-Trotskyist) Committee of
the RIM has been treating Peruvian capitulationists as right-opportunist
PCP members instead of as renegade deserters. Rightly angered by this, on
March 10, 1996, Luis Arce Borja's camp issued the World Mobilization
Commission Call for Mobilising for Struggle, which stated:

"...The opportunist leadership of Co-RIM, is the main cause of immobilism
in the international movement of support for the People's War in Peru.
Since October 1993 their nefarious activities have been geared to
paralysing any show of support for the People's War and to cast doubts upon
the revolutionary condition of Chairman Gonzalo. Both bureaucratic
organisms, the Co-RIM and the IEC, are not in any way politically and
morally capable to call upon the masses and political organisations to the
defence of the Peruvian revolution.

"No working class individual would listen to or follow the calls of an
eclectic leadership who took a conciliatory position towards the police
fraud for over a year and a half and kept during that time secret relations
with the promoters of the police and capitulators' plot abroad, a
leadership, moreover, that took steps to pigeonhole documents of the PCP.

"No political organisation abroad can take seriously the proclamations of
the International Emergency Committee (IEC), while the bureaucracy in
charge of that organism is the same bureaucracy in charge of the Co-RIM. No
one with elementary political sense would want to offer thier support and
solidarity to Chairman Gonzalo if this must pass through the IEC, an
organism in whose 'leading body,' three individuals who are working and
coordinating actions with the Peruvian government remain....Given the
ideo-political considerations above, we issue this call to set up and
organise a WORLD WIDE MOBILISATION COMMISSION (WWMC) to defend the Peruvian
revolution."

What was Agent Quispe's response to this call? His response was to order
non-participation in the WWMC, with his excuse being that the WWMC's
initiators have big egos and are not PCP members. A large part of his
"evidence" regarding egos in his circular "logic" was that the initiators
of the call initiated it, and therefore must be trying to promote
themselves as the leadership of the pro-PCP movement abroad. Agent Quispe's
talk about egos was an appeal to conscious and unconscious anarchism in the
movement--a tendency to mistrust leaders and those who assert leadership,
regardless of political line. In contrast, MIM applauds revolutionary
arrogance. We seek to cultivate in our membership the kind of arrogance
which allows one to go toe-to-toe with the imperialists. We are glad that
the initiators of the WWMC call had big enough egos to think, "better us
than Avakian!" In fact, though, if you read the call itself, it says
nothing about making leaders out of Luis Arce Borja or Adolfo Olaechea. It
was Agent Quispe who made these leaders' personalities an issue.

In regard to Agent Quispe's charge that the WWMC is a sham because the
call's initators are not PCP members, this is wrong on its face, because
the formality of membership or non-membership is not the test of whether an
initiative is correct. Political line is. But Agent Quispe is not simply
making an innocent formalist error. No, Agent Quispe is trying to goad
people into insisting that they are PCP members, and maybe into naming some
names to prove their credentials. Agent Quispe has likewise tried to goad
MIM to name the names of its previous Peruvian contacts. Fortunately, no
one is biting on Agent Quispe's fishing lure.

Even if the question of the WWMC is dealt with as a question of
personalities the way Agent Quispe, would like, the history of Agent Quispe
is not favorable in comparison to the histories of Luis Arce Borja and
Adolfo Olaechea. Agent Quispe came seemingly out of nowhere after Gonzalo's
arrest, an arrest which caused a temporary setback for the PCP which the
Peruvian fascists and their Yankee handlers sought to maximize through
psychological-warfare plots. In contrast, Luis Arce Borja has a history, a
history of correct leadership. When Chairperson Gonzalo sought to share his
views with the masses in interview format, he turned to Luis Arce Borja.
Since, Luis Arce Borja's El Diario Internacional has been in the forefront
of the pro-PCP movement abroad. When the fake "left" joined the imperialist
chorus in condemning the assassination of Maria Elena Moyano, for instance,
El Diario Internacional did a commendable job of exposing the truth about
"Mother Courage." Adolfo Olaechea, too, has a history. His includes a
history of struggle against RCP-USA/Co-RIM crypto-Trotskyism (Avakianism).

In his campaign to derail the WWMC, Agent Quispe has sought to focus
attention on the personalities of the call's initiators. Agent Quispe
prefers for the discussion to center on personalities rather than on
political line, because on the question of political line, Agent Quispe is
on thin ice. In reality, the question is not "arrogant Luis Arce Borja and
Adolfo Olaechea vs. humble Luis Quispe." No, the question is WWMC or....Or
what? What is Agent Quispe's proposed alternative to the WWMC? Though he
blows a lot of smoke to distract attention from his position, the answer is
that Agent Quispe's proposal is to continue to prop up the Avakianist
Co-RIM by "struggling" with it from within the Co-RIM-led RIM. Like
"MPP-Malmoe," Agent Quispe justifies this position by pointing to a pro-RIM
document written by the PCP Central Committee. But this document was
written prior to Gonzalo's arrest, prior to Operation Capitulation, and
prior to Co-RIM's attempts to prop up capitulationist deserters by calling
them "PCP." Agent Quispe also has tried to prop up RIM by claiming that it
is led by the PCP, when in fact the RCP-USA is the party with the most
hegemony in RIM.

Is it simple dogmatism which causes Agent Quispe to cite a
pre-Gonzalo-arrest document as the guideline for how to relate to RIM?
There is another explanation. Apology for RIM = apology for Co-RIM apology for the Canto Grande authors = apology for capitulation = embrace
of Fujimori and his Yankee puppeteers. Those like Agent Quispe who embrace
RIM are in fact embracing imperialism, fiery rhetoric to the contrary
notwithstanding.

CONCLUSION

Agent Quispe's goals are to weaken the PCP by:
1. Splitting PCP supporters from PCP supporters, especially from leading
PCP supporters like Luis Arce Borja.
2. Splitting PCP supporters from potential PCP supporters
3. Promoting capitulationism among PCP supporters.
4. Naming Peruvian names.

Among Agent Quispe's tactics are to:
1. Count on the fact that people may have short memories or do not read
documents and use the prestige of the Peruvian revolution to turn black
into white.
2. Tell various people different things so as to set the supporters of the
People's War against each other. Do so by word-of-mouth.
3. Use an alleged party card to protect himself against charges regarding
his own practice outside Peru.

Police provocateurs by their nature do whatever political work and favors
they can in order to ingratiate themselves with their targets. For this
reason, people need to be judged not just on their political work, but on
their ideological and political line. In Agent Quispe's case, an
examination of his political line reveals wild inconsistencies upon first
glance, and right-wing opportunism (accomodating Yankee imperialism via
Fujimori via Canto Grande capitulationists via Avakian's Co-RIM via RIM,
"MPP-Malmoe," and Sol Rojo) upon closer look. Furthermore, an investigation
of Agent Quispe's "political work" reveals a pattern of splitting and
wrecking, intelligence gathering, double-dealing, snitch work, lying and
forgery, a pattern which indicates that his fiery rhetoric is not a
political line but a mask.

This document is only a summation, but we believe the evidence outlined
above, when pieced together, constitutes proof that Agent Quispe is indeed
a police provocateur. The reader does not have to take our word for much of
what we outline above. Agent Quispe used to do his double-dealing in
private, but he has graduated to the public arena of the Marxism List, and
the accountability this brings has proved to be the beginning of the end
for him.

MIM reiterates that it is important for supporters of the People's War to
break with Agent Quispe without waiting for PCP approval to do so, since
the PCP cannot know everything that is being done abroad in its name.
Support of any sort for an exposed police provocateur is intolerable, and
those who engage in such support must be broken with if their behavior
cannot be rectified.





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