Abimael and the Super Friends.
From left to right:
Margie Clavo, Elena Iparraguirre, Abimael Guzman, (aka Presidente Gonzalo), Victor Zavala, and Angelica Salas.
I used to know all their "party names," but it has been a long time since I scrutinized these personalities in my target folders.
Make no mistake: these guys came very close to causing the Peruvian state to collapse back in 1992. It is important to explain that they were not exactly pushing Peru over a precipice, so much as they were deftly nudging it. Peru had problems all its own, but the Communist Party of Peru was masterfully exploiting them, and most importantly, was assiduously building grass-roots organizations with national breadth and range that would have been the only institutions still standing in the event of a total implosion of the state.
Had this happened, it is possible that they would have founded a hermetic socialist state on the south american mainland that would have made Cambodia under Pol Pot look like a garden spot. These are not just Marxists. These are Maoists, Maoists who advocate the collective raising of the young, the systematic atomization of the family unit, deliberate construction of a "new socialist man." These are Maoists who advocate "reeducation," "rectification campaigns," and endless revolution as the only means of banishing the tendrils of residual bourgeois capitalism. These guys are Communists, with a capital C, Communists who understand that there can be no true Communism unless it is global.
You can safely dismiss anyone who claims to be a Marxist, if they do not profess anything but respect for the Communist Party of Peru, and for Guzman himself as the "Fourth Sword of Marxism." That person is a poser, a dilettante, and worthy of the ultimate Marxist epithet, bourgeois, if they do not worship Guzman. The guys in this photograph are the real deal. It is to be hoped that we will never see their like again.
Their weapon is organization, their ability to organize, to inspire dedication and discipline and focus and sacrifice from cadres. They built a vanguard party which, at its height, never exceeded 250 actual party members, but which led thousands of militants, combatants, and unnumbered "masses" in various party organizations.
I do not know what the
fuck Peru is doing, giving these people a forum. Wisely, they have banned cameras and tape recorders from future hearings. The first time that Guzman was arrested and presented to the press, back in 1992, he was displayed in a white and black prison uniform, in a cage, and he gave a
speech which was, in its way, spellbinding in its mastery of oratory and Marxist cant. If you like, you can
download and dissect it from the website of the
MIM, the Maoist Internationalist Movement. Unless you are conversant with Maoist phrasing, it may all seem a bunch of gobbledygook to you. But to its target audience, this speech was a weapon, yet another weapon, and the last thing that the government of Peru needed to do was depict these aging revolutionaries standing in a rank, fists raised, chanting slogans.
I do not know why they have bothered with hearings in the first place. The state, for all its warts, has them in custody. Be thankful. They were outfighting the authorities until DINCOTE and Montesinos got lucky as hell and discovered Guzman living a quiet gentleman's life a mere block away from the Peruvian Ministry of Defense in 1992.
God help us all if he escapes.
Put the man back in his windowless cell. Feed him his oatmeal, three times a day.
Wait until he dies. Then bury him in the garden, in the middle of the night, and do not announce it to the world.
Let the Marxists of the world wonder, forever. Better that they wonder, than hold grand events celebrating his death, and demonstrations protesting his incarceration and death in captivity.