Mariátegui’s Thought in the Peasant Struggles of Hugo Blanco

From Mariátegui to Blanco

José Carlos Mariátegui was shaped by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, but he maintained a distance from ideas that later became Marxist dogmas, being among the first left intellectuals to express his political differences on both local and international platforms. He identified the complex social-historical Latin American reality resulting from the semicolonial status of our nations due to their political and economic dependence on the central capitalist countries. He was one of the most important and creative intellectuals on the left in Latin America. His thesis on the role of indigenous people in the revolutionary struggle transcended the limits of the various left currents both within and outside his country. It made him contemplate the political strategy of including the indigenous peasant from a class perspective as an essential subject in the struggle for socialism in Latin American countries.

The course of Mariátegui’s intellectual life and his lucidity and sensitivity soon led him to realize that beyond the exploitation by capital of agricultural and urban workers was the oppression suffered by indigenous workers evidenced by a profound discrimination that excluded them from the scant benefits and political rights of the rest of society. This in turn prompted another reading of Marxism, other political proposals for the socialist struggle in Latin America (among them the creation of an Indo-American socialism) that took into account the potential of the indigenous subject as part of the revolutionary subject. He found that prejudice against the indigenous race as inferior allowed their extreme exploitation, making it necessary to fight both the exploitation of human beings and racial discrimination. “In these countries the race factor is compounded by the class factor,which revolutionary politics must take into account” (Mariátegui, in Vanden and Becker, 2011: 308). The superexploitation of labor and the intense racial discrimination accepted by Peruvian society led Mariátegui to contradict some of Marxism’s premises, refusing to let socialism in Latin America be a carbon copy, and highlighted the differences between developed capitalist societies and those that were still largely agrarian.

In 1921, with the approval of the Augusto Leguía administration, an indigenous convention was held in Lima, Peru, with the participation of various indigenous communities that leveled, “in Quechua, forceful accusations against the gamonales, ¹ the authorities, and the priests” (Jiménez, 1979: 244). Similar conventions were held annually for four years for the purpose of formulating indigenous peasant demands that the Tahuantinsuyo Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee would take up in 1924, when the government was persecuting the indigenous leaders. Mariátegui not only proposed “a revolutionary strategy supported by the worker-peasant alliance uniting peasants and workers into a single union federation and the political unification of a socialist worker-peasant party” (Quijano, 1985: 135) but also supported the vindication of indigenous people as historical subjects of their cultural and artistic expressions. This grasp of the indigenous issue was also a product of the cosmopolitan vision he had acquired during his exile in Europe (1919–1923). This experience allowed him to broaden his reflective horizons and his appraisal of the Peruvian civilizing past, which emerged in his thought in the recognition of social and economic relations close to his own reading of communism.

Mariátegui’s pioneering idea of including indigenous demands in the Latin American socialist struggle of his time, in addition to appreciating and publicizing the civilizing Inca culture and challenging the stigma of considering it simply a remnant of the past, called into question the Marxist view that the proletariat was the only revolutionary subject. For this reason, he aimed to expand the horizons of the political struggle, which considered itself not only socialist but anti-imperialist and transformed some of the Latin American nationalisms into revolutionary and leftist ones. The political transcendence of the Peruvian intellectual—not only in the new Latin American left that continued from the Cuban Revolution but also in those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which broadened their perspective on social struggles—may reside in these ideas.

In 1927, during the Second Workers’ Congress in Lima, Mariátegui (in Vanden and Becker, 2011: 182) said:

Marxism . . . is a fundamentally dialectic method. It is a method that is completely based in reality, on the facts. It is not, as some erroneously suppose, a body of principles of rigid consequences, the same for all historical climates and all social latitudes. Marx extracted his method from history’s very guts. Marxism, in every country, in every people, operates and acts on the environment, on the medium, without neglecting any of its modalities.

Therefore, in the meeting of the South American Bureau of the Third International, he debated the issue of the differentiation between nation and nationalities with some of the Latin American delegates, using the example of the Quechua and Aymara problem. In this regard he acknowledged, according to Carlos Franco (1982: 10), that “the ethno-cultural content of indigenous demands . . . should be expressed through the struggle against latifundismo and for the control of the land. In this confrontation, the indigenous people will reveal their identity through the development of one of their oldest institutions: the indigenous community.” This idea of coming back to the indigenous community “as the focal point of the reorganization of the countryside entails simultaneously satisfying the ethno-cultural and the classist demands of the indigenous movement,” the same ones that present themselves today in almost all of the struggles of indigenous communities in Latin America in recent years.

Just as Mariátegui admired the Russian Revolution, Blanco admired the Cuban one, which expressed, according to Martín Mangiatini (2016), “the climate of the era” and according to Walter Benjamin “the spirit of the times.” This was a young revolution that was proof of the viability of the construction of socialism in Latin America, carried out by young combatants with an impact on youth with socialist and communist inclinations around the world but especially those in Latin America, who saw themselves in the Cuban historical social reality. Blanco was no exception. Captivated very early on by socialist ideas, he still remembers his adolescent collective reading discussions with Manuel González Prada, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Blanco and Romero, 2018). At the age of 19, Blanco traveled to Argentina in 1954 to study agronomy in La Plata. His older brother was living there and introduced him to his Trotskyist friends. The political environment of the Argentine left in those years greatly impressed him. It was there that he opted for the Trotskyist current led by Nahuel Moreno, ² who was already an important leader and with whom he would establish a close friendship. After leaving the university, Blanco began working in a meat-packing plant, where he had his first experiences in union matters (Camejo, 1972: 10). Later he also participated in the popular struggle of resistance to the coup d’état against Perón.

In 1958 he returned to Peru, assigned to reorganizing the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Party—POR) in Lima. Along with some 20 other activists, he joined the orthodox wing of the party led by Félix Zevallos (Blanco and Romero, 2018). This faction of the POR held great influence in Moreno’s Argentine Trotskyist party. According to Blanco, the objective of this faction was to independently build the revolutionary party, and it identified as its primary task “promoting and advancing the struggles the working class was developing through its trade unions, to raise them higher and higher, to create a revolutionary trade-union tendency which could bring together the best trade-union leaders and activists” (Blanco, 1972: 20). This was the line of action that he would maintain, but for peasant unions, during his leadership in La Convención.

In the same year, pursued by the authorities for his participation in the unrest during then–Vice President Nixon’s visit to Lima, Blanco took refuge in Cuzco, a decision made by Zevallos’s POR, which had begun work with peasants in the region that year. Here he joined the Federación de Trabajadores de Cuzco (Cuzco Workers’ Federation—FTC) (Blanco, 1972: 21):

Inside the FTC, I came up against a reality that we had not expected: it was basically an organization of artisans, with minority representation of workers. In addition, its radical wing was composed not of workers’ representatives but of peasant delegates. It was then that I began my peasant campaign; for, although the militants of the POR had what was for Peru a lopsided orientation toward the urban working class, still, as Marxists, we followed the practice of examining reality and assimilating its lessons, and then taking action along a revolutionary path where the revolutionary tendency flowed.

From then on, as did Mariátegui, Blanco showed a critical capacity not to subordinate reality to theory. At the same time, he was no stranger to the Cuzco situation. He had been born in Huanoquite, Cuzco, to a middle-class mestizo family in 1934. His father was an attorney who defended peasants. Blanco “had learned to speak Quechua in his parents’ study listening to the stories of the elderly agrarian leaders” (Cordal, 2016: 50). In Cuzco Blanco met Andrés González, a union leader from Chaupimayo, La Convención, and an acquaintance of his father-in-law. González was an FTC lawyer and Communist Party militant (Blanco and Romero, 2018). Blanco’s arrival in La Convención as an envoy of González, especially with his knowledge of Quechua, facilitated his acceptance among the peasants of the hacienda. He began to work as an allegado (laborer) in a coffee and coca grove. However, when he attempted to present himself as a Chaupimayo union delegate in the FTC he was rejected for being a Trotskyist, accused of being an imperialist agent sent by the gamonales to destroy the unions (Blanco and Romero, 2018). This would be one of his first confrontations with the FTC bureaucracy, which he always considered Stalinist. To some extent, this episode was the beginning of a turbulent phase of his life no less complex than the situation in the valley.

The Peasant Movement of La Convención and Lares

La Convención is the largest province in the Department of Cuzco and is located in the northern part of it at an elevation between 800 and 2,000 meters above sea level (Lora, 2003: 36) in the high forest of the Peruvian Amazon Basin. At the start of the twentieth century the province began experiencing a boom due to its incorporation into the southern Andean market as a supplier of coca, sugar (Bustíos, 2014: 50), cacao, and coffee (Murri, 2019: 108). The Mountain Lands Act of 1909 fostered the concentration of rural property in the zone, resulting in “a significant increase in the number of haciendas that sent their products to the city of Cuzco” (Bustíos, 2014: 50). This process meant the dispossession of peasant communities and small landowners (Murri, 2019: 104).

A highly lethal malaria epidemic began in September 1932 on the upper Urubamba River in La Convención and rapidly spread to the Lares district in Calca (Bustíos, 2014: 50). The epidemic heightened the demand for manpower on the haciendas, and therefore “the hacienda owners took peasants to the area . . . from all the provinces in the highlands of Cuzco, Apurímac, Ayacucho, Puno” (Blanco and Romero, 2018), and Arequipa. The peasants who went to work in La Convención and Lares were arrendires (renters) (Blanco and Romero, 2018) who paid the hacienda owner in days of forced and unpaid labor on his land, approximately 10 days per month (Murri, 2019: 108), that were called the “condition.” They had absolutely no job security and no right to the value of any improvements they made on the land (Hobsbawm, 1968: 278). On the forested lowland slopes the land had to be cleared before starting a plantation, and because of this its products could not be harvested in the same year (Blanco, 2007). An arriendo of 3–20 hectares was too large for one peasant to work, and to fulfill his work quota on the hacienda and be able to work his own plot an arrendire would employ allegados, who sublet a piece of land of 1/2 to 1 hectare and worked on it either for him or for the hacendado in his name (Blanco and Romero, 2018). At the end of this labor-property system (gamonalism), which several writers have considered feudal or archaic (Mariátegui, 2007: 26; Hobsbawm, 1968: 278; Murri, 2019: 108; Blanco and Romero, 2018), there were also habilitados (farm workers), normally temporary and paid daily in cash or in kind by gamonales, arrendires, or allegados (Blanco and Romero, 2018; Hobsbawm, 1968: 278). Coexisting with these forms of labor were the pongueaje ³ and the yanaconaje, ⁴ forms of unpaid labor and even of servitude that originated in the colonial era (Murri, 2019: 106). Among the peasants of La Convención, the majority of whom were Quechua-speakers, resentment of abuse by the gamonales—corporal punishment, torture, death, sexual exploitation of campesinas, etc. (Hobsbawm, 1968: 276)—was part of the system of exploitation in which they were involved. This was the gamonalism that Mariátegui denounced in his Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (2007).

In 1957, the peasants of La Convención began to organize through unions (Murri, 2019: 109). A union tradition had existed there since the 1930s “due to the political influence of the workers’ federations in the country’s capital, organized under the name ‘José Carlos Mariátegui’” (Lora, 2003: 76). In fact, shortly before his death, Mariátegui had promoted the sending of trained workers, peasants, and intellectuals from Lima to strengthen the class organization in the highlands (Vanden, 1978: 204). Blanco would be the heir to and the driving force of this effort. Upon his arrival in La Convención there were some half-dozen peasant unions. When he was arrested in 1963 and ended his campaign, there were almost 150 new unions (Cordal, 2016: 51).

A year after his arrival in La Convención in 1959, Blanco was jailed in Cuzco’s Central Prison for leading one of the strikes against the rise in fuel prices. Two months later he began a hunger strike to secure his release. Peasant pressure was so great that the FTC was forced to threaten a strike for Blanco’s freedom. This process transformed him into a public figure in Cuzco (Cordal, 2016: 51). Once free in June 1960, he was able to participate in the FTC and in the Federación Provincial de Peasants de La Convención (Provincial Federation of Peasants of La Convención—FPCC). In the latter he was named undersecretary and later secretary of press and publicity, although his primary task was “organizing and reorganizing unions and their struggles” (Blanco, 1972: 22). Regarding this initial period, he wrote (86),

I was just another of the union organizers of the FPCC and of the FDCC. The organization of peasant unions in the department was begun much earlier under the FTC. There had even been militant peasant unions then. It can be said that the old-time militancy of the peasantry had also expressed itself in union form. Evidence of this was the Peasant Union of San Jerónimo in the 1940s led by Lorenzo Chamorro.

From this comment we can see that, like Mariátegui, Blanco was steeped in the organizing tradition, resistance, and struggle of the indigenous peasantry. Mariátegui believed that it would have to be the indigenous peasants themselves rather than an urban proletariat vanguard who would bring about structural change in their socioeconomic conditions, starting with an agrarian reform (Vanden, 1978: 198). This was another point of convergence between Mariátegui and Blanco (1972: 119): “Only the organized mobilization of the peasantry against gamonalism and its accomplices will be able to accomplish an authentic agrarian reform. We know that in that way it will become the agrarian revolution, as part of the process of socialist revolution led by the proletariat.” As did Mariátegui, Blanco regarded the peasant class as a revolutionary subject and interpreted the peasant movement he was part of as one phase in the revolutionary process toward socialism.

Before the arrival of Blanco and the other Trotskyists, the Partido Comunista (Communist Party—PC) had had a presence in the valleys and operated politically there. In 1959 the PC began to act through the FTC (Lora, 2003: 91–92), which had attorneys present legal demands (Blanco, 2007), including an eight-hour day, reduction in the length of “the condition,” elimination of the pallay, ⁵ an end to the eviction of arrendires, and union freedom (Blanco and Romero, 2018). In response to these demands there were negotiations and reluctance by the gamonales to comply. Peasant unions in the region multiplied, and the struggle became radicalized to the point that there was no room for negotiation given the strikes, work stoppages, demonstrations, disregard of court orders, etc. (Blanco, 1972: 22).

One of the important things that Blanco discovered was that the strategies being used in the workers’ struggle had different meanings or effects for the struggle of the indigenous peasantry. For example, Blanco noticed that peasants in a union were tied together not only by direct exploitation or abuse by a gamonal but also by working and living in the same place and having common needs. This resulted in their forming a community (Blanco, 1972: 58), ⁶ and he therefore felt that “from its birth, the peasant organization had a deeper, more extensive, more political significance than the workers’ trade union” (Blanco, 1972: 58). The peasant strike was also different. While the workers’ strike tended to weaken the longer it lasted, for the highland peasant a strike against the hacendado meant more time to work his arriendo; working the land, time was not an enemy. This feature of peasant strikes allowed for strikes of nine months or a year: “When we realized that a prolonged strike would, in actuality, shatter the system of property relations in the zone, we sought to make a long-term general strike” (Blanco, 1972: 49–50).

With the support of the police, repression by the gamonales increased. In response, the organized peasants shifted from strikes to takeovers of gamonal lands. Toward the end of 1961 the Frente de Izquierda Revolucionario (Revolutionary Left Front—FIR) was formed, bringing together the POR, independent militants, and the Leninist-PC (Cordal, 2016: 54). Its most important function was to coordinate with the urban efforts of the Secretariado Latinoamericano del Trotskismo Ortodoxo (Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism—SLATO) led by Nahuel Moreno (Blanco, 1972: 38). In 1962 there was a more far-reaching wave of land takeovers (Murri, 2019: 109). Blanco, who at first had been in charge of organizing the union defense brigades, was now one of the principal leaders of La Convención. Tensions with the Communist Party increased, since “the legalistic form that the PC stamped on the methods of struggle . . . was limited to the institutionalization of the conflict. . . . According to Blanco, there had been a clash between Trotsky’s Transition Program . . . and the PC program of minimal reform” (Lora, 2003: 94). For example, the PC was opposed to unification of the lists of demands and to basing the struggle primarily on mobilizing the masses. It viewed the legal struggle as the nucleus and the mass mobilizations as secondary (Blanco, 1972: 45).

In that year, the Manuel Prado Ugarteche administration (1956–1962) was halted by a coup d’état. “The military occupied the regions where there had been land invasions of haciendas and where the radicalization of the peasantry was greatest, as was the case in La Convención, violently eliminating peasant leaders” (Murri, 2019: 110). In July 1963 Fernando Belaúnde Terry became president of Peru. He implemented an agrarian reform solely for the La Convención region as part of a strategy to put an end to the social conflict and land seizures in the area (Murri, 2019: 110). Blanco distrusted this reform: “We know that ever since colonial times they have been enacting laws that benefit the peasant but never enforce them” (Blanco, 1972: 119). Nevertheless, he was clear that, if the will of the peasantry was to enforce that law, then that was what the revolutionaries should support, even if that decision put off the possibility of continuing and intensifying the armed struggle (124):

The last agrarian reform law alleviated some of the tension in the countryside, decreasing thereby the possibility of armed struggle. Nevertheless, the contradictions did not disappear, and others arose. The development of these new conflicts toward armed struggle depends on the incorporation of the revolutionaries into the life of the current peasant movement, beginning with its present organizations, its present consciousness and present necessities, its concrete, immediate, and most deeply felt demands, and the sooner they join and participate in these the sooner will they consciously be able to transform this struggle from its present low level to armed struggle. . . . Only contact with reality will be able to indicate to us specifically how the armed struggle must develop.

Although the conflict in La Convención did in fact diminish, land takeovers began in other areas of the highlands, including the Department of Lima (Blanco, 2007). Belaúnde continued the violent repression against the takeovers such as the massacre of 19 peasants in Solterapampa, in the province of Canchis, Cuzco, in February 1964 (Cama, 2013: 121). Murder, persecution, or imprisonment of both peasants and leaders did not put an end to the movement in the highlands; “between 1963 and 1965 alone about a million and a half peasants were mobilized throughout Peru, figures that were unprecedented” (Murri, 2019: 107). Recovery of communal lands, hacienda takeovers, and unionization “signified a qualitative leap in the highland struggles” (Murri, 2019: 113). Newspapers of the Peruvian oligarchy such as La Prensa, Crónica, Expreso, and El Sol covered significant events and published the demands of the peasants and even the agreements reached with the landowners (Hobsbawm, 1968: 279–280). This important media coverage placed the highland peasantry at the center of the Peruvian political scene and the intellectual debates in Lima (Murri, 2019: 111, 113).

From prison, Blanco followed Belaúnde’s agrarian reform and the continuation of the peasant movement. In 1966 he was sentenced to death, but an international campaign, largely organized by the Fourth International with participation from intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Bertrand Russell, managed to have the sentence reduced to 25 years. According to his reading of the political scene, given that the congress members were hacendados, Belaúnde’s agrarian reform would not go beyond La Convención (Blanco and Romero, 2018). In any event, opposition in Congress to Belaúnde’s government, led by Haya de la Torre’s Partido de Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Party—APRA), blocked the executive’s reformist proposals, especially the Agrarian Reform Law, the resolution of the International Petroleum Company (IPC) ⁷ matter, and the fiscal reforms, and this led to a governmental crisis and a sharp devaluation. Apprehension among the military, initially allies of the Belaúnde administration, intensified, and the emergence of a new reformist ideology in the military high command contributed to the October 1968 coup d’état and the formation of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces under the command of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (Cotler, 2002: 66–70).

The following year, agrarian reform was decreed for the entire country. The significance of the reform centered on the fact that “it entailed a restructuring of landownership, doing away with the latifundio and the hacienda, but also encompassed political and cultural changes tending to revalue the Andean tradition and to consider the peasant sectors as citizens entitled to rights” (Murri, 2019: 113). This opinion was partly shared by Blanco, who asserted in a 2019 interview that the Velasco reform “at least eliminated latifundismo, in a way, but eliminated the latifundismo that had feudal characteristics” (Blanco and Romero, 2018). This reform was well received in the country and abroad, since it concurred with the aims of the Alliance for Progress. Furthermore, the army was ever more convinced that a widespread, violent mobilization would occur if it did not attempt to resolve the country’s social problems (Cotler, 2002: 64, 70).

After seven years in prison, Blanco was amnestied by Velasco Alvarado and deported to Mexico in 1971. That same year he wrote Tierra o muerte (1971), at once a critique of and a testimonial to the peasant movement in which he interpreted the events in La Convención.

Blanco and the Fourth International

We believe that the success of Trotskyism in some Latin American countries was due to the concept of “the theory of the permanent revolution, a theory that defines the strategy of the struggle for socialism in economically backward countries, colonial and semicolonial, and the reaffirmation of the international nature of the proletarian revolution in the face of globalized capitalism” (Bensaïd, 2002: 39). As Bensaïd noted, although the Fourth International ⁸ could not be an international workers’ organization, it did manage to organize an international network of Trotskyist political currents including some in Latin America that led to the founding of the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (Latin American Solidarity Organization—OLAS). ⁹ In 1957 the Fourth International established its International Committee, and Nahuel Moreno, one of its members, organized the SLATO, which he coordinated along with Trotskyist militants from Chile, Peru, and Argentina. As a POR activist, Blanco convened various Peruvian left forces for unity in support of the peasant insurrection being organized in the Cuzco region, and out of this union the FIR was created. Moreno sent militants from the SLATO to Peru to collaborate in the peasant uprising led by Blanco, but this support did not produce good results. ¹⁰

Blanco was recognized by the Fourth International as the principal representative and leader of the Peruvian indigenous peasants. As previously mentioned, although he received his early political training in the ranks of Trotskyism, his intense union participation, first with Argentine workers and then with Peruvian peasants, prevented him from conducting a more militant political life in its ranks or dealing with the debates that began both within the party and in the Fourth International. Regarding his Trotskyist activism, Blanco pointed out that he participated in a “current with Trotskyist features and methodology but without a formal organization” (Blanco, 1972: 37). Another aspect of his dissent from the canons of Trotskyism was his position on armed struggle—his steadfast respect for the decision of the collective with regard to following a politico-military strategy. He refused to accept either the role of vanguard or that of a leader separate from the will of the majority (71):

We were unionists, accustomed to respect the will of the masses, and as revolutionaries our military function was nothing more than a small aspect of our political function. And our political function was to show the workers that they had to govern and that we were no more than their military arm, their instrument of struggle, not their benevolent despots.

At the same time, he did not declare himself against armed struggle and in fact considered it a sine qua non for the transition to socialism: “The Trotskyists have had to defend the Marxist-Leninist concept that there is no possibility of the exploiters’ giving up power without a struggle. The peaceful transition to socialism is not possible; the armed struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors is an inevitable phase of the revolution” (Blanco, 1972: 62). He participated in actions to raise funds for the Cuzco and La Convención movement, and the defense brigades he organized were peasant militias. What he opposed, ultimately, was identifying guerrilla warfare as a strategy instead of as “a tactic that may be used in a particular country under particular conditions.” Among those conditions was something he considered fundamental: the political consciousness of the masses (Blanco, 1972: 64).

Years later, after the peasant mobilizations in the early 1960s, Blanco acknowledged that one of the fundamental things that he could not resolve was the creation of a party (Blanco, 1972: 36), since there was no party tradition in the countryside and the speed with which events took place prevented him from organizing other political activities outside the movement. At the time, for Mariátegui and Blanco the partisan proposition was a pressing need; they were thinking about a political organization linked to the masses, about a social movement, “a party made up of workers, peasants, intellectuals, and artisans” (Franco, 1982: 15).

Over time, as in the trajectory of any intellectual or political leader, there was no continuum in Blanco’s thought or political activity. In later years he changed his organizational and strategic paradigm, leaving the political path to change to the collectivist traditions of the various indigenous ethnicities. In a 2018 interview he referred to his previous Trotskyist militancy as follows: “I don’t think that either Trotskyism or the Fourth International is necessary now. I join with all those who fight for the peoples. Regarding indigenous peoples, yes, there are things I do defend now” (Blanco and Romero, 2018: 8)

Echoes, Influences, and Convergences: Mariátegui and Blanco

According to José Aricó (1986), Mariátegui is still acknowledged today in Peru as the “founding father of a nation project conceived as an advanced, solidarity-focused social democracy.” He found this project in the primordial collective social organization embodied in the Quechuan ayllu, a community representing what Karl Marx called primitive communism, in which labor and social and cultural activities were conducted collectively and aimed at the community. Mariátegui insisted on making explicit Latin America’s difference from the developed countries. With great persistence, he publicized the Inca, Quechua, and Aymara cultures as highly developed civilizing expressions.

Like Mariátegui and perhaps through him, Blanco (1972: 122) learned of the long history of resistance of the peasantry in Peru:

From there, from the very center of the real and existing peasant movement, with the heart of Túpac Amaru in our chests, with the blood of our martyrs pulsing through our veins, we will guide the struggle, we will organize it, we will lead it to the agrarian revolution as part of the socialist revolution headed by the proletariat. The fundamental slogans of the FIR for the countryside continue to be the same: organization, extension, and coordination of the peasant movement.

For Blanco, the highland indigenous peasantry was not a theoretical Marxist peasant class but an actually existing peasantry that gained materiality and specificity by knowing its historical past. This past was also insurrectionist and was understood as a heritage that ran in its blood. Knowledge of this past allowed Blanco to challenge, as did Mariátegui in his time, the Marxist theoretical canon of the era marked by the Cuban Revolution and to question its revolutionary requirements (Blanco, 1972: 124):

The details in specific working outline cannot be determined beforehand, but will be a product of direct contact with the reality, any attempt to detail a plan of action a priori would only result in hollow words. . . . The form of struggle depends on reality, and the reality of the countryside is in the countryside. . . . We Trotskyists must listen to the revolutionaries who speak to us from the countryside, from within the peasant movement. The forecasts made by them are the ones we respect most. This is all the more so now that there are so many windbags about armed struggle who don’t even know where the countryside is.

Between theory and materiality, one of the things Blanco confirmed through this conscientious contact with reality was the nature of one of the peasants’ basic problems. In Tierra o muerte he wrote from the Frontón prison in 1969, “The Indian problem is the problem of land, as Mariátegui said. It is certainly true, because we know that we have fought, even with guns in our hands, under the slogan ‘Land or Death!’” (Blanco, 1972: 133). Mariátegui is echoed in the motto of the La Convención peasant movement, intertwined with one of the revolutionary ideals, to die for the revolution. For Blanco, the revolutionary did not run from death, “because you can fight as well by dying; you can transform the world as well by dying” (Blanco, 1972: 97). He was also aware of Mariátegui’s political project and saw it as a reference point for the revolutionary process: “To die is no disgrace when it brings nearer the dawn; when you see, you feel the massive awakening of the peasants; when you see the workers, step by step, reconstructing the true Workers’ Union of Mariátegui” (Blanco, 1972: 97).

In fact, Mariátegui’s aphorism is not about “the problem of the peasant” but about the problem of the Indian, because in the Peruvian highlands the indigenous status of the peasantry is practically a given. Mariátegui (2007: 40) framed the problem of the Indian and the land as basically an economic problem that intersected with the “race factor.” In this sense Blanco concurred once again with Mariátegui: “But our oppression is not simply economic. As a sequel to economic oppression, they abuse the Indians of all our countries in many ways. They destroy our culture, our Quechua, our Aymara, our Guaraní, our yaraví, our esthetic values” (Blanco, 1972: 133). Direct contact with the reality of the peasantry marked his militancy in La Convención, and not only at the level of political praxis. He included himself in the “we” of the Indians.

Mariátegui’s influence on Blanco was not merely a matter of the Cuzco leader’s picking up on his thinking. Rather, the originality and power of Mariátegui’s thought were a bridge that allowed Blanco to progress toward a cultural identification with things Indian and be able to say “we Indians.” In this also lies part of the originality of Blanco’s own thought when he described a different level of experiencing the struggle from “the Indian being”—that the rallies, the strikes, the work stoppages were lived and felt differently when one was Indian (Blanco, 1972: 46–47):

The peasant meetings acquired a much greater significance than any others. In Cuzco, for centuries, the Indian had slouched along the streets, with his poncho and whispered Quechua. The mass meeting put the Indian on top of the monster. Windows and doors of the powerful fearfully slammed shut at the advance of the multitudes, aggressive, insulting, threatening, shouting in Quechua truths silenced by centuries of Castilian Spanish.

The element of ethnic identity melded with Blanco’s idea of revolutionary internationalism (Blanco, 1972: 133):

To whoever may believe that this Indian way of seeing the struggle is chauvinist, regionalist, racist and opposed to internationalism and even the unity of Peru, we reply that the only way we Indians can become part of humanity is as Indians; it is our way of being people. We have to join the world of peoples as a people, not as a caricature; with a personality, not depersonalized. It is not by accident that the same government . . . wants to dissolve us into the general category of “peasants” as if we don’t suffer a thousand humiliations precisely because we are Indians.

Blanco discovered that calling himself a peasant was not enough to be part of the revolution in La Convención; he also joined as an “Indian.” Understanding this allows us to follow up on his thinking after the 1960s, since in the indigenous communities he also found the collectivist societies that committed to the struggle “against the depredation of the environment and also to defend their possession of the land” (Lao and Feldmann, 2009).

Blanco understood the importance of indigenous identity in Peruvian society, an identity that was not only cultural but also classist and therefore political, which is why he did not hesitate to choose it as a front from which to fight for socialism in Peru and Latin America. He has affirmed this idea in every text, interview, or lecture he has given in social forums in which the presence of Indo-Americans as interlocutors was a given. Another extremely important aspect for both Mariátegui and Blanco, despite the different contexts in which they lived, was keeping the ethical dimension in the political struggle. Both were marked by splits and political changes reflecting the ideological crisis of the nineteenth-century positivist rationalism and the crisis of real socialism and left political parties in the late twentieth century. They were able to give a new vitality to the indigenous peasant community movements, not only showing the fairness of their demands but also presenting them as a new option embodying class solidarity— as Mariátegui would say, the greatest weapon that workers can create.

Mariátegui was unable to witness the great mobilizations of the indigenous communities of various Latin American countries, but he was able to understand his role in the political struggle at the dawn of the twentieth century. This allowed him to see indigenous people as an integral part of exploited groups. At the same time, through his militancy Blanco experienced political transformation and a transformation of the discourse of the Latin American indigenous movements. From 1959–1963 to recent decades, these movements have been able to demonstrate the universality of their causes and their ethnic, cultural, economic, and ecological demands and defended the political autonomy of their communities.

Although in some cases the indigenous struggle continues to be for land and for better working conditions in the countryside, indigenous people have currently taken a stand to reestablish a social order that is aligned with nature, rejecting the extractivism that contributes to the dispossession of indigenous communities and threatens the communal reproduction of life.

The indigenous political victories in this century have been of enormous significance, among them the full recognition of their rights as citizens and the plurinational nature of Latin American nations, Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Yet impunity and the assassination of indigenous leaders in Latin American continues, and many cases have not been solved, perhaps because the number of executioners has multiplied. Blanco’s assertion in Tierra o muerte is still valid: “Without question, the struggle in the countryside is between the peasant and the gamonales; but the resurgence of the Indian, of the oppressed nationality, is a fundamental ingredient” (Blanco, 1972: 30).

In Conclusion

The relevance of Mariátegui’s thought for the Peruvian and the Latin American left is undeniable, validating the current indigenous struggles from his intellectual perspective. It provides insight into the changes in praxis of earlier leaders of the left and the indigenous peasant movements themselves, which are once again inspired by what they consider their communal origins, contemplating “social structures more grounded in solidarity, mutual support, and communality; communities that call for territories in community” (Gil, 2020).

The political reading of Mariátegui’s work today may differ greatly from his objectives. Although he was opposed to a party of cadres that could isolate the mass movements, he did not shun the creation of a partisan organization. He always declared himself a Marxist-Leninist, although, as Franco (1982: 15) points out, he acknowledged plurality and argued in Marxist terms that “they should increasingly gravitate toward ideological and political definitions by democratic means” and “reject the idea of giving the socialist tendency an organic form that was unrelated, outside or independent of the national political movement.” Today, however, the indigenous movement seems to disparage political organization. Instead it seeks to maintain the traditional forms of community organization, suggesting that this will do away with the verticality that generates authoritarianism within the organization itself. Although there is a long road ahead, one thing is certain: that Mariátegui’s thought will live on in future Andeans.