Hugo Blanco - Peasant Struggle

Peasant Struggle

Returning to Peru he joined the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) in Lima and participated in the famous protest to the then Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon, in 1958 . Following those demonstrations, Blanco caught the attention of the police, and decided to move to his home region in the Convencion Valley. Here he took residence in 1958 as a subtenant farmer, immersing himself in local politics. Beginning in 1958, with the help of students from the Cuzco University, Blanco’s Quechua federation mobilized the allegados against the hacendados and arrendires.

Back in Cuzco, Blanco joined the Campesino Department in Cuzco as a delegate of the only Union of newspaper vendors, then he joined the Union of Peasants. His experiences in the latter helped him get a better perspective on agrarian problems in Peru, he also left POR because of his new knowledge.

In the early 1960s he led the Quechua peasant uprising in the Cuzco region of Peru. He was the first who managed to build a bridge between the Spanish speaking intellectuals and the Quechua speaking workers. He organised the 2000 peasants in trade unions which occupied the landowners' lands and organised the defence of the occupations against the police and the landowners. His organisation controlled an area, where national control did not exist, there he put an agrarian reform into effect. He set up a peasant trade union in the valleys of Convencion and Lares in Cuzco. Blanco's Chaupimayo Community had its government, public law, popular justice, defense and education, Blanco called this "dual power" It was reported at this time that, while he was arresting a hacienda owner in Pucyura who raped a little girl, he shot a police officer in self-defense. According to some historians this seems to be propaganda, since he could not have been at Pucyura at the time. De la Puente rejected a union with Blanco because Blanco was a Trotskyist. Captured by the military, he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on the island of El Frontón. Nearly all his Trotskyist comrades where already in prison when he was captured. In 1963, unionists took the city of Quillabamba, who were carrying out an order, that was issued in Cuzco by the Federation, to go on strike, so that some imprisoned union leaders, among them, Hugo Blanco would be freed. During his imprisonment he wrote Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru. During this time he exchanged letters with José María Arguedas which were written in Quechua. In 1968 he was chosen by the Swedish section of Amnesty International as prisoner of the Year.