Transpacific Revolutioinaries. The Chinese Revolution in Latin America 2012029208, 9780415656177, 9780203078082

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Transpacific Revolutionaries The Chinese Revolution in Latin America

Matthew D. Rothwel

R Routledge

Taor&francsCroup

W

YOAK AwD LONDON

First published 2013

by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor å Francis Group an informa business

2013 Taylor & Francis work the of 78 77 and has been asserted by him in accordance with sections Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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right of Matthew D. Rothwell to be identified as author ofthis

All nghts reserved. No part ofthis.book.may reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any fom or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in in wnting any infomation storage or retrieval system, without permission

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rothwell, Matthew D.

Transpacific

revolutionaries: the Chinese revolution in Latin America /

by

Matthew D. Rothwell.

history; 10) P.cm.-(Routledge studies in modem and index.

Includes bibliographical references 1. Latin America--Foreign relations-China-Case studies. I. Title. Foreign relations-Latin America-Case studies.

2. China

F1416.C6R68 2012

327 8051dc23 2012029208

1SBN: 978-0-415-65617-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-07808-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex Co Vantage, LLC

Prinied and bound in the United States of America by Publishers Graphics,

LLC on sustainably sourced paper.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 China and Latin America

11

2 Mexico: The Wayward Disciples of Vicente Lombardo

23

3

Forging the

Fourth Sword of Marxism: The Chinese Revolution

and Peru's Shining Path 4

Bolivia: Nationalists and Maoists

S Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography Index

48

Diverge

71 88

97 115

125

Acknowledgments

became interested in Latin American Maoism when I stumbled uponit in Mexico City in 1993. I was in Mexico friends over winter break, visiting and we came upon a massive sort of plantón (a long-term, sit-in prorest) in support of Abimael Guzmán, the Peruvian Shining Path leader who had

I first

been

captured in 1992. Over the portions of which were spent

of the

years, substanof regions Chiapas controlled by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), I met all variety of Latin American and European leftists, and my curiosity about this Chinese ideo logical transplant to Latin America deepened. I have been aided by many friends, colleagues and teachers during the almost twenty years since I first became interested in Latin American Maoism. I cannot thank them all by name, but I hope those who l don't name know who they are and know that

tial

course

next two

in the

they are appreciated. Serious research on this

project, initially as a PhD dissertation, began under the guidance of Christopher Boyer and Bruce Calder in 2005. Chris read innumerable drafts of the dissertation patiently and with a critical eye, which has vastly improved the book and my own writing. Without Chris's mentorship, I suspect this book would not and I am deeply thankful for all he has done for me and for this exist, project. Bruce has been

endlessly encouraging of my scholarship and convinced me to pursue a at a time when had serious I doubts about-pursuing the life path that I am on (and that has been so rewarding). Bruce's was a PhD

support

and much

constant

appreciated part of my time in graduate school. James Searing, Nils Jacobsen and Javier Villa Flores rounded out my dissertation commit-

tee

and

provided

valuable feedback which I incorporated into the book. large part to Laura Hostetler and Andrew Eisenberg for of Chinese history, which has been so in

T am indebted in

my

knowledge

this book.

important writing

My research benefited from the aid and cooperation of many people in the United States, Peru and Bolivia. In the United Mexico, States, I would particularly like to thank

Vicki Cervantes. Vicki put me in touch with networks in Mexico and Bolivia in so doing, and, probably saved me months of work. Joel Andreas me gave permission to look through the papers of

x Acknowledgments his mother, Carol Andreas. During research trips to Denver and New York City, I enjoyed the hospitality of Doug Vaughn and Monica and Paul Shay

respectively. I conducted a large number of oral history interviews and 1nformational meetings with Latin Americans, Europeans, North Americans, Indians and Filipinos who traveled to China or had knowledge of pro-Ch1nese political

activities that are not directly cited in the text. Several of those I interviewed or met with requested anonymity for a variety of reasons. Among thosel canacknowledge publicly,I would like to thank Irving Zuckerman and Sidto China in the ney Gluck in the United States. Monica Shay (who traveled

1970s as Monica Newbold and asked that her interview be cited under that name) from the United States and Tron Ogrim of Norway both gavetasc nating and helpful interviews before their untimely (and unrelated) deaths.

They were both

triends of mine and

are

missed.

In Mexico, I would like to thank José David Quiñones, Yolanda Fernán dez, Alberto Híjar, Adolfo Mexiac, Andrea Gómez, Enrique Cisneros, Iseo Noyola, José Narro, Manuel Rodríguez, Martín Rodríguez, Víctor Reyes,

Camilo and Simitrio Tzompazquelitl. In Peru, I would like to thank Laura González and Laura Balbuena for their hospitaliry. The food and conversation at the hostel they run is out standing. The staff of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission archive at the Defensoria del Pueblo was always helpful. In particular, I haveto thank

Ruth Borja and Renzo Aroni Sulca. The interviews I conducted with Zenón

Naveda and Oswaldo Reynoso were very important, and l am grateful for their time. Many other people gave generously of their time to help me make

connectionswith sources and orient me on doing research in Peru. For help in this regard, I want to thank Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Carlos Alberto García, Ricardo Caro, Ponciano del Pino, Iván Hinojosa, Juan Luis Pérez Coronado, José Coronel and Enrique González Carré. The various street vendors and others who helped me track down old and current Sendero documents cannot all be thanked by name (especially since many of them carry this material under the counter), but they have my gratitude. In Bolivia, my research was greatly facilitated by the generous and con-

stant aid of lván Nogales, Oscar Vega, Ramiro Fernández and Luis Oporto. Thanks also to Edgar Ramirez, Jorge Echazú, Hugo Borda, Félix Muruchi, Diva Arratia, Víctor Reinaga, Emilse Escóbar, Oscar Zamora, Norma Bilbao, Jesús Taborga and Eduardo Ayllón. Casey Harison, Tamara Hunt and Niharika Banerjea, colleagues of mine during my time at the University of Southern Indiana, all gave me valuable

fedback on early drats of some chapters. Erie Zolov read several chapter draftsandmyexchanges with himhelped to concretize my thinking on some key aspects of the book. Routledge's three anonymous reviewers provided

very valuable feedback, for which I thank them.

Thanks to Roberto Márquez for permission to use his and David Arthur McMurray's translation of Nicolás Guillén's "La canción del regreso."

Acknowledgments x Research for this book was funded in part by grants from the Universiry

of Ilinois at Chicago, the University of Southern Indiana and the American Historical Association. Judith and Tom Dillon, my parents, have always supported my efforts and are appreciated more than they real1ze. Pauline and Albert Gordon are models of kindness and love that I strive to emulate. Above all, I thank my wife, Lina, for her patience and sacrifice in helping to see me through with this project.

Introduction

Is it clear to you, the land of rice and of bamboo? Isn't it clear to you?

I have seen Peking:

Peking, no mandarin

nor palanquin.

I have seen Shanghai:

I cry, no more Yankees in Shanghai. Ir's awesome how life's begun to blossom. It's strange how life's begun to change.

Sing with me, brother, and speak as I speak!

I cry, no more Yankees in Shanghai.

Peking: the coffin of the mandarin.

Run, behold it.. . you, the land of rice and of bamboo! -Nicolás Guilén, "Song of Return Between 1949 and 1976, thousands of Latin Americans traveled to the

socialist People's Republic of China. Many of these Latin Americans who visited China were interested in adapting aspects of China's policies to

Latin American conditions. Some, such as Mexico's Vicente Lombardo Toledano, were mainly interested in China's potential to show how a

Third World country might break out of the dependent economicdevelopment paradigm. Orhers, such as Peru's Abimael Guzmán, hoped to learn how to reproduce China 's experience of revolutionary warfare. At least

2

Transpacific Revolutionaries

a thousand of these Latin American visitors were trained in politics and

military matters while in China. The efforts of these Latin Americans who visited China to domesticate what they saw as the lessons of the Chinese

Revolution created a pro-Chinese political trend that played a substantial role in Latin American social and guerrilla movements in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Peru, at least 69,000 people died during the Shining Path insurgency, which began in 1980. The Shining P'ath is known for carrying out ideologically driven actions that many people not well-versed in the Shining Path's

worldview found incomprehensible. By understanding how Chinese ideas influenced Shining Path members, we can better comprehend some of the

Shining Path's more bizarre actions, such as hanging dead dogs trom lamp

posts in the streets of Peruvian cities. Understanding how the Shining Path saw itselt as applying Maoist ideology to Peru also helps us to understand the decision-making dynamics behind the Shining Path's destructive response to flagging peasant support in the face of the dirty war waged by the Peruvian

government, a phenomenon that many observers have found bewildering. A key part of understanding how the leaders of the Shining Path thought about their own Maoism, and how they hoped to reshape Peru in a Maoist mold, is understanding the experience of those leaders in China. Almost all of the top Shining Path leadership spent considera ble time in China, and

their efforts to imitate Chinese political forms they experienced firsthand in China illustrate the importance of travel to China in the formation of the

Shining Path's political vision. Examining the intluence of Chinese revolutionary ideas also sheds new light on several recent episodes of Bolivian history. Some members of the left-wing of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement government (MNR,

1952-1964) were interested in China as a model for economic policies

and political reforms that they hoped to pursue in Bolivia. And the Chinese hoped that the Bolivian revolutionary nationalists might be the first government in the

western

hemisphere

to

give diplomatic recognition

to

the People's Republic of China. While the pro-Chinese faction of the MNR failed to redirect Bolivia's economics and politics away from dependence on the United States, the existence of a faction within the MNR that favored Chinese-style policies complicates our understanding of the dynamics o

Revolutionary Nationalism in Bolivia. Maoist ideas also played an influential role in the Bolivian miners move ment. In the middle of the twentieth century, Bolivia was dependent on

exporting tin. Bolivian miners' political influence sometimes matched the decisive role of their industry in the country's economy, such as when they

insured the 1952 Revolutionary Nationalist revolution's success. The militant mining center of Catavi was a hotbed of Maoist activity, "the proletar an university" according to a former Maoist leader I interviewed." It was

here that Federico Escóbar Zapata, a popular leader of the miners, held the

founding congress of the pro-Chinese Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-

Introduction 3 Leninist) in 1965. Both Escóbar, the general secretary, and his deputysecre

tary, Oscar Zamora, had already been to China. In Mexico, Chinese ideas contributed to the eclectic and heady intellectual mix that circulated in the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Chinese influence combined with the influence of the Cuban Revolution to divide both the Communist Party and the adherents of Vicente Lombardo's brand of Marxism berween those who hoped to continue trying to pressure the government to adopt more socialistic policies and those who hoped to overthrow the state with armed force. As the guerrilla experience

guerrla movements in Florencio ofMexico Medrano demonstrates, the post-1960s cannot be properly understood without coming to terms with earlier

eforts to bring Chinese ideas to Mexico. While efforts to domesticate Chinese

ideas to Latin America yielded

ditferent resuts in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico, in each country the process of transmission of these ideas was remarkably similar. Key individuals traveled to China and upon their returns to Peru, Bolivia and Mexico dis-

seminated their understandings of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution Via party meetings and public forums, and in articles and books. Parties

and

organized networks of activists worked hard

to distribute propaganda promoting Maoist revolutionary ideas, much of which was produced in

China. Thus, in each country considered here, the movement of Chinese ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort that

involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the

People's Republic of China. THE ORGANIZED INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY

IDEAS: A NEW DIMENSION TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL AND GUERRILLA

MOVEMENTS OF THE 1950s-1990s In the past, scholars who investigated the influence of Maoism in Latin America were more concerned with the international maneuvers of a Cold War enemy of the United States than with Latin American social and

political

movements per se. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a series of scholarly articles

and a single book were published that examined China's attempts to spread its intluence in Latin America." These works on the Chinese intluence in Latin America reflected rhe Cold War focus on containing communism and countering the threat of communist revolution. China was more the tocus of concern than Latin America, and so these works emphasized how China was trying to spread its ideology in Latin America, neglecting the questions of why or how Latin Americans might be interested in Chinese communism.

Indeed, with the rapprochement between China and the United States in the

early 1970s, this whole field of scholarship disappeared. The agency of Latin Americans in the transfer of ideas

was

almost

complerely neglected.

4TranspactfteReivoluttonares The concerns that anmate the current study

that is, the nature of the

anster of deas across the (Global South and the role of Maosm within par

tICular Latun Amerncan social contexts, were almost entirely absent from this turst generatuon of scholarsh1p on the spread of Maorsm to Latin America Incontrast, I emphas1ze the Latun Amercan agency in the transfer of Maorst deology Although Chna was ecager and willing to promote its revolution ay deology among laun Anericans, there could be no que stion of those deas ganing any traction without an enthusiastic effort by Latn American

sympathzers. The Cold War era scholarsh1p on China and Latin America did get most of its tacts right most of the time, and for that am gratetul am stand1ng on the shoulders of those cold warriors when it comes to the not very casy task of actually reconstructing key events and po1nts of contact in the process oft the creation of Lat1n American Maosm. Most of

those events and points of contact were secret at the time and are still kept secret today by China and most former participants. But the "what are those

nefarious Chinese doing now to underminethe U.S. sphere of influence in Latin America" interpretive standpoint of those early cold warriors means that their work does not tell us much of value about how Maoism played out within particular Latin American societies.

For example, let's examine a quote from the 1970 book Communist China and Lat1n America, which illustrates the problems with a China Centered viewpoint on the transter of Maoism to Latin America: "The Chinese have also attempted to expand their influence in Latin America through As use ot the tilms. early as March, 1959, they were showing Chinese films in remote Bolivia, where they were seen by crowds in La Paz, Cochabamba,

and Catavi. Altogether they scheduled showings of the films in forry other Bolivian cities, including Sucre and Santa Cruz."* While China no doubt provided tilms free of charge to sympathetic Bolivians (for reasons and

through mechanisms that I will detail in later chapters), such a film series could only have been organized by Bolivians who wanted to promote Chinese ideas in Bolivia. The author ignores the agency t

Bolivians in this

process, despite acknowledging that China did not have a single state repre Sentative on the ground in Bolivia at the time (indeed, it seems that China's

ablty to organize the tilm series without having a representative on the ground was taken by the author as evidence of the mysterious power of the dangerous and craty Chnese, rather than as evidence of Latn American

agency). Sadly, the above quote is representative of the approach of the 1960s and early 1970s literature on Chinese intluence in Latn America. ln reality, the broad distuibution of Chnese tilus m Bolivia demonstrated the scope ot pro Chnese eftorts by Bolivians rather than China's ability to reach nto all parts of Bolavia.

As much as I would like to take lull credit tor the, in retrospect, rather Simple idea that t might be truittul to examine the tormation ot Latin AmerICan

Maoisms from

a

Latin American-centered perspective, I

am

heavily

indebred to two recent trends in the study of the globalized Cold War. The

Introduction

5

first of these trends emphasizes how a variety of actors outside of Moscow,

the Washington, Beijing and other power centers shaped the history of Cold War.' The second trend in recent global Cold War scholarship is to focus on the ways in which the Cold War was meaningful to cultures and societies

far removed from global power centers." The expanded sense of agency that

historians have developed in regard to subordinate actors in the Cold Wa, combined with an expanded sense of the ways in which the Cold War was

meaningful to different sets of people, helped me to recognize that the existing scholarship on the transter of Chinese ideas to Latin America ignored Latin American agency. Thus, my concern is with how Latin Americans exercised agency in forging a Maoist identity and politics in the Latin American context. Along with asking how China sought to influence Latin America, I am asking how and why Latin Americans reached out to China. And then, how did the Latin American intellectuals, activists and revolutionaries try to apply the conAmerica? My concern is with the cepts that they studied in China to Latin formation of Latin American Maoism as a continental social phenomenon, rather than with the particular histories of particular Maoist organizations. To that end, I examine the formation of Maoist organizations and move-

ments in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia as case studies in the creation of Latin American Maoism, with an eye to what these cases can tell us about the in process through which Maoism was transplanted Latin America by Latin American travelers to China. While a "chase for resembiances" between the three cases examined here

overall, continent-wide

is central to the overall project, the "recognition and appreciation of differences" is not being cast aside for the sake of the chase." Although Latin Americans from different countries did meet and interact in China, the specific features of each party or organization's own practice of Maoism was

decisively shaped by

the

particular national political conjuncture of each

case. Mexican, Peruvian and Bolivian Maoists had dramatically different

histories and fates. A significant part of the richness of the story told in this book lies in the particular paths that the Mexicans, Peruvians and Bolivians followed. But, despite the divergent directions each country's Maoists went

once they had managed to transplant Maoism to Latin American soil, there was a striking resemblance in the dynamics of the initial transfer of ideas

from China to Latin America. A common process yielded different results in each particular national situation.

Ihe emergence of Maoism on the Latin American scene coincided with,

and formed a part of, the emergence of a New Left that was "socially diverse, ideologically complex, and engaged in countercultural politics."8 Yet, the Latin American New Left had important continuities of tradition and per

sonnel with the pre-1960s Old Left. As Jeffrey Gould has demonstrated, the "shared vision between young and old, worker and student, shaped the utopian moments that punctuated" 1968, and there "is simply no way of understanding the three largest movements" of the 1960s in Latin America

6 Transpacific Revolutionaries "without recognizing the active role of the Communists." The Maoists demonstrate this link betrween the New and the Old Lefts perhaps more clearly than any other New Left political tendency. Many of the Maoist leaders at the time of the Sino-Soviet sp!it in the early 1960s were respected, if young, leaders within their respective communist parties or in the global

apparatus of the international communist movement. On the other hand, Maoist parties gained their strength from the massive upsurge of rebellious

youth, particularly students, during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Maoists were also firmly situated in the camp of those New Leftists who broke with the Old Left by preparing for and engaging in armed struggle.

While each Latin American country had a ditferent experience, there are

some common ways in which activists, politicians and intellectuals in each Americans involved in country tried to domesticate Chinese ideas. Latin domesticating Chinese ideas had a variety of responses to their experiences in China. What they saw as valuable in China's experience was strongly influenced by what they wanted to accomplish in their own countries. In

general,

a

basic division

can

be drawn between those who

were most

inter

ested in China as a model for economic development in a Third World coun-

try and those who saw China as offering a model experience for revolutionary warfare. However, these were not hard and fast lines. Those who wanted to

reproduce the Chinese guerrilla experience also wanted

to

reproduce Chi-

na's development experience. The converse was not usually the case, how

ever. Those who mainly extolled China as demonstrating a path to economic

modernization independent of U.S. control or influence usually had little or

no interest in replicating China's guerrilla experience. The particular forms

that these two general trends took comprise a

substantial

portion of the case

studies of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia in this book.

THE "COMMON WIND" BLOWING FROM BEIJING Travel to China and personal contact with leaders such as Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai, however brief, conferred an authority that allowed Latin American activists and intellectuals to plausibly challenge the dominant narratives about the Chinese Revolution and win adherents to Maoist efforts in Latin America. The forms that Latin American Maoists used to commu-

nicate Maoist ideas to their home countries often depended on establishing the authority of the author or speaker based on their firsthand experience of Chinese socialism. The main ways in which Maoist ideas were spread in

Latin America included travel narratives, political forums, the distribution of propaganda produced in China and through party meetings. Travel narratives of trips to China, both as testimonials delivered in orga-

nized forums and in the form of books that recounted trips to China, played a

particularly important role in Latin American intellectuals' attempts to coun ter the dominant narrative of communist China by utilizing the authority of

Introduction

7

their own experiences. In the following chapters, I examine travel books writren by figures as diverse as the Mexican Marxist leader Vicente Lombardo,

left MNRistas from Bolivia and an important ideologue of Peru's Shining Path. Despite their different political perspectives and social positions, each of these authors used their travel books both as a way of establishing their authority as interpreters of the Chinese revolutionary experience and as a way of describing Chinese events or conditions that they hoped could be reproduced in Latin America. LIkewise, the testimony ot activists who visited China served as the cen

terpiece of organized forums. In all three country case studies examined in this book, pro-Chinese Latin Americans organized both public forums and private small group meetings where China travelers related their experiences

in China as a way of building support for politics that Latin Americans derived from Chinese experience. Indeed, as we see in the Mexico chapter, rival interpretations of what appropriate lessons Latin Americans could draw from China were sometimes highlighted in forums that competed with each other by being held simultaneously. In that case, forums on Chinese science and art dueled with forums on women's participation in the armed

struggle to liberate China. The organized distribution of Chinese and locally produced agitation and propaganda materials also played an important role in the ideological transter. In all three cases examined herein, Latin American activists

used the Chinese magazines Peking Review and China Reconstructs (in their Spanish-language editions) as well as Chinese pamphlets and books to train themselves and others in Maoist ideology. While activists utilized regular distribution outlets such as bookstores and newspaper stands-forthese materials, they also set up portable literature tables on the streets and handed out mimeographed flyers and locally produced agitational matei als. These street actions were often accompanied by oral political agitation. Classrooms were another venue for ideological transter in all three cases.

In Peru in particular, Maoist professors sometimes had great freedom to uti lize Chinese materials, such as Quotations from Chairman Mao (the "little red book"), as required-texts and to force students to learn Maoist ideas as

a course requirement. This was particularly the case at the National Univer

sity of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, which served as an incubator for the Shining Path. Many Maoists held administrative positions there

and thus had tremendous freedom to shape the curriculum along Maoist lines. In Mexico and Bolivia, the communication of Maoism in university and secondary school classrooms took a more muted form, but teachers still played an important role in communicating Maoism to students.

Many of the activities of Latin American Maoists were organ1zed by proChinese communist parties and solidarity organizations. ldeological trainrelevant ing in Maoism, and debate over which Chinese ideas were most to Latin Americans, were central elements of the internal life of these par ties and solidarity organizations. Recruits would commonly attend internal

8 Transpacific Revolutionaries party meetings and classes in order to be trained in Maoism. The more

a dvanced cadre would debate the finer points of Maoist doctrine and par ticipate in the procesS of deciding what was most relevant to their country's

particular context. Thus, these parties and organizations were important sites for the transfer of Maoism from China to Latin America, as well as vehicles for propagating Maoist ideas more broadly in Latin American soci-

eties. Cadres who had traveled to China enjoyed greater authority in parry discussions over Maoist doctrine and played the leading roles in interpreting the relevance of particular Maoist ideas tor their own countries.

The importance of subterranean networks and personal authority based on experience for the diffusion of Chinese ideas in Latin America is remarkScott what Julius Scott has called the "Common Wind." Diy to Similar a comhas shown how expansive, subterranean, word-of-mouth networks of

munication played the key role in the movement of radical ideas through

the Haitian Revolu-

diaspora during the period surrounding Wind tion. Other scholars have expanded Scott's concept of the Common

the African

to

encompass the movement of radical ideas among the Black diaspora up early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanism.0 In the case of the Haitian

through

Revolution, ideas were transmitted within the context of an already exist

Black sailors relied on established connections within the African diaspora to spread Pan-African propaganda and organi

ing

slave

community. Later,

zational ties. The personal experience of those who witnessed the revolu-

tion (or the revolutionary society) firsthand or had personal contact with a prophetic leader such as Marcus Garvey enabled them to claim the authority

to put forward a counter-narrative against the dominant narrative and also to claim privileged status in interpreting the meaning of the revolution for their own soCiety.

The example of Black sailors as vectors for radical ideas, particularly in the case of spreading the influence of the Haitian Revolution, is helpful in conceptualizing the role of travelers to China in the spread of Maoist ideolAs Julius Scott has shown in the Haitian case, sailorS and tormer slaves

ogy. who had seen the Haitian Revolution firsthand served as bearers of the idea of the revolution, conveyors of its lessons and example. Later, "the ship remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communication before the appearance of the long-playingrecord."" While the Chinese Revolution took place in a world with much more advanced mass media and international communication systems, these media were very limited in what they could report on events happening inside China (indeed, even

many China scholars during these years faced great restrictions on their ability to understand events taking place inside China "). Certainly, Latin

American, U.S. and European media outlets delivered little news that com munists would have found either trustworthy or inspiring. The usefulness of the Common Wind model for understanding the com

munication of Chinese ideas to Latin America lies in the key role of personal experience and the communication of that experience

to

others in ways that

Introduction

9

circumvented standard mass media. The particular social mechanics of com munication differed, of course, Irom those of the African diaspora described

by Scott. Despite the fact that the transter of Maoist ideology to Latin Amer ica took different forms in each of the case studjes I examine, the dynamics of the transfer are very similar. In each case, Latin Americans who had traveled to China utilized the same methods for spreading Maoist ideology in their home countries.hese methods of transmitting ideology included

oral testimony in organized political forums and smaller group meetings; memoirs of travel to China; the structures of political parties and solidarity organizations; propaganda teams that passed out agitational political

literature in public places while conducting oral agitation; and classroom instruction

by pro-China protessors.

The aptness and also the limitations of the parallel with Scott's Common

Wind model are illustrated by comparing Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the

Shining Path, with Denmark Vesey.3 After spending some years of his youth in Saint-Domingue, Vesey was inspired by the example of the Haitian Revolution and relied on the networks of the African diaspora to keep abreast of Haitian events. In 1822, Vesey organized a rebellion against slavery, which

was betrayed before it could be initiated. Guzmán was also animated by a great social revolution and likewise sought to imitate it. Whereas Vesey derived inspiration from Haiti and had a close knowledge of Haitian affairs through study, lived experience and correspondence with comrades in Haiti, Guzmán derived both inspiration and authority from his formal connections

with China and from attending training courses in China. His mastery of Maoist texts gave hinm further authority that would not have been possible in Vesey's case due to the importance of ideology in the case of Maoism. The

differences between Vesey's betrayed rebeilion and the civil war that Peru endured for over a decade are many and obvious. What is interesting, however, is how international connections sustained by subterranean networks that spread the influence of great revolutions were at work in both cases, and personal contact with the revolutionary country and with revolution-

aries in that country played an important part in shaping both Vesey and Guzmán

as

revolutionary leaders

CHINESE cOMMUNIST INFLUENCE ON LATIN AMERICA The period of influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America coincides with the Cold War. Gilbert Joseph has described this period of Latin American history as being characterized by "a particularly ferocious dia-

lectic linking reformist and revolutionary projects for social change and national

development and the excessive counterrevolutionary responses they triggered."a When the Chinese Revolution triumphed in 1949, Latin America had just emerged from the first cycle of that dialectic. A wave of democratic openings that occurred toward the end of World War II was cut

10 Transpacific Revolutionaries short in the years following the war by a series of coups as the Cold War got

underway and the United States began to view Latin American reformists and nationalists as essentially servants of international communism and the

Soviet-led bloc. The success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 initiated a new and more intense cycle in this dialectic. Cuba's success in implanting a progressive regime through military force so close to the United States, and its continued

success in defying U.S. efforts to undermine the regime, spurred the development of new revolutionary initiatives across Latin America. The Cuban Revolution set off a new and intense period of leftist mobilization across the continent, far beyond the relatively small numbers of activists and guerrillas who tried to copy Cuba's foco guerrilla strategy. This wave of protest and

mobilization culminated in 1968. Athough major efforts to bring Chinese ideas to Latin America began during the 1950s, it was in the 1960s, as part

of a broader wave of protest and mobilization, that those ideas found a solid

foothold.

The pro-Chinese political trend created by Latin Americans who trav-

eled to China circulated ideas and formed organizations that intluenced and

acted within the various national movements for social change. Sometimes they played a leading role and sometimes they were only bit actors. But

across the continent, they formeda substantial contingent within this wave of protest and mobilization. The following case studies of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in Peru, Mexico and Bolivia amount to an argu-

ment that Chinese ideas played a significant and hitherto underappreciated role in the social movements and guerrilla struggles that constituted the

radical "projects for_social change and national development" mentioned

by Joseph.

1

China and Latin America

On May 8, in Chengchow, chairman Mao Tse-tung received friends from

eight Latin American countries then visiting China.

At the reception, he first extended a warm welcome to the friends from Latin America and then spoke to them about the experiences of

the Chinese people in revolutionary struggle and socialist construction. The friends trom the eight Latin American countries gave him their impressions of China gained during their visit. They warmly praised the achievements of the Chinese people in their work, China's general line

for building socialism, the big leap forward and the people's commune, as well as the contributions made by the Chinese people to world peace

and the cause of human progress. They also talked about the historical ties and the ever-growing friendship berween the peoples of Latin America and China. The Latin American people and the Chinese people,

they said, have a common enemy-that is, U.S. imperialism. They spoke of the struggles waged by the peoples of Cuba and other Latin American

countries against U.S. imperialism. They expressed the view that the Latin American people, with unity among themselves and unity with the Chinese people and the peoples of the rest of the world, could certainly

struggle against imperialism. Chairman Mao Tse-tung thanked these friends for their friendship with the Chinese people. The Chinese people, he said, just like the Latin win the final

victory

in

the

American people, had for long suttered from imperialist oppresion and

exploitation. During the Maoist period, from 1949 to 1976, thousands of Lat1n Amert

cans attended receptions in Beijing like the one recounted above. In the following chapters, we will consider case studies from Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. In each of those case studies, we will examine the activities of revo

lutionary activists and intellectuals who traveled to China and then sought

to apply the lessons they learned from the Chinese revolutionary experience to their own Latin American countries. In order to follow the case study

narratives in the chapters that follow, it will be helpful for the reader to have some information about the Chinese Revolution, the experience of socialist

12 Transpac1fic Revolutionaries construction in China, and the international affairs of the People's Republic of China, particularly in regard to Lat1n America. In this chapter, we will

quickly summarize the history of the Chinese Revolution and discuss Maoist China's foreign relations, including the Sino-Soviet split and the creation of Maoism as a trend within international communism. We will look closely at Maoist China's foreign relations with Latin America, both in the traditional diplomatic and economic sense, and also in terms of party-to-party relations

between the Chinese Communist Party and its Latin American counterparts.

THE CHINESE REVOLUTION IN A NUTSHELL The Chinese Communist Party, which led the Chinese Revolution and came to power with the triumph of that revolution in 1949, was founded in 1921. Two major events contributed to the foundation of the Chinese Communist the RusParty, one domestic and one foreign. The international event was sian Revolution of 1917. The domestic event was the May 4th movement, a

nationalist political and cultural movement named after the 1919 day of protest in Beijing when students and other Chinese citizens protested the decision of the great powers meeting at Versailles to adjudicate the post-World War 1 world order to grant defeated Germany's concessions in China to Japan. Some students who mobilized as part of the May 4th movement formed a study circle around Beijing revolutionary intellectual Li Dazhao to study

Marxism and to domesticate Marxism to Chinese conditions. Li interpreted Marxism in such a way that the rural Chinese peasantry might oCcupy the

role of a revolutionary subject that Marx had not envisioned forpeasants. The success of the Russian Revolution, and the betrayal of China by the liberal imperialist powers, motivated Li and his students to study Marxism. As Mao Zedong put it in 1949, "Before the October Revolution, the

Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin, they did not even know of Marx and Engels. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism."4 But the example of the Russian Revolution was not The Communist Party was formed in1921 with the direct

Chinese enough. aid and intervention of several representatives of the Communist Interna Hendrikus Sneevliet, tional (Comintern), including the Dutch communist who presided over the founding congress of the Chinese party.

the Nation-

During their early years, the Chinese communists allied with warlord alist Party (often known by its Chinese name, Guomindang) to end

Tule in southern China. In 1927, the Guomindang launched a surprise purge

of communists which led to an extended period of civil war, as the Chinese

strategy of carving out rural could base areas initially for survival and then as havens from which they and social relaboth attempt to extend the revolution and model policies famous of Tions that they would later try to extend to all of China. The most commuthese base areas, Yan'an, was founded in northern China after the

Communists, led by MaoZedong, formulated a

China and

Latin America

13

nists were lorced to make a year-long strategic retreat, known as the Long

March, from southern China beginning in October 1934. (Mao established his absolute leadership of the Communist Party during the Long March. While he had been a founding member of the party and had led the establishment of the communists' largest base area, he had nor previously always prevailed in internal policy debates. His ideolog1cal oppo nents often derived authority from Moscow. In 1930, the Communist Inter national dispatched a group of inexperienced and dognatic young Chinese

communists who had been trained in Russia to lead the Chinese partyThese returned Bolsheviks" ma1ntained close contact with MosKow, and their pol icies sharply diverged from Mao's (suspiciously, an obituary for Mao ran in a Comintern journal in 1930). As repression in the cities forced party leaders to relocate to the rural base area that Mao had established, they removed him from the leadership of the base area. Some sources even indicate that Mao was held under house arrest during l1934 because of his disagreements with

the recently relocated party leaders. A German agent of the Comintern, Ort Braun, led the Chinese party from 1933 to 1935, when Mao displaced him

and firmly established his own leadership during the LongMarch. Japanese aggression against China mounted during the 1930s, culminat in a full-scale invasion in 1937. In response, the communists and the nationalists allied once more. During this time, called the period of the Second United Front, the communists moderared their earlier policies of class struggle and united many progressives under their banner, as well as rural invasion in people from all class backgrounds who opposed the Japanese the northern areas where the communists had their strongest support bases. which they saw as the Many patriotic young Chinese migrated to Yan'an, invasion. center of the most effective and principled resistance to the Japanese

ing

The communists and nationalists fought a final civil war after World

War II. By 1949, the communists had achieved a clear military victory acros the country, leaving only Taiwan and a few small off-shore islands in the hands of the nationalists. The new People's Republic of China (PRC) soon signed a mutual defense treary with the Soviet Union and began to receive copious

amountof Soviet aid. The United States backed the nationalists in Taiwan and

resisted giving a seat in the United Nations to the PRC until 1971. Mao laid out what he considered fundamental principles for Chinese foreign policy in thepost-victory period as early as 1945. At the Seventh Congress of the CCP, he stated that "when you are mnaking revolution, you need foreign aid; atter At A you have achieved victory, you ought to support foreign revolution."

CHINESE FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1949-1956 Mao's belief in the need lor socialist states to support revolutions abroad

characterized the foreign policy of the newborn People's Republic. The dangers of this

policy

were

also

quickly revealed,

as

military engagement

with

14

Transpacific Revolutionaries

the United States held the threat of nuclear war and military defeat. In any case, military support for revolution abroad proved expensive for a Chinese economy that was only now recovering from decades of occupation and civil war. The tension between supporting revolution abroad and building socialism at home manifested itself in a sometimes contradictory foreign policy, with China emphasizing world revolution at some points and peaceful coex-

istence at others. These divisions reflected broader divisions berween revo lutionaries and moderates within the Chinese Communist Party. Moderate figures, such as the skilltul diplomat Zhou Enlai, were associated with the peaceful coexistence line, while more radical figures such as Lin Biao were associated with the line of spreading world revolution.

In his November 16, 1949, speech at the opening proceedings of the Union Conference of the Countries of Asia and Australasia held by the

World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Beijing, Liu Shaogi promoted

the Chinese Revolution as a model that revolutionaries across the developing world should emulate when he stated that "the path taken by the

Chinese people in defeating imperialism and its lackeys and in founding the People's Republic of China is the path that should be taken by the peoples of the various colonial and semicolonial countries in their fight for national

of independence and people's democracy."3 As we will see at the beginning Chapter 2, iwhen we examine the experience of the leading Mexican Marxist and labor organizer Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Chinese Communists

played an active role at the WFTU conference in determining in what particular ways the Chinese Revolution could serve.as a.model for revolutionar-

ies in other parts of the world 6. In addition to setting themselves up as revolutionary teachers tor other Third World revolutionaries, the Chinese Communists took an active military role in advancingrevolutionjin their immediate neighborhood when they

intervened to save the tNorth Korean.armed forces from being defeated by the United States. The Chinese were tied down in the Korean Peninsula trom

November 1950 until July 1953.Although the Chinese and Soviets had signed a treated of "friendship, alliance and mutual assistance" in February 1950, the burden of the fighting and much of the cost of the war fell onthe shoulders of the Chinese. Fear of renewed warfare with the United States and a desire to

refocus the country's energies and resources on the task of economic develop ment, concentrated in the First Five-Year Plan, which the Chinese began in 1953, led China to reevaluate its aggressive international posture.

At the 1954 Geneva Conference on the war in Indochina, the Chinese

pressured Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers' Party to accept a peace agreement rather than push for nationwide victory after they deteated the French at Dien Bien Phu. Although Mao would later criti-

cize himself for this decision, at the time the Chinese were anxious to avoid being drawn into another conflict as had happened with the Korean War. In 1954) the Chinese communists also urged the Malayan Communist Party to leave off their armed struggle and switch to peacefuland democratic tac-

China and Latin America 15 tics At the same time, the People's Republic sought warmer relations with noncommunist neighboring countries, such as U Nu's Burma and Thailand. As part of this diplomatic initiative, China's leaders pledged not to support communists in Thailand and Burma.0 This diplomatic effort at promoting "peaceful coexistence" with estab Tished capitalist governments rather than promoting socialist revolution in capitalist countries reached itsclimax at the Bandung conference in 1955. Zhou Enlai played a prominent role in Bandung, promoting the idea of peacetul coexistence with the goal of winning African and Asian nations to the idea of establishing equitable relations with each other and not supporting the United States in its containment of China and its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Peaceful coexistence was shorthand for theFive Principles

of Coexistence: mutual respect for territorial sovereignty, mutual nonaggres sion, mutual nonintervention in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and coexistence Clearly, to the degreethat China had recentered its foreign policy around the idea of peaceful coexistence, it had come a long way from promoting revolution abroad. An observer in 1955

peacetul

genuinely

might reasonably have thought that the Korean contlict had tamed Chinas

revolutionary ardor and that the People's Republic had settled the contradiction between promoting its own peaceful development and supporting8

world revolution firmly on the side of peaceful development. With the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward, however, things

would change again.

THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT AND THE CREATION OF MAOISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL TREND

After midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev summoned the delegates of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union to a surprise session where he criticized many of Stalin's errors and crimes. This secret speech began a process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, durihg which many of Stal1n's represive policies were reversed or.at

least relaxed. Khrushchev criticized the mass political repression that char acterized periods of Stalin's rule, as well as Stalin's cult of personality and the arbitrary nature of Soviet justice during periods of political terror and

mass mobilization. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for Yugoslavia's estrangement from the Soviet bloc and criticized Stalin's domineering approach to dealing with fraternal communist parties. Khrushchev also put forward the ideas of "peaceful co-existence" and "peaceful competition" between the social ist and capital1st worlds, in contrast to previous communist doctrine that

socialism could only triumph through violent revolutions and warfare with 1 the capitalist world.

One might expect the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev's been favorable. After all, the Chinese Communist Party had

speech

to

have

repeatedly suffered

16

Transpacific Revolutionaries

from Stalin's interference both during the armed phase of the revolution and

during the early years of socialist construction. Indeed, Khrushchev revealed the identities of all the Chinese KGB agents operating in China as an early

act of atonement for Stalin's treatment of the Chinese party." While the

Chinese communists welcomed the admission that the Soviet Union had

mistreated its weaker allies, because of domestic political concerns, the ini tial Chinese reaction was mainly negative. Faced with an economic crisis ca used by adopting the then-current Soviet economic model, which empha-

sized industrial development at the expense of agriculture, in 1955 the Chi nese communists instituted a series of agricultural policies that emphasized

mass mobilization for the collectivization of agriculture in the hopes that the agricultural sector of the economy could catch up with the projected

needs of industry. This move by the Chinese was not only a break with the current Soviet orthodoxy, championed by Khrushchev, but also reminiscent

of the mass mobilizations for agricultural collectivization and rapid indus trialization of the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and 1930s. As in the earlier Soviet experience, the Chnese combined high-minded appeals with

substantial coercive force and a ramped up cult of personality. Just as the Soviet Union was moving to de-Stalinize, the Chinese communists, led by Mao Zedong, rejected the new Soviet policies in favor of the revolutionary, heroic tradition of the early Stalin years. De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union was a direct threat to the policies of China's leaders.

In early April 956,the Chinese communists published "On the Histori

cal Experience ofthe Dictatorship ofthe Proletariat," theirfirst response to Khrushchev's speech. In this article,° the Chinese communists put forward

a summation of Stalin's years of leadership that was much more positive than Khrushchev's evaluation. The authors of the article, a writing com mittee working under Mao's supervision, stated that "some people consider that Stalin was wrong in everything; this is a grave misconception. Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist, yet at the same time a Marxist-Leninist who

Committed several gro5s errors without realizing that they were errors."17 The Chinese recognized that Stalin had committed errors, but the attitude

of "On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was in line with Mao's summation of Stalin, that "we maintain the estimate of 30 per cent for his mistakes and 70 per cent for his achievements. After the revolts against Soviet-dominated regimes in Poland and Hun gary later in 19563 the threat of d-Stalinization became more urgentto the

Chinese. In late December, the CCP published "More On the Historica Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." The new article was

more sharply worded than the eponymous April article and indicated thatthe Chinese leadership felt that de-Stalinization was a serious error thatthreat ened the stability ofthe socialist bloc. The Chinese leadership reconfirmed its oPposition to de-Stalinization when the Thousand Flowers campa1gn, which

involved mild political liberalization, revealed broader and deeper discontent with Communist Party rule in early 1957 than Mao had suspected.20

China and Latin AmeTica

17

I n 1958, the Great Leap Forward marked an extension of Mao's creative development of the revolutionary, heroic model of socialist development derived from the early Soviet experience. At the same time, and for separate reasons, the Chinese began to criticize the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. Simultaneously with the launch of the Great

Leap Forward (indeed, totacilitatepopular mobilization for the Great Leap the Chinese provoked the Second Taiwan Surait Crisis without informing the Soviet Union of its plans. The United States, perceiving a threat to laiwan, threatened nuclear war. Thus, the Soviet Union was brought to the brink of being forced by treay obligations to support China ina nuclear war without even having been informed of Chinese military plans beforehand.21 The Chi nese military provocation in the Taiwan Strait amounted to a forceful rejec tion of the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence. The Chinese leadership had decided that peaceful negotiations would not lead to the recovery of Taiwan

and that, in any case, Khrushchev's policy of peaceful competition with the capitalist world and the concomitant idea of a peaceful transition to sociak

ism were ideas treasonous to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Mao challenged Soviet superpower connivance with the United States by almost provoking

a nuclear war. But the crisis also-pushed the Soviets to further their negouaions with the United States by scaring the Soviets aboutthe possibility that

without achieving détente with the United States, the Chinese might be able to force the Soviets into a war that they did not wish to fight.

From this

point on, the Chinese Communists counterposed the role of anti-imperialist

revolutionary movements in Third World countries in achieving socialism against the Soviet position on peaceful coexistence. This was a reversal from

China's recent claim that "we have consistently held and still hold that the socialist and capitalist countries should coexist in peace and carry out peaceful competition."23

T

TheSino-Soviet split became more and more hostile over the following years. By 1963, the Chinese called on their international followers to break with parties dominated by supporters of the Soviet line. Already in 1959, the Chinese began to prepare the ground for this split by sponsoring training schools for foreign communists from the developing world-that sought t o propagate Chinese positions within the international communist move ment. We will see examples of Latin Americans who attended these schools

in the case studies on Mexico, Peru and Bolivia in the chapters that follow. As China distinguished its own politics from those of the Soviet Union in the course of the Sino-Soviet split, Maoism to come into focus as a began distinct and new international political trend. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 completed the process.

The Cultural Revolution was a chaotic series of eyents wjth many differ-

facets. At the highest levels of power, it was ásuruggle waged by Mao Ledong and his supporters against pther high-level Communist lead-

ent

(most prominently Liu Shaogi ahd Deng "taking the capitalist road,"-that is,

ers

Party

Xiaoping) who Mao accused of pursuing aset of policies that would

18

Transpacific Revolutionaries

restoration in China just as they claimed had happened lead to a capitalist the ComUnion. During the cOurse of the Cultural Revolution, in the Soviet the struggle was shattered and then reconstituted as munist Party apparatus and

reflected on the regional the highest levels of the party was Cultural Revolumass revolutionary upheavals, the local levels. As with all idealism and opportunism at all levels of participation. tion was a mix of againstauthority, The Cultural Revolution was(also a youth rebellion of Mao Zedong as the and parental (albeit in the name botheducational traveled in the Cultural Revolution, youth Early authority). highest single also traveled from urban areas the country and exchanged experiences. They the Cultural Revoto impose the upheaval of to more "backward" areas taken off. Later, many youth would be lution on areas where it had-not from the peasantry, in an important "sent down" to the countryside to learn on the importance of the peasantry

going

on at

expression both ofMaoism's/emphasis

and of Maoism's epistemologicalprinciple that revolutionary knowledge is gained through sharing the lives of the basic masses. articuCultural Revolution, Mao and his supporters Ithe

course of the

road

the revolutionary policies meant to keep China on Maoism was initially toward communism. During the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union. In the Cularticulated in a negative sense, in opposition to and fleshed out in more tural Revolution, Maoism was further articulated from the set of short quotations positive, forward-thinking terms. Apart no one book that laid out contained in the "Little Red Book,"24 there was on Maoist ideology someMaoist principles, and the major publications international times contradicted each other in important points, leaving or another at the expense ofadherents a lot of room to emphasize one point Maoist adherent might consider a cardinal question (a an idea that another internaout repeatedly in the political schisms of the process that was played lated

a

series of

the Chinese Maoists tional New Left).2 But despite the ad hoc way in which Cultural Revoluformulated and created their ideas during the course of the trend at this time. As Maoism became a coherent international political

tion,

the culture and ethos for violent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its visceral enthusiasm to triumph over rebellion and emphasis on the ability of human willpower a

result, international

Maoism

was

deeply

marked

by

even the most adverse of objective material conditions.

CHINA AND LATIN AMERICA, 1949-1976

Throughour the Maoist period, and especially after the Sino-Soviet split, the propaganda of the Communist Party of China emphasized the amportance of Asia, Africa and katin Amertea in the world. In particular, the

Communist Party held that "the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples."26 Despite the clear importance that Latin America had in Chinese

China and Latin America 19 propaganda statements as one of the main battlegrounds where the cause of world revolution would be decided, the literature on Chinese foreign rela

tions during the Maoist period barely mentions Latin America at all. There are several possible explanations for this, all of which may be operative me degree. First, and perhaps most obviously, topics such as China's

relations with the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Korea and the United States are of larger overall significance in the history of Chinese foreign relations and have occupied the time and energy of those concerned with Chinese toreign

relations in the Maoist period. Second, apart from China's relations with Cuba, which went sour after the Sino-Soviet split in ay case, Chinese relations with Latin America cannot be studied as state-to-state relations until

many Latin American countries gave diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic in the early 1970s. By then, the Maoist period was almost over, and in any case, those governments clearly weren't what Lin Biao meant when he wrote about the importance of the revolutionary struggles of the Latin

American people. That being the case,Latin American relations with China

have to be studied by examining the hazy and deliberately hidden wortd of

bLcAR

communist parties and militant guerrilla organizations thatadopted Maoist that might politics in Latin America For the time being, Chinese archives assist in this research are not open.

The People's Republic began developing its capacity to interact with and earliest days of its foundinfluence Latin American revolutionaries from the that came from the Soviet Union in 1949 to ing. Among the many experts and propaganda operaassist in the creation of China's new foreign ministry The Spaniards had been living in tions were a group of Spanish refugees. Civil War and now came to China to the USSR since the end of the Spanish Republic's ability to interact with the Spanishhelp in developing the People'sAmericans began to take their place as partyspeaking world. Until Latin berween the Chinese party and its Latin to-party relations

were established

American counterparts, these

Spain were China's translations early polishers of Spanish

retugees

were the main Spanish teachers and materials.8 of Chinese propaganda

from Franco's

America, The first China pursued-twomain diplomatie tracksÄn-Laun directed state-to-state relations and was track was in the vein of traditional recognition. The second was diplomatic and securing promoting(trade

al

with Latin American com

clandestine and involved partyt0-parryyelations diplomatic recognition hunists. While no Latin American countries gave another its first decade (and it would be to the People's Republic during PRC after Cuba's 1960 recognition), the decade until Chile recognized the number of PRC

was

able

to

establish

a

cultural and economic presence in a formed the that time. To this end, the PRC

Laun American countries during Association and promoted the formaChinese-Latin American Friendship countries. The first of associations in Latin American tion of counterpart was founded in 1952 with the the Chile-China Cultural Association,

rhese, who had sitedChinain 951, and participation of the poet Pablo Neruda,

t

20 Transpacific Revulutionaries the painter José Venturelli, who traveled to China constantly tegjnning in

1952.2 The activity of thé Mexico-China Friendship Society is exarmined in some detail in Chapter 2. In 1952, China also founded the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade to pursue trade relations mith countrier thar had n given t diplomatic recognition. China had some initial success in developing economic ties with Mexico, Argentina and Chile. China's first trade pacr with a Latin American country was signed with Chile in 19S2 for copper

and niurates. Trade with Latin America grew slowly throughout the Manist

period, beginning at $1.9 million in 1950, risingto $7.3 million in 1955 and $31.3 millon in 1960,and reaching $475.7 million in 1975 (by comparisn,

China's trade with Latin America stood at $70,218 million in 2006). An important aspect of China's people-to-people diplomacy was the sending of delegations to Latin America and the invitation of Latin Ameri can delegations and prominent individuals to visit China. The delegations

that the Chinese sent to Latin America weré quite varied. In 1954, the poet Ai Qing attended Pablo Neruda's fiftieth birthday celebration in Santiago.

Delegations of actors and acrobats toured the Southern Cone in 1956 and 1958, followed by journalists in 1959. A delegation of oil workers visited their counterparts in Venezuela in 1959, and in 1960 a Peking opera troupe toured Venezuela and Colombia. The purpose of these delegations was to build up goodwill toward the People's Republic of China and to influence public opinion, both broadly and among influential sections of people, for the diplomatic recognition of the PRC. Leading members of these delegations could also extend invitations for Latin Americans to visit China.

One scholar estimates that about1.500 Latin Americans visited China berween 949and 1960* Aside from travel to China by communists, dele

gations of students, journalists, lawyers, politicians, workers, artists, actors, peace activists and many others visited China and met with their Chinese

counterparts. The majority of those who visited China were not communists, although the average delegation member left China with a positive impression. New York Times Latin America correspondent Tad Szulc wrote hat "dozens of books, articles, and speeches almost uniformly praising

China-or at least showing a grudging admiration for it-have been written by Latin American congressmen, intellectuals, artists, and labor- and student

union members on their return from guided tours of the Chinese main

Jand." Returnees from China played key roles in founding and sustaining the work of the Latin America-China triendship associations. Prominent Latin Americans who visited Çhina jncluded the former Mexican.presidents Lázaro Cárdenas and Emilio Pertes Gil (both in 1959 former Dominican

Republic president Juan Bosch in 1969, Chilean senatorSalvador Allendein 1954 (Allende also served as honorary president ofthe Chile-China Cultural

Association), the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueirosin 1954, the Brazilian author Jorge Amado in 1952 and 1957, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in

1951 and 1957, and Guatemalan aurhor Miguel Angel Asturias in 1956.

China and Latin America

21

The Chinese Communists used the Xinhua (New China) News Agency* an important vehicle for establishing a presence in Latin America, By 1962, Xinhua had set up branch offices in Cuba, Chile, Brazil and

Argentina."

Later, in the 1960s, Xinhua branches proliferated in other Latin Asmerican countries. As with the Soviet TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), Xinhua correspondents often had duties that went beyond news gathering, In countries where the People's Republic of China did not enjoy

diplomatic

recognition, Xinhua agents sometimes worked to tacilitate trips to China by Latin American delegations and vice versa. Xinhua agents also sometimes had a role in facilitating party-to-party contacts between the Chinese Communist

Party

and Latin American parties. In the absence of

a

large Spanish-speaking

corps of Chinese diplomats and journalists, Latin American comnunists were

sometimes recruited (in consultation with local communist parties) to serve as correspondents for Xinhua. These Latin American Xinhua correspondents would not have the broad semi-diplomatic portfolio of their Chinese col leagues, but they would go to China to receive training and initial instructions for their work.6 After Cuba gave diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of

China in 1960, a Chinese embassy was established in Havana. The opening of the Chinese embassy facilitated China's overtures to progressive Latin Americans who were drawn to revolutionary Cuba. The example of the Mexican artist Andrea Gómez is indicative of the way in which the Ch

nese embassy in Havana facilitated the spread of Maoist influence in Latin America outside of Cuba. Gómez had won national recognition in Mexico during the 1950s for her linoleum prints "La niña de labasura" ("The Girl of the Garbage") and "Madre contra la guerra" ("Mother Against War"). In the early 1960s, Gómez went to Cuba to paint murals. While there, she met the Chilean artist José Venturelli, who had already participated in art

exhibitions in China in the 1950s. Venturelli infected Gómez with enthuSiasm for visiting China and passed along her request for an invitation to visit China to the Chinese embassy in Havana. Gómez visited China for two months. She mainly applied herself to learning Chinese artistic techniques, but she also toured the country-and-learned about the Chinese approach to socialism. Gómez was also invited to several including one hosted by Zhou Enlai for visiting Latin American banquets, intellectuals that was attended by the Uruguayan novelist and social critic Eduardo Galeano. When she later returned to Mexico, Gómez took up residence

in

Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. Coincidentally,

as detailed

led an chapter, the Mexican Maoist leader Florencio Medrano war in Cuernavaca eftort to create an urban base area for a Maoist guerrilla in the

nexI

in 1973by leading a land take-over on the outskirts of the city and estab-

Rubén Jaramillø on frshrng the self-governing squatter communityColonia in the communiry and painted a mural the seized land. Gómez took

of Ruben

Jaramillo, the

of the set1lement.

a

plot

veteran

of Emiliano

Zapata's

army and namesake

22

Transpacific Revolutionaries

Gómez's story is reveal1ng of several important dynamics. During the first half of the 1960s, until the rupture in Sino-Cuban relations that accompaattached nied the Sino-Soviet split, Latin Americans who were ideologically such as José Venturelli, circulated in Cuba. to the Chinese socialist model, RevoWhile in Cuba, Latin Americans drawn to the cxample of the Cuban learn about China lution could encounter pro-Chinese Latin Americans and from them. Operating under regular diplomatic conditions, the Chinese more easily than roving Xinembassy could then facilitate travel to China the few years that hua correspondents or cultural delegations could. For Havana China and Cuba enjoyed warm relations, the Chinese embassy in was well situated for making contact with progressive and revolutionary Latin Americans-from across the continent. and Aside from the pursuit of diplomatic recognition, cultural diplomacy second track in its economic ties, the Chinese Communist Party pursued a involved establishing party-toforeign relations with Latin America, which American communist parties. While the Chinese party relations with Latin Latin American parties through the party had been in contact with- some various networks and mass

organizations that

were

created

by international

Peña attended the (for example, Cuban communist Lázaro and in World Federation of Trade Unions conference held in Beijing 1949,

communism

events in the Soviet Chinese and Latin American communists had been at entailed the Union together in earlier years), party-to-party relationships information and creation of formal mechanisms tor exchanging ideas, communist party to establish partypotentially aid. The first Latin American the Brazilian party, which sent a delegation to to-party ties with China was from 12 Latin American Chima i July 1953. In September 1956, leaders the Communist Party of communist parties attended the Eighth Congress of 22 Latin American communist parties had formal relations China.

By 1960,

with the Chinese party.38 Chinese efforts to win Latin American communists

to

their side in the

Sino-Soviet split began immediately after Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when Latin American delegates to the CPSU congress were invited to visit China. Many of these delegates first learned of Khrushchev's speech while visit-

the Twentieth

Congress of

ing China after the congress. The delegates were received by Mao Zedong

and Liu Shaoqi, who discussed their differences with the Soviets with the Latin Americans. At least one Latin American delegate, the Brazilian Diogenes

Arruda, the chief aide

to

top Brazilian leader Luis Carlos Prestes,

was

both convinced by Chinese arguments and impressed by personally meet-

ing

the top Chinese

leadership. Osvaldo Peralva,

a

Brazilian

assigned

to

work on the Cominform newspaper Fora Lasting Peace, For a People's Democracy's staff, reported on his conversation with Arruda upon Arruda's return to Moscow from China in July 1956: "Proudly he told me how he,

together with the rest of the Latin American Communist delegation, had been received by Mao Zedong, who had talked with them for two hours

China and Latin Amnernca 23 ad even Askrel whether they wanted

continue theconversation. In the

svirt o n on the oxher hand, he sad, he had never had the honor of being receved by evrn the most obsure member of the Central Committee."

Following the Iwenticth Congress of the CPSU, a group of Latin Amer Can commumsts atended a s1% month training course in China. The train-

ingcourse focused on both ideological and practical questions. Because the Iwenticth Congress of the CPSU concluded at the end of February and the Eghth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party began on September 15, 1956, it seems fair to a55ume that some of the Latin American delegates

to both congresses participated in this six-month training program"" This 1956 trainng course was the prototype for the siX-month program that the

Chinese ater instítutionalized for training Latín American communists.In (1959, the Chinese party set up a school near Changping,a small town north of Beijing, where they regularly conducted six-month training courses for Latin American communists. The most famous graduate of this program is the Shining Path leader, Abimael Guzmán. We will encounter other gradu ates of this program in each of the country case study chapters. The institutionalization of the six-month training program in 19S9 coin-

cided with Chinese efforts to win over Latin American communists in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In the second half of 1959, the Chinese held a fivemonth political seminar for Latin American communists. The official reason for the seminar was to teach the lessons of the Chinese Revolution, but it was also intended to win over adherents in the escalating dispute berween

China and the Soviet Union. While it is not entirely clear which countries were represented at this seminar, the top leadership of the Peruvian Com munist Party was in attendance, and it seems likely that other high-ranking Latin American communists were there as well. The content of this confer ence, and its importance for the pro-Chinese faction in Peru, are dealt with in Chapter 3.42 As the Sino-Soviet split came to a head, Latin American communist parties with substantial Maoist factions divided into separate pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet groups. The Brazilian party was the first to split, in 1962, shortly

before China adopted the policy ot encouraging its supporters to torm new parties. The Brazilian Maoists named their party the Partido Comunista do Brasil, to distinguish it fron the pro-Soviet Partido Comunista Brasileiro. When the Peruvian Maoists created their own new party in January 1964, they followed suit, naming their party the Partido Comunista del Perú to distingursh it fron the Partido Comunista Peruano. The Maoist parues that formed soon thereafter in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and in some other Latin American

countries opted for a less subtle distinction, naming themselves Marx1st-Leninist Communist Parties" (as in Partido Comunista de Bolivia (Marxista-Leninista]). The implication was that the Maoists were the true followers of Marx and while the Lenin,

pro-Soviet

parties revisionist." By the end of the 1960s)most Latin American countries had at least one Maoist party (some countries had more than one due to

were

splintering

24 Transtpacific Revolutionaries among the Maoists, a process we will examine below in the country case studies). However, only in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia and Paraguay did the newborn pro-Chinese parties rival the pro-Soviet parties in size and influence at the time of their founding. With the formation of pro-Chinese parties in Latin America in the early 1960s, China stepped up its efforts to aid those parties. In 1963, Chinese

propagandists and Latin American translation polishers began to produce a Spanish-language edition of the Peking Review (Pekín Informa), a weekly magazine dedicated to providing "timely, accurate, firsthand information on economic, political and cultural developments in China and her relations with the rest of the world."4 Aside from stepping up the production of Spanish-language propaganda, Beijing also gave material support to the Maoist political groups in Latin America. The most basic form of mate

rial aid was money. In July 1963, a leading pro-Chinese Ecuadorian, José María Roura, returned to Quito from Europe carrying $25,000, which the Ecuadorian authorities promptly confiscated.4" Until Chinese archives are much money China opened up, it will be impossibde to say exactly how Even Latin Americans who readily gave to Latin American Maoist eforts. reticent to admit to having been involved in receiving funds from China are

discuss precise figures."*

of Although we canngt makewith any certainty a quantitative estimatewe the amount of Chinesëmonetary suppopt' for Latin American Maoists, assessment of its influence. As a can make a relatively accurate qualitative communist parties were short on funds, and general rule, Latin American have eased pressures and facilismall infusions of money would certainly Chinese funds facilitated travel, tated party activities. It seems likely that otherwise not have been puballowed publications to appear that might

lished, and maybe

allowed for

a

who otherwise would have had

be full-time activists to make a living (and thus

few party members

to

find other ways

to

It does would have been available for fewer party tasks).

likely that

for a Maoist made the difference berween life and death No Maoist group in Latin America that movement in Latin America. political material aid to maintain its base of suphad a mass base relied on Chinese but facilitated Maoist political work in Latin America, port. Chinese funds failed to develop could have sustained parties that it was not on a scale that sucAmerican Maoist groups failed or their own bases of support. No Latin their lack of access to external funding ceeded beca use of Chinese funds or discusses Communist Party of the Philippines, the of leader María Sisón, José the 1960s and 1970s in the China during from received the aid that his party have learned the Chinese funding

-

not seem

ever

the teachings of Mao, we revolution forward. We sell-reliance in carrying the Philippine of principle not dependent from abroad but we are material following

terms:

"From among

need moral and on

it.

Sisón's

support

but also

having needed, support

somehow

of having not depended on, of conceptualizing the from abroad is a helpful way

assessment

Maoists. for Latin America's Chinese support of importance

China and Latm America 25 Undoubtedly, the reticence of those who received funds from China to

discuss the specifics of that funding has to do with the fact that receiving funding from abroad can be used to delegitimize a political movement, or at least to expose it to accusations of having been manipulated by the foreig ers who gave the money."" During the course of many interviews with Mao

Ists and former Maoists, members (or former members) of various splinter groups sometimes accused their opponents of having misused Chinese funds

for their own personal benefit. Despite the fact that the sums involved were relatively modest, and despite the way in which Chinese funding can be easily explained as a form of internationalist solidarity, the act of receiving

money from abroad to fund political activities in Latin America has a certain taint to it.

China provided other forms of aid as well. Although Latin American Maoists tended to prefer Europe, particularly France, as a site of politi-

cal refuge, China was available as a place that political exiles could flee

ro. China provided other services to some Latin American Maoist leaders as well. For example, when a member of the Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist) was injured in a car crash, she eventually went to China

for eye surgery. Chinese party leaders made themselves available for regular consultations with Latin American party members, with certain leaders

with a remarkable frequency for such consultations. The Bolivian leader Oscar Zamora, discussed in Chapter 4, is one such example. Chinese rapprochement with the United States and diplomatic recogni-

traveling to China

tion by many Latin American countries in the early 1970s did not substantially affect Chinese support for Maoists in Latin America. Chinese foreign

belief that the Sovier Union was the alignment of Allende's Chilean a major military threat to China, and forces meant that China had few qualms about government with pro-Soviet swilt recognition recognizing the legitimacy of Pinochet's regime. China's overthrow of of the Pinocher government after the September 11, 1973, American leftists. Allende caused China to lose prestige among some Latin the Chilean Maoists fought Despite China's friendly relations with Pinochet, the Pinochet regime along with the and killed were

policy in the early

against and

1970s

was

tortured

guided by the

by

50

of the Chilean left, The Chinese Cultural Revolution ended in October 1976 with the arrest month alter Mao's Mao's closest supporters, the Gangof Four, less than a

rest

of death.

Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese policy abruptly

at home, The abanshifted to focus on promoting economicdevelopment donment of Mao's revolutionary vision by the new Chinese government One of the first led Maoist forces internationally to target Deng Xiaoping. it launchedits insurrection in 1980 was to actions of the Shin1ng Path when Xiaoping. It is hang dead dogs from lampposts with signs denouncing Deng aid to Latin that China had stopped giving probably unnecessary to mention Chinese diplomats worked to American Maoists by that time. Over time, societies that they worked with in Latin reinvent the network oft triendship

26

Transpacific Revolutionaries

America, emphasizing general sinophilia and not Maoism. In 1991, Chinese diplomats went to the length of requesting that a Mexico-China Friendship Sociery burn their remainingcopies of Mao's works and begin distributing material on Tai Chi instead.52

LIFE FOR LATIN AMERICAN VIsITORS AND RESIDENTS IN CHINA DURING THE MAOIST ERA Thousands of Latin Americans visited China berween 1949 and 1976, and many of those visitors stayed for extended periods. There was no single Latin American experience of being in China during the Maoist period. But there were certain common experiences of being in China that many

Latin American visitors did share. Many of those who worked pn Spanishshared common living and language propaganda ctivities based in China courses working conditions. Those who attended the six-month training learned from a curriculum that was relatively standardized. Even visitors who were traveling on individualized itineraries interacted with a Chinese a set of standards and apparatus for dealing with foreign visitors that had practices that were applied to other visitors.33

Most visitors to China were taken on multi-stop/tours of the country, the length of which depended on the amount of timethey would be spend in China. Details of particular trips to China are given in Chapters 2, 3

ing

and 4. Typical tours involved visits to model tarms and factories, as well as

more traditional tourist fare, including cruises on the Yangzi River and visits cultural sites, such as the Great Wall. Six-month cadre

TOmajorcities and

training courses also included travel around China as part of the curricu

lum, in addition to the time spent studying Maoist ideology and the practical aspects of making revolution. It was not unusual for foreign visitors to

attend a banquet presided over by Zhou Enlai (or, less frequently, by another major Chinese leader, such as Zhu De). These semi-regular banquets for for-

cign guests were quite large and would unite many of the toreigners pasing through Beijing. The personal touch of Zhou Enlai at these banquets was

nored in numerous memoirs and interviews and clearly generated good will toward China even among skeptical visitors. lt is hard to imagine another major statesman of the twentieth century who had as much contact with relatively unknown foreigners on such a regular basis. Most Latin Americans who worked ás language teachers or who helped

with Spanish-language propaganda activities lived at the Friendship Hotel, a compound in northwestern Beijing that was built in 1954 to accommo

date Soviet advisers. The Friendship Hotel hadcafeterias that served several international cuisines, ample recreational facilities and even its own stores.

Although it was bsilt to accommodate 3,100 residents, after the departure of the Soviets it was never full.* Despite the fact that the Friendship Hotel

had plenty of room available, some Latin Americans lived in other locations

China and Latin America 27 more convenient to their work units. For example, the Latin Americans

who broadcast

the shortwave radio

station Radio Peking in Spanish, Portuguese, Aymara and Quechua lived in an annex next to the radio staon

tion itself, even though some of them also taught Latun American languages to the Chinese. Despite their dispersed living situations, many of the Latin Americans residing in Beijung would gather on the occasional Saturday to socialize and to discuss Chinese and Latin American events.5 In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, we will examine the process through which

Mao

ist ideas were transferred to Mexico, Peru and Bolivia and domesticated in those countries, with varying degrees of success. Despite the very different outcomes of the transfer of Maoism to each of the three countries we are considering in this book, the role of Latin American travelers to China in the process was remarkably similar. Each country's China travelers had their own experiences in China and their own interpretations of the meaning of their Chinese experiences for their home country's politics. But they all

experienced similar conditions in China and interacted with the same Chinese party and state apparatus that supported them in finding ways to adapt Maoist ideas to the conditions of their own countries. The incorporation of the story of pro-Chinese communists, intellectuals and activists into the historical narrative of Cold War Latin America forces a revision of our understanding of how the Cold War played out ideologi-

cally in Latin America. Recent historiography has almost entirely ignored

the Chinesefactor inLatin Americas.Cold Wa:" Yet, during the 1960s and 1970, Maoist groups seriously contended for leadership of the left in several Latin American countries, and played influential roles even in many counies where they were not in serious contention for left hegemony. Including

the Maoists and leftist sinophiles in the historical narrative of Cold War Latin America leads us to expand our conceptual understanding of the Cold War ideological framework. It also broadens our concept of who and what constituted the communist left in Latin America during the Cold War. This broadening of our conceptual horizons of the Latin American Cold War does not verturn the current dominant narrative of the Latin American

Cold War, but it does complicate that narrative and indicate areas in need of revision.

2

Mexico The Wayward Disciples of Vicente Lombardo

I toast

a new

period of fraternal friendship berween China and Mexico.

continent that had I remember that the only country on the American was relations with China for many years, starting in the 17th century, the commerce Mexico, then called New Spain. I recall the fact that

between Mexico and China influenced various aspects of Mexican life,

particularly in artisan production

and in the

popular arts, and I refer

to the romantic legend of the China Poblana (Pueblan Chinese Girl), whose dress, modified by the taste of my people, became the costume

par excellence for

expressing the complicated and rich feeling of mes-

tizaje, in the most popular and lucid national dance. Let me end by voting for the return of the China galleon to the port of Acapulco, not?

only

to

import and

export valuable

merchandise,

as

in the past, but

to

communicate to Mexico the ideals of the People's Republic of China and pick up the highest aspirations of the Mexican people."

So toasted Vicente Lombardo Toledano at a banquet held by Zhou Enlai in

honor of the Union Conference of the Countries of Asia and Australasia held

by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Beijing from Novem ber 16 to December 1, 1949. As a member of the executive bureau ot the WFTU, Lombardo formed part of the meeting's presidium. It was at this

conference that Liu Shaoqi announced Chinese and Soviet plans to promote the Chinese Revolution as a general model for revolution throughout the

developing world. It is in this context that we have to understand Lom-

bardo's toast to "communicate to Mexico the ideals of the People's Republic of China," and his leading role in beginning that proces.

By the time that Mexico's long 1960s began," Maoist ideas had gained sufficient traction in Mexico to play a significant role in the social move-

ments of that period. The influence of Maoist ideas were manifest in the

formation of explicitly Maoist groups that operated withintheBargersocial movements, and also in the way that other organizations and movements

took up particular Maoist ideas without committing themselves to the ideology as an organic whole. Mexicans who admired Maoist China and devoted

themselves to propaganda work in support of the ideals of the People's

Mexico

29

Republic of China" played a key role inthe diffusion of Maoist ideas, beginning with Lombardo's memoir of his{949^rip to China. Systematic efforts at promoting lessons of the Chinese Revolution that began with Lombardo's memoir were continued by Lombardo's People's Party (Partido Popular), reaching a nodal point with the creation of the

Mexico-China Friendship Sociery n 1957.)This society later dividedin rwo,

as veteran communist and feminist Esthér Chapa led a faction that advocated armed struggle and an orthodox adherence to Mao's ideas. Orthodox

Maoism in Mexico reached its high point in the guerrilla struggles led by Florencio Medrano in Morelos and Oaxaca in the 1970s, while a variery of new leftist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s borrowed an eclectic mix of Maoist ideas and combined them with other influences. Maoist ideas have had an often unrecognized impact on contemporary Mexico. The main opposition party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution de la Mao[PRD])

(Partido Revolución Democrática absorbed many former ist activists, while the smaller Workers' Party (Partido del Trabajo [PT]) was formed by former Maoists. More surprisingly, Adolfo Oribe, one of the main advisers of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was a leading ideologue of a Maoist splintef groyp that focused on peaceful reformist organizing among the

poor. Meanwhite,the Revolutionary People's Army (Ejército Popular Revolucionario), one of Mexico's most prominent guerrilla groups (out of dozens of small armed guerrilla forces in Mexico today), stillclaims to adhere to a policy ofProtracted People's Was a concept that originated with Mao Zedong. The story of how Maoism played an important role in Mexico's long 1960s, and its continued reverberations there today, begins with Vicente Lombardo Toledano's 1949 visit to the recently founded People's Republic of China.

VICENTE LOMBARDO TOLEDANO AND THE BEGINNING OF PRO-CHINA PROPAGANDA ACTIVITIES IN MEXICO

Vicente Lombardo Toledano was one of Mexico's foremost labor leaders. In

1936, he founded the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), Mexico's largest union. The CTM became closely aligned with Mexico's ruling party,

and Lombardo was

torced

out

of its

leadership

in

1997{towever,

Lom

bardo remained an immensely important labor leader. Despite having been forced out of the CTM's leadership, Lombardo maintained a stance of criti cal support for (combined with loyal opposition to) Mexico's ruling party,

subscribing to a form of Marxism that ascribed a leading role in Mexico's revolutionary process to the national bourgeoisie. Lombardo's memoir of his trip to China and the ongoing propaganda ettorts of his People's

Party (Partido Popular {PPD (later People's Socialist Party [Partido Popular Socialista, PPS}) were the nitial conveyor bels of Maoist ideasj to Mexico. These propaganda effortsformedthe basis for the influence of Maoism on splinters from the PP(S)" such as Arturo Gámiz's People's Guerrilla Group

30

Transpacific Revolutionaries

(Grupo Popular Guerrillero) (where Maoism was a secondary influence) and

theMexico-China Friendship Association led by Dr. Esther Chapa (which considered itself Maoist). The WFTU conference required that Lombardo be in China from November 12 to December 6, 1949. The People's Republic had only been founded on October 1, and the Communists were still mopping up Guomindang troops in Sichuan and the southwest. The WFTU was a Communistdominated body and the conference was being held in Beijing both to mark and build on the success of the Chinese Revolution. Prior to the Chinese Revolution, such a conference would have been held in the Soviet Union. The conference was an opportunity for the various delegations to come and see revolutionary China for themselves. Lombardo himself utilized the trip

to have conversations with Chinese Communists about the nature of the revolution they had carried out. Lombardo traveled to China through the Spviet Union, flying across the USSR as part of a convoy of four airplanes carrying delegates to the WFTU conference. Apart from Lombardd's wife, Rosa María, only one other Latin of the communist Contfedera-

was present, the secretary general American tion of Cuban Workers, Lázaro Peña. On their

arrival in Manchuria, the

delegation was welcomed by singing children and a feast. Despite the snowstorm and the wind that keeps you from opening your wait for us at the station. eyes, hundreds of workers and schoolchildren

One of these, standing in front of his comrades, who look like porcelain

dolls, leads the chorus that sings the March ofthe Eighth Route Army the hymn of the tamous army of the Chinese Revolution, equivalent to

La Adelita of the Northern Division of the Mexican Revolution

that

we would afterwards frequently hear during our stay in the country.

Lombardo and the rest of the executive bureau of the WFTU were received as distinguished international guests. Similar events took place along the entire route to Beijing. Mass organizations of workers, youth and women greeted the delegation at several stops,

hosting large meals in honor of the delegation. For example, a rally was held in Harbin, where Lombardo was one of four WFTU executive bureau members to address the crowd. In discussing the novelty of addressing a crowd in the snow, Lombardo reminds us of his international stature: Before the masses that await our speeches under a copious snow, here in

Harbin, and while I wait my turn to speak, I remember in contrast the occasions that I've had to speak under a torrential rainbefore-crowds of peasants accustomed to let their clothes dry on their bodies, in the

hot country of Mexico, or under a cold raid in the indigenous villages of the Andes, and also in an intense and humid heat in the tropic regions of isthmic America, until I left a puddle of sweat under my feet, or high

Mexico 31 on a table serving as a tribune, on the banks of the Magdalena River in

Colombia, at dusk, having to interrupt my speech every so often to spit the mosquitoes that entered my mouth. But I've never had to speak in the snow: doing so I have to use both hands to clear my face and

out

observe the audience

through the cataract of white flakes.

In Beijing, the WFTU representatives were met by a high-level delegation led by Liu Shaoqi and were put up in the Six Nations Hotel (formerly the Gran Hotel des Wagons Lits) On November 17, Lombardo had the first of a series of meetings with

representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This first meeting was apparently on the history of the revolution, which he retells in the trav-

elogue. His next meeting, two days later (November 19) was on China's agrarian reform. In his memoir, he emphasizes the land-to-the-tiller policy of land redistribution (with no mention of this as a basis for future collectivization, which, given the experience of the Soviet Union, would have been an obvious issue to raise), peasant participation in the process, and an end to

oppression by landlords.10 The next day, November 20, Lombardo had his next meeting, which focused on China's economy." He emphasizes worker participation in

workplace decision-making processes and the importance of state owner ship combined with a secondary role for private capital. Lombardo asked his Chinese interlocutors: And what about financiai policy?-I ask my friends, remembering the bitter experiences of Mexico's governments of revolutionary origin, that with one hand build or try to build and with the other destroy or para-

lyze their own work through lack of an effective credit policy, that could serve as a

basis for economic

development.2

Lombardo's Chinese friends answered: All financial

enterprises-they answer me-will be strictly controlled by

the State. The right of issuing currency belongs to the State. The circu-

lation of

foreign currencies inside the country is forbidden. The selling and buying of foreign stocks, of foreign currencies, of gold and of silver, will be managed by the State banks. Private financial enterprises that

operate within the Law will be subject to the supervision and guidance

of the State.3 In exchanges such as these, Lombardo uses his questions and his friends answers to didactically communicate Chinese policy to his readers as a

development model that is potentially adaptable to Mexican conditions. On

November 21, Li Li-san addressed the conterence on the "experi ences, lessons and current conditions of the workers movement in

China."1

32

Transpacific Revolutionaries

Lombardo summed up the talk as addressing the question, "How were the working class and people of China able to defeat the reactionary and brutal and bureaucrat capitalism and win government of imperialism, feudalism like China?"5 victory in a backward, semifeudal and semicolonial country It is key here that he asks this in these general, universal terms: How does a

backward, semifeudal and semicolonial country defeat imperialism,feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism? What follows concerns not only China, but also is meant as a lesson for other backward, semifeudal and semicolonial countries. Li Li-San (and Lombardo in his memoir) emphasize the workerformation of a united front peasant alliance and the agrarian revolution; the that could encompass the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie; the Liberation guided by Marxism-Leninism, which

Army;

People's

Party,

enabled it to articulate the appropriate tactics at each phase of the struggle and

USSR's exisrightist and adventurist deviations; and the War II. Lombardo describes support base, and its victory in World

overcome

tence as a

these factors as the Chinese Revolution's "causas de la victoria."/ In describing both Mexico and China as semifeudal and semicolonial, and drawing universal lessons about worker and peasant mobilization under such conditions on the basis of the Chinese experience, Lombardo seems to

ignore the

vast

social and cultural differences berween Mexico and China.

It is hard to believe that Lombardo, who had a long history as a success-

ful organizer of Mexican workers, particularly as the founder of the CIM,

would be unaware of the vast differences between Mexican and Chinese workers and peasants, and between the larger societies these workers and peasants found themselves in.

Yet, to be able to seriously advocate taking the

Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexico, Lombardo must have believed that, despite whatever differences between Mexico and China he was cog nizant of (and he was no fool), there are certain universal characteristics of workers and peasants, and of semifeudal and semicolonial societies, that prevail across space, time and vast cultural and social differences. These

universal characteristics would then allow for lessons to be drawn from one

context and applied in another, seemingly completely alien context, on the - basis of the commonalities berween all peasants or all semifeudal societies (regardless of time and space). That night, Mao received and dined with the executive bureau members of the WFTU. Lombardo sat next to Jiang Qing (Mao's wife) at dinner.

Lombardo was impressed by Mao: His face is one of those that powerfully attract even those least inter ested in observing men. He has a high and shining forehead, small and

expressiveeyes, nose short and straight... If is hard to find a man so great and at the same time so modest, so

sure of the victory of all the peoples ot the world over their oppressors and of the necessity of recognizing that obstacles exist and that it is necessary

to

destroy them.8

Mexico 33 "the similarity, in origin, between When he met Mao, Lombardo explained and I intorm him the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the Chinese Revolution,

of the enormous interest with which all the peoples of Latin America fol lowed the development of the liberation war of his people."7 After dinner, Lombardo reflected

on

meeting Mao:

national revoMao Zedong is the leader of the greatest anti-imperialist lution in history, the liberator of the Chinese people, which represent a fourth part of the population of the planet; the creator of new forms

of democracy within the universal struggle that the peoples have today taken up for their emancipation. Alongside Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, the other important men of my time-and l'm thinking of those who have influenced the fate of the world with their work-occupy a secondary station.

20

Lombardo's comments to Mao merit some consideration. Did Lombardo

really see the Chinese and Mexican revolutions as being similar in their origin? If his comment to Mao was merely cocktail party conversation, why did he repeat it in his book, which is nothing if not didactic? While the Chinese and Mexican revolutions both involved the mass mobilization ot rural people, the similarities end there. The Chinese Revolution was led by a Marxist party and created a socialist country. The Mexican revolution was

led by a collection of decidedly nonideological leaders. It seems likely that the comment was meant to further convince the reader of the relevance of Chinese experience to the Mexican experience.

On November 27, the WFTU executive bureau members were treated to a review of a special north China division of the Peuple's Liberation Army The review was an occasion for discussion with military leaders about the military strategies and tactics developed in the course of the Chinese Revolu tion. Lombardo recounts some of these main points in his memoir, stressing

the political role of the army and Mao's maxim that "the enemy advances, we retreat." While Lombardo does not say anything specific about the universality of these military lessons of the Chinese revolution, the way Lombardo treats Chinese milhtary theoretical tormulations as aphorisms rather

than as something particular to China implies that he takes them as lessons

with universal application (despite the fact that Lombardo never made any serious plans for armed struggle in Mexico). Despite Lombardo's aversion

to armed revolutionary struggle in Mexico, some of Lombardo's followers (such as Arturo Gámiz) did eventually take up arms. It is intriguing to think that Lomardo's interest in Chinese approaches to economic development may haveexposed some of his followers to Chinese military doctrine.Lombardo's final meeting with his Chinese hosts was on November 29

and focused on what the Chinese called the New Democratic form of gov ernment.A long section of his book deals with how the four classes of the united front (proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and national

34

Transpacific Revolutionaries

bourgeoisie) partic1pate in government through parties and mass organi zations that represent ditferent class forces and sectoral imerests. He cites statements by a variety of representatives of mass organizations representing

noncommunist social strata, Such as an industrialist and a religious person, in support of the idea that noncommunists were able to substantially and

L

meaningfully participate in governing the People's Republic of China.23 Lombardo's memoir was one component of a new, global campaign to

promote the Chinese Revolution as a model for much of the Third World. in late 1949, the Chinese and Soviet communist parties reached a consensus on this approach, and it was publicly announced in a speech by Liu Shaoqi at the WFTU conference in Beijing. Given Lombardo's status as an execu

tive bureau member of the WFTU and his political astuteness, it is certain that he would have been aware of the significance of this new approach. It is likely, although I have found no direct evidence for it,that this new policy was explicitly discussed with him by the Soviets and Chinese. Indeed, the didactic manner in which he reports on his conversations with his *Chinese friends" about various aspects-of the Chinese Revolution seems to confirm

his support for this new agenda.24 Lombardo's main political concern was to make Mexico economically

independent through deepening the land reform and a program of rapid industrialization.25 The Soviet Union had provided an initial example for

implementing this vision.

Now

China,

which communists assumed

to

share

a semicolonial and semifeudal nature with much of the rest of the Asia, Africa and Latin America, was also implementing this vision. But the Chi-

nese Revolution had been a long, violent war led by visionary Marxist phipromote China as a possible model for an alternative path to modernization in Mexico, he was importing an ideological package that contained volatile elements.

losopher When

Lombardo decided

to

TWO SPIN-OFFS FROM LOMBARDISMO: ARTURO GÂMIz'S GRUPO POPULAR GUERRILILERO AND ESTHER CHAPA'S

SOCIEDAD MEXICANA DE AMISTAD CON CHINA POPUAAR In the early 1960s, two spin-offs from Lombardismo emerged in the context of domestic and international polarization among communists set off by deStalinization in the Soviet Union and the 1958 strike movement of teachers

and railway workers in Mexico. These spin-offs echoed Lombardo's earlier promotion of the Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexico. The first was Esther Chapa's Mexico-China Friendship Society (Sociedad Mexicana de Amistad con China Popular), which dedicated itself to promoting theChi

nese Revolution as a model for Mexico. Unlike Lombardo, Chapa's Society focused on the relevance of the Chinese model of a protracted people's war as a revolutionary model for Mexico and emphasized the study of Mao Zedong Thought rather than the relevance of particular development poli-

Mexico

35

cies. The second spin off was the P'eople's (Guerrilla CGroup (Grupo Popular Guerrillero), which was led by Arturo Gamiz and other former PPIS) cadres who left the PPIS) Ied General lInon of Mexican Workers and Peasants

nnón General de Obreros Campesinos de y

México

|lUGOCM||

to

launch

guerrilla warfare n Chihuah1ua Whether or not the rwo group had any contact, together thev represented the emergence of an ideolog1cal undercur rent in Lombardismo that saw armed struggle as an immediately possible and desirable path for creating a socialist state in Mexico. These currents in support of armed struggle emerged from Lombardismo as a resut of dynamics set in motion by global and Mexican events thar polaized the communist political terrain and clearly exposed the contradic thon within Lombardismo of supporting revolution abroad while promoting Soviet Union compromise with the PRI at home. The conflict between the and China, which began in 1956 and culminated in open polemics in 1963, was a major international factor. The polemics highlighted different Marxist

positions, includ1ng the contradictions inherent in the PP(S)'s understanding of China's relevance to Mexico. Domestically, in 1958 there was a strike

movement in Mexico among teachers and railway workers. This struggle marked a high point for communist mass influence in Mexico, despite the fact that the formal leaders of the Communist Party and the People's Parry were wary of the rank-and-file leadership of the strikes. Yet when the strike novement was brutally crushed in 1959, Lombardo denounced the strike

leaders and the Communist Party showed itself incapable of responding to the crisis situation. The weakness of the Communist Party and Lombardo's

betrayal of the railway workers in the face of repression, combined with the example of the triumphant Cuban Revolution and Chinese polem1cs im favor of armed struggle, led some communist militants to try to find a way

to begin armed struggle in Mexico. It was in the context of these events that Esther Chapa and Arturo Gámiz made their breaks with the retormism of Lombardismo.

The Mexico-China Fnendship Society In 1957, Luis Torres Ordóñez, an economist at the National Indigenist Insti-

tute (Instituto Nacional lndigenista) and a member of Lombardo's People's Party, formed the Mexico-China Friendship Society (Sociedad Mexicana de

Amistad con China Popular (SMACP]). The society distributed literature from China and orgamzed iups to China tor artists, scientists, polticians and

representatives of the labor movement (notable uavelers included muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and former president Lizaro Cardenas*"). The Chna travelers would meet theu protessional counterparts n Chna and tour the country, and then report on what they saw at meetings organized on ther

return to Mexco. The society was also a center tor Mexican sinoph1lia. Thus, a meeting on Chinese art or science would mix admiration for Chi nese art and culture in general with particular admiration for socialist art

36

Transpacsfte Revolutonarnes

or science and the alleged abil1ty of socialist society to make new and rapd

brrakthroughs on these

tronts (with the clear

implcation thar,

were

Mexico

to become socialist, or at least adopt more socialistic policies, similar break throughs could be made n Mexco)

public op1nion Mexico to swith diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China to

theaccomphshmentsof social1st for

he People's Republic of China and

The seciety both soughr to propagate

China

as

well

Because ofits focus on propaganda work

its tes to the Chinese government and

main conduit for

Ch1nese

as to win over

propaganda

rul1ng party,

i

sOCiety was the

MexIco professor

entering

of microbioiogy at Doctor Esther Chapa was the first female medical school, a commu the National Autonomous University's (UNAM) she fought for women's right to nist and an early fem1nist." In the 1930s,

vote as a found1ng member and leader of the United Front for Women

As a communist women's Rights (Frente Unico Pro Derechos de la Mujer)." with men and their capaciry rights activist, she emphasized women's equality activists who emphasized women's as revolutionaries in opposition to other 1936 pamphlet, El derecho de voto nurturing and maternal nature. ln her para la mujer (Voting R1ghts for Women), Chapa emphasized women's par

ticipation in workplaces and universities; in the struggles against war, impe rialism and fascism; and in the revolutionary movement more generally

Chapa stated, schools, continues at home and takes to the street for demonstrations, organizes meetings, acts in revolutions and, finally,

She

is in

offices and

favors the sanctioning of leftist governments to support the proletarunder class that has the mission ot destroy1ng the capitalist reg1me the which we live. And this modern woman is denied the vote under

ian

pretext that she is

incapable of exercising it!2

In World War lI, she participated in the Federal District's civil detense com women's representative. She served as director of the National Escolar) and School for Teach1ng Medicine (Escuela Nacional de Medicina mittee as a

the National Nursing School (Escuela Nacional de Entermeria). She gave

women's prison and was involved in ettorts to retorm involvementinthe SMACP, Chapa had a history women prisoners. Beiore her President Cardenas of leadersh1p in international sol1darnty etorts. In 1939, victunized by the named her director of a committee to aid Spanish children medical

care at a

with the Soviet Mexican Communist Party and Lombardo's Onion sponsored by both the m the early 1960s, her People's Party. Until her break with Lombardisno the Mexican Communist politics were similar to those of Lombardo and Mexican society and extend Party. She had participated in eftoris to retorm

Spanish Civil War," and she was active in solidarity activities

PRM and

work with the solidarity to the socialist world, while also trying to activities such PRI governments, including participating in official state

the civil defense committee and the

prison administration."

as

Mexico

37

The Declaration of Principles and Statutes of the SMACP enumerated its goals: creating cultural and fraternal ties between the Mexican and Chi nese peoples; popularizing knowledge about China and its new era; devel-

oping interchanges; and working for the inclusion of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations." In the early 1960s, a rmajor political dis-, pute arose about what the main task ot the association should be. Should

it continue to mainly do propaganda work promoting Chinas cconomic and culrural advances? Or, should it mainly try to spread the revolutionary lessons about China's liberation through people's war and concentrate on doing propaganda work about the relevance of Maoism to making revolution in Mexico?

This conflict resulted in those who advocated a people's war approach,, led by UNAM professor Esther Chapa, being expelled in 1963 and forming their

own

Mexico-China

Friendship Society.

Both of these groups

oper

ated out ot modest headquarters where they sold books, held meetings and

showed films produced in China. They concentrated on propaganda activities, distributing Pekin Informa (Peking Review), China Reconstruye (China Reconstructs), books by China's Foreign Languages Press and other litera ture emanating from the People's Republic. They also organized regular vis-

its to China. The original group, still led by Luis Torres, concentrated on sending notable political figures, artists and professionals to visit China. The Chapa group organized delegations of workers and revolutionaries." Dur ing the spring and summer of 1966, Chapa organized a delegation of "18

workers who will take a one-year course on Marxism-Leninism" and made arrangements for sending pamphlets and other literature back to Mexico from China.3 Police records indicate that Chapa's SMACP had about 150 members in 1966.

In addition to bringing propaganda back to Mexico from China, Chapa may have received some funds for her political work and for use by other Maoists as well. Agents of the Political and Social lnvestigations (IPS) police service suspected that Chapa was receiving tunds trom China. In speculating

about the source of an unusually large quantity of money that the Spartacist Communist League (Liga Comunista Espartaco) had acquired, an IPS agent

speculated, "It is possibly Esther Chapa, Chairwoman of the Mexico-China Friendship Sociery wh0 is giving them money, as it is known that her trips

to China are for the purpose of bringing back funds for agitational work."0

The differences between the two Mexico-China Friendship Societies are clear in the police surveillance reports. The reports describe Chapa as

organizing "Irequent visits to People's China with numerous worker delegations and as having links to some of the small, pro-Stalin and pro-China groups that were formed in the wake of de-Stalinizationand the Sino-Soiet

split. They describe her as being in favor of the "struggle line" and apply

ing

the Chinese

experience to Mexican workers' struggles. The differences

between the two societies are illustrated by the dueling events they some

times held on the same night. For example, on July 8, 1966, Chapa gave

oey

38

Transpacific Revohutionaries

a talk attended by about sevcnty people on the "State and Organization of People's China" att the National School for Political and Social Sciences

(Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Politicasy Sociales), where she talked about her own visits to China. That same night, Torres's society held an event

attended by about fifty people, where they showed a film on Chinese painting and landscapes." Later in the month, on July 22, Torres's society held

a talk on printing, engraving and marble sculpture in China attended by about forty people. That same night, Chapa gave a talk on women in China

at UNAM's school of economics that was attended by about three hundred people. She emphasized the role of women guerillas in China's communist Struggle and showed a film from China.4

As can be seen from the IPS police reports, Chapa's events were usually larger than Torres's, sometimes by a large margin. It seems reasonable to expect that youthful militants swelling the ranks of Mexican radicalismin the 1960s would be more attracted to a prsentation on women guerrillas

than a presentation on marble sculpture. To the extent that the Torres group remained faithful to the vision of Lombardo Toledano, who discerned an "anti-national provocation"

within the 1968 student movement, it prob-

ably was less attractive to New Left youth and students than Chapa's group. Chapa's presence on the UNAM campus might also have added to the prestige, and accessibility, of her events.

In 1966, Chapa's SMACP made a particular effort to commemorate the anniversary of the October 1, 1949, founding of the People's Republic of China. The association marked the event witha September 30 movie showing and talk by Chapa, followed up by a series of smaller, invitation-only

discussionsessions on October 1. The discussion sessions wereeach led by experienced members of the SMACP. This effort illustrates how Chapa's

SMACP saw the role of revolutionary propaganda in the formation of Maoist organization in Mexico. First, Chapa showed a movie and gave a talk to smaller large audience. Then, the next day, SMACP gathered

a

the

together

groups to talk privately and in more depth about the content and meaning

of the previous day's event. This was one method for Chapa to ideologically

train new Maoist cadre.46

I n March 1967, Chapa returned from China with the impression that she had been made China's only official representative in Mexico and with a small amount of economic aid in hand for forming a pro-Chinese communist party. Subsequently, she held meetings with Spartacist Communist

League leaders with this proposition in mind. However, no unified Maoist

party materialized out of these efforts. It is impossible to know exac1ly what she was told in China. Given China's foreign policy shift toward

(and even greater domestic rhetorical emphasis on) favoring the develop ment of liberation struggles in orher countries during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, it seems quite plausible that someone in China who met with Chapa gave her a strong endorsement vis-à-vis the politics

of Torres's SMACP. Certainly, Chapa's emphasis on revolutionary struggle

over econmme developmeni ethuud the dupugual hattfas hny, agh

within the (hinese (ammunist Pany and hess mawhel hitna's vAlueal una al the ne, However, given the chans in hina' pyruersmet 1901 an the faci that forrrs's sor ity kryr futiang as n always had, n dons nnn seem that whateve (hapa was nld was ery meaningful un the bay, 1u

China dd no break off relatums mth ores's uney, and hase n u further evidence that ( hina considered (hapa irs sude epeanative n

Mexico, Perhaps Chapa Was a vicin of a cmhinatin f thr endutvn ary enthusaSIn and breakdown n guerunet f u e t y , vf the At ura)

Revolution, Or perhaps the responsible ( hinese party nembers yun kly rethoughi heir decisunn and decided 1 wud hr 1) *wkwatd tn smam

Chapa of heir error, In any case, (hapa seemns to have planud muh me importance on her (short ved) position as (hina's offuial reprewitative within Mexico's revolutionary movement than (hina dud."

Travel to China and talks given by those returning from these trnp, akan with the organized distribution of Chinese prapaganda ry the frendship

societies and other pro China political groups, were key ways in uhich Maoist politics were spread o Mexico, The 1PS police archives skwru inte sive propaganda efforts by Maois1 forces during this period, with htical

activists showing up individually or in groups as large as twenty at univeri ies and elsewhere with bookstands featuring, the works of lznin anud Man and other literature from China,1 Such propaganda activíties wese smmon but risky, since although this sort of propayanda was legal, thez efforts

sometimes ended in police attacks on the polítical actívists."

The

People's Guerrilla Group

Arturo Gámiz had bcen a smember of Lombardo's PP(S) and had played a leadingrole in a series of land invasions conducted by the PP(S)-led UGOCM

(General Union of Mexican Workers and Peasants) in Chihuahua and north ern Durango during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1964, Gámiz and in to in the

orhers left the PPS order

begin armed sruggle, culminating

September 23, 1965, assaulr on the Madera Barracks." The most in-depth ideological statenents made by the movement led by Gámiz appeared as a

series of five resolutions (printed in pamphlet form) adopted by a "Moun

taun Meeting'" (Encuentro de la Sierra) held in February 1965 to unity his

movement around a political platform in Torreón de Cañas, Municipio de Las Nieves, Durango.

These resolutions display influences from a number of sources, most

prominently the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. They also show a signifi cant Chinese influence. As a member of the PP(S), Gámiz and his leader ship cohort were exposed to Chinese communist ideas (including Lombardo's memoir discussed above), and they assimilated some of these ideas into their own program for revolution in Mexico. Indeed, China is indicated as a refer ence point at the beginning of the third resolution: "Compared with China

40

Transpacific Revolutionaries

Fatherland is very short." and other European nations the history of our the "peaceful road," while not In the fifth resolution, the polemics against echo the Chinese polemics against the Soviet unique to the Chinese position, resolution states, Union of the same period. The third

Ir's

common to

speak of

progress and

stability in the abstract but

we

revolutionaries shouldn't go around in the clouds with abstractions, their real meaning. There are two social classes, we should give things should a revolutionary let himself forget this, the never, at any moment exploited and the exploiting. This can a

of Mexican history since the Mexiposition, along with the summation Revolution as a "half century of bourgeois dictatorship," represented that break with the Lombardista and Communist Party orthodoxy

sharp

Saw

development of Mexico significant revolutionary nationalist

the economic

under the PRM and PRI as havaspect to it. In particular, the

ing a Maoist economic thinking in emphasis on "development for whom" echoes China's polemics with the Soviet Union. Mao's maxim that "political power grows

out

of the barrel of a

gun" is

echoed in Gámiz's statement that "rights and freedom reside in the gun."33 Also telling, Mao's concept of the mass line is reflected in the following statement

by Gámiz:

"The

obligation of revolutionaries is to synthesize and

rationalize the experience the masses gain in their struggles and integrate

revolutionary movement."34 While Gámiz was not an statements shows the archetypical Maoist, an examination of his ideological

i t with the universal

Maoist influence of the Chinese Revolution. After having been exposed to deas as a PP(S) cadre, Gámiz took up some Maoist ideas and wielded them in explaining his reasons for taking up arms after leaving the PPS.

Chapa and Gámiz: From Lombardo's Popular Front

to Mao and Che's Amed Struggle

Esther Chapa's Mexico-China Friendship Sociery continued its propaganda

work throughout the 1960s, and its work was carried on by her sister Vir for Chiginia after Esther's death in 1970.3 It remained the main conduit

nese propaganda and as such was a key link in the ideological training of Mexico's Maoists. Arturo Gámiz's People's Guerrilla Group was smashed soon after its ill-conceived assault on the Ciudad Madera barracks in Chi another guerrilla group, the Party of with some survivors

huahua,

joining

the Poor. These two groups came out of Lombardismo but broke with it

because of their militant stances, which involved taking-up the politics of Maoism to a greater or lesser extent. They were part of a larger turn toward armed struggle and confrontational mass politics that occurred in the l1960s.

What happened that made advocates of armed struggle like Chapa and Gámiz leave Lombardista political organizations (the original SMACP and

Mexico

41

1960s? Betore the ruptures of the the UGOCM," respectively) in the early communists perceived no conflict late 1950s and early 1960s, most Mexican overthrow the between the idea of eventually waging an armed struggle to

Mexican state and a long-term policy of supporting the left-wing of the PRI.

broad popular Major communist parties around the world had integrated front politics with armed struggle during the 1930s and 1940s.37 Lombar

do's discussion of the Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexican revo lutionaries did not ignore the Chinese experience of armed struggle, even though that was not what he chose to emphasize. When Esther Chapa wrote

in 1936 that the modern woman "acts in revolutions and, finally, favors the sanctioning of leftist governments to support the proletarian class that has the mission of destroying the capitalist regime under which we live," she put mass uprisings side-by-side with supporting the left of the ruling party. Yet after the Sino-Soviet split with its polemics over Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence, the failures of Mexico's communist leaders in 1958, the successful examples of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the decisive

defeat of the French in Vietnam in 1954, a shift occurred. What had previ ously not been a contradiction within the thinking of Lombardismo became

a contradiction. Those who were won over to the new armed struggle line, or who had inclined in that direction all along, had to separate from their

old organizations and begin creating focos or people's armies, depending on their particular orientation. So Arturo Gámiz gathered his forces and assaulted the Madera Barracks, while Esther Chapa founded a propaganda society dedicated to winning over other Mexicans to follow the model of the Chinese Revolution.

THE GUERRILLA EFFORTS OF FLORENCIO MEDRANO

Florencio Medrano's efforts at forming a base area for a Maoist people's war in Mexico from 1973 to 1978 represent a particularly noteworthy attempt to make a Maoist revolution in Mexico. While Maoist ideas had a broad and diverse influence from the 1960s on, Medrano-was a-speeialcase. A central tenet of Maoism is the idea that a protracted people's war is necessary to

make revolution, that "political power flows from the barrel of a gun." Of

all the political forces that took a large part of their inspiration and ideologi cal orientation from the experience of the Chinese Revolution, his guerrillas were the only ones to make sustained efforts at creating base

Medranoand

areas for a protracted people's war according to the Maoist model. In addi tion, Medrano considered Maoism an all-encompassing world outlook and, in that regard, was more Maoist than many other communistand guerrilla groups that were heavily influenced by Mao, but felt that Maoism was only

applicable to particular spheres of politics and warfare. If there was ever a

movement that might have become a Mexican Shining Path, it was Medrano and his followers.

42

Transpacific Revohutionares

Florencio Medrano Mederos was born into a p0or campesino family Before becoming a Maoist, he had been an activist in the (Communist Party,

in Danzós Palomino's Independent Peasant Union (Central Campesina Inde pendiente) andin CGénaro Vásquez's (Guerrero Civic Association (Asociación Civica Guerrerense). In May 1966, he served a month in prison for a land

invasion he led in his home town of Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico. Between

1964 and 1966, Medrano was in dialogue with Javier Fuentes, leader of the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (Partido Revolucionario del Proletari

ado |PRP]), about joining the PRP. Upon return from a trip to China, Fuen tes encouraged Medrano to join another delegation Fuentes was organizing to China. In the summer of 1969, Medrano went to China tor six months

(from July 9 to December 31) as part of a delegation of at least seven members of the PRP58

During his time in China, Medrano received what Elena Poniatowska calls a "leadership course."59 The Special Prosecutor for Political and Social Movements of the Past (Fiscalia Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Politicos del Pasado0 claims Medrano attended an international cadre school. Ramón Pérez also claims that Medrano received military andideological training in China.61 None of the sources get into the specifics of the content of the military and political training. Medrano got to see quite a

bit of the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Yan'an and the Jinggang mountains. He spent time on a collective tarm and learned about

Chinese rice culivation techniques. Medrano and his companions attended

a banquer held by Zhou Enlai for foreign delegations and Medrano shook

Zhou's hand. Onhis return to Mexico, Medrano unsuccessfully disputed the leadership of the PRP with Fuentes. Medrano felt that since the majority of the PRP's membership was campesino, then it should be led by a campesino like himself. This argument reflected Medrano's anti-intellectualism, which had been

stoked by anti-intellectual currents in China during the Cultural Revolution and was heightened by the poor performance of the PRP intellectuals who Medrano tried to train in guerrilla wartare techniques in the mountains of

Morelos. The PRP decided it would launch a protracted people's war in Yucatán and proposed to send Medrano there to lead it. Medrano argued against such a move, claiming he was only valuable in Guerrero and Morelos, where he had a mass base of support, and that in any case, "They're

not even Mexicans over there." This odd proposal by Fuentes and the PRP

leadership seems to reflect a desire to recreate the Chinese experience by set ting up a guerilla front in a remote location where the state would have less

ability to field its repressive apparatus. Although threatened with expulsion,

Medrano prevailed and the PRP abandoned the idea of sending him to find

followers and start a guerrilla war in Yucatán."

Before these conflicts berween Medrano and other leaders of the PRP could lead to division, a PRP bomb maker in Mexico City accidentally blew himself up, setting off a police roundup of PRP cadre and leading to the

Mexico

43

arrest of Fuentes. This left Medrano as the main leader of the PRP outside of jail. Medrano took control of what was left of the organization and set up a mass front called the National Worker-Peasant-Student Association (Asociación Nacional Obrera Campesina Estudiantil [ANOCE]).64 At the core

of ANOCE was a "struggle committee" comprised of thirty experienced Maoists, including some activists who knew some Chinese. The first major

effort ANOCE undertook was the occupation of vacant land (intended for luxury recreational development) on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, creating a squatter community that they called Colonia Rubén Jaramillo.55 In the early 1970s, there were many squatters movements across Mex ico. Poor peasants were flooding into Mexican cities due to the crisis of campesino agriculture. The lack of available housing in the cities forced many new arrivals to join in forming new settlements on the outskirts of

the cities.66 But Medrano's March 31, 1973, land take over in Cuernavaca was fundamentally different from other squatter struggles going on at the same time, mainly because it was launched and led with the express purpose ofcreatinga base area tor a Maoist protracted people's war. In contrast to

other squatter settlements in other parts of Mexico, the way in which the

Colonia Rubén Jaramillo was run reflected important themes of the Cultural Revolution that Medrano absorbed while in China. March of poor Cuernavacans by ANOCE an had set seven o'clock on the following Saturday, March 31, for the land take over. By nine on the 31st, only a few families had shown up, and Medrano

On

25, 1973, assembly

held

got on his motorcycle to round up the stragglers. He rode around the poor

parts of Cuernavaca, exhorting his followers to follow through on their commitmentto-the land seizure. By dawn on Sunday, more and more families were arriving, and Medrano awarded four hundred square meters to each of the first thirty families, on the condition that they build their new homes and begin living on their plot within seventy-two hours. After three

days, three hundred families had arrived and the settlement was continu ing to grow. In order to accommodate the stream of newcomers, Medrano called an assembly of the squatters to reduce plor sizes. By appealing to the

need for proletarian solidariey,Medrano overcame initial resistance from the first wave of settlers, and the assembly decided to reduce all plots to rwo

hundred square meters. Eventually, fifteen hundred plots were distributed and after

a

few months the

population reached

ten

thousand.

In order to build up the settlement's infrastructure, Medrano made collective labor mandatory. According to Elena Poniatowska's account, "Almost

everyone was enthusiastic to participate in the communal tasks. Installing

drainage pipes, raising the church, fencing in the cemetery, the sports field and the children's playground were everyone's work." When asked what materials a bridge would be built with, Medrano answered, "With the mettle we carry inside," echoing Chinese propaganda about massive develop ment projects built with little more than the will of the workers themselves.

Indeed, as Medrano put it, "I want to make the Jaramillo settlement the first

44

Transpacific Revolutionaries

people's commune of the Mexican Republic." Medrano organized Red Sun days, when idealistic youths who came from Cuernavaca and Mrxico Ciuy joined in on the collective labor, echoing the ovement ol educated youth t do peasant labor in the Chinese countryside, The hospilal was named alter Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who died serving in the Chinese com

munist Eighth Route Army and who was the subject of one of Man's lo always read" essays. Echoing the Cultural Revolution'seducaton reforms, the schools built in the settlement emphasized the need for education to he connected with productive labor.s* Student participation in the Red Sundays generated some untoreseen political complications. Many of the students were flirting with a variety of lefrist ideologies. Their presence expanded the range of political ideas in contention within the settlement (some students were partisans of the PCM, while others belonged to other militant Marxist organizations, such as the

Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party). Some ANOCE cadres complained that the students didn't do their work well and that they wanted to talk

about Marxism and other revolutionary ideas more than they wanted to work. Some cadres also felt that bringing in crowds of newcomers allowed

cover for police spies to enter the Colonia. However, Medrano felt that by facilitating political ferment within the settlement and developing its ties to outside political forces, he was creating a br0ader support base for initiating

armed struggle.69

As the settlement grew, the lesser political commitment of many latecomers caused problems for Medrano's political project. Some settlers came with the idea of trying to sell or rent their plots, having already done the same in other squatter communities. Police were also able to enter dis guised as squatters. One even got elected as a block representative to the

Colonia's assembly. After a couple months, Medrano began focusing more and more on political and military preparations for armed struggle and

paid less attention to keeping the community politicized and mobilized. Sometimes these preparations required him to leave Rubén Jaramillo for days at a time. As a result, problems such as inadequate trash renoval cumulated, and enthusiasm for collective labor and political struggle

diminished. Criminals began to use the Colonia as a base of operations, since the police couldn't enter. As Medrano's preparations for armed strug

gle advanced, he and his guerrillas began carrying arms openly, scaring many community members.0

By the end of 1973, the dangerous experiment of an armed, sell-governing area on the outskirts of a major city was too much for the Mexican government to take, and the army invaded the settlement (it did not leave until

1980). Medrano andthecore of his armed force escaped and made their way to the countryside around Tuxtepec, where Medrano had organized some

supporters. For five years, until his death in combat, Medrano and his forces

tried to adapt Mao's military and political teachings to Mexican conditions and form a base area in a border region between the states of Oaxaca and

Mexico

45

Veracruz. In 1920s China, border regions between states had been lawless

areas, and Mao Zedong took advantage of that weakness to create rela tively stable base areas along the Hunan-Jiangxi and Jjangxi-Fujian borders. While Medrano was able to use the terrain and popular support to evade

the police, he was never able to crea te a base of operations that the police or army could not penetrate.

Medrano formed mass organizations among timber workers and peasants

in the Tuxtepec region and used his armed forces in support of the demands of these organizations. Medrano criticized Mexico's Guevarist guerrillas for being disconnected from the people:

Our movement is also the result of a series of experiences like those of the compañeros Génaro Vasquez, Lucio Cabañas, and Arturo Gámiz, who oftered their lives for the sake of the people. These compañeros deserve our respect because they died for their ideals. But they also made

mistakes, and we have to learn from their mistakes. These compañeros that a Guevara be able to carry off a revolution in Mexico. That's not the way, because

believed

small unit of guerillas, Che

style, would

the guerrillas can't be disconnected from the people. A revolution has

to be made by the people-that is, directed by its best children. Thatr's why our idea is to tie ourselves to the people, so that we can teach them

the ideal of struggle. They have to know their rights and know how to defend them against oppressors and exploiters and their servants." Because of this, Medrano expressed his need to be close to the communities he was trying to organize, even though this put his life in danger." However, despite his attempt to combine involvement in popular struggles with armed

struggle, he was unable to form any sort of relatively stable base area, and his party (now renamed the Unted Proletarian Party of America [Partido Proletario Unido de América, PPUA]) was never able to pass over from being a roving guerrilla band to being a force more deeply rooted among the people of the Tuxtepec region.

Medrano's somewhat mechanical-fidelity to Mao is the hallmark of his movement. According to Ramón Pérez, a young militant in the PPUA from

Oaxaca, Medrano always had Mao's works at hand and encouraged his mili tants in their study as well.73 Drawing on the strong anti-intellectual strain in the Cultural Revolution and the tendency to se Mao's writings as applicable to any problems that could possibly arise, he constantly studied Mao's works but neglected the sort of broader study that would be necessary to truly com-

prehend the nature of Mexican society in the 1970s. When he felt threa tened intellecby intellectuals, Medrano would respond by invoking the purges of

tuals in Ch1na in order to quash opposition." He saw the bold action of the

workers and peasants on the basis of Mao's theories as all that was necessary to struggle" he would in order to make revolution, that somehow, by "daring not only "dare to win," but also would inevitably win. Medrano was guided

46 Transpacific Revolutionaries by his faith in the power of Maois1m as an ideology and in the capacity of the people to struggle when led by a Maoist political line.

CONCLUSION Travel to China was a central feature in the domestication of Maoism in

Mexico. It was in China, during the WFTU conference, that Lombardo was briefed on the early Soviet and Chinese policy of promoting the Chinese Revolution as a model for other underdeveloped countries. And his travel memoir communicates what were intended as universal lessons of

the Chinese experience for a Mexican audience. The Mexico-China Friendship Societies (SMACP) created regular channels of communication for both literature and people to flow berween China and Mexico. Reports of trips

to China and the universal, revolutionary lessons learned there were central features of the propaganda work of both the SMACPs. Florencio Medrano became a Maoist on his trip to China, where he absorbed political lessons that guided his actions from his return in 1970 to his death in 1978. His closest collaborators also had made the trip to China.

The connection to China created through the SMACPs and by other China travelers formed the basis for the creation of a counter-narrative to both dominant Mexican and (after 1956) Soviet narratives about the

Chinese Revolution. Relying on the authority of their own experiences and

utilizing the Chinese propaganda that flowed through pro-Chinese political networks, travelers to China painted a positive picture of the Chinese Revolution, both as an event in its own right and as a source ot lessons to

be applied in Mexico. As the crafters of the pro-China counter-narrative, China travelers played a disproportionate role in the creation ot new Maoist

political efforts. The authority that Chapa and Medrano derived from their travel China played a major role in their ability to craft a credible Maoist coun-

ter-narrative and lead others in developing Maoist politics. In both Ponia towska's interviews with residents of Colonia Rubén Jaramillo and Pérez's memoir of being a PPUA activist, Medranq is shown to have derived sub

stantial authority and leadership credibility from his travels. For Chapa, China travel was a central element in her activities. Much of the SMACP's propaganda work involved testimonials by Chapa and others as to what they had seen in China, and one of their main activities was to organize others to travel to China and "see the future for themselves." In drawing lessons from the Chinese Revolution, Mexican Maoists' think-

ing reflected a belief in "revolutionary asynchronicity." That is, they thought that they would almost literally reproduce aspects of the Chinese revolutionary

experience. In his portrayal of the Chinese

Revolution

as a

model tor

Mexicans, Lombardo elides the vast differences berween Mexico and China. He perceived the Chinese Revolution as offering a model for all "semi-teudal,

Mexico

47

semi-colonial" countries. Medrano sought to reproduce many aspects of the

Chinese experience. In the Colonia Rubén Jaramillo, students from the cit ies came to engage in collective labor with the resident squatters, like youth

in China who had been "sent down" to the countryside. In addition, such collective labor was perceived and described in terms taken directly from Cultural Revolution China. The schools in the Colonia were structured, like Chinese schools, around the practical needs of the poor, and combined labor with instruction. After losing the Colonia to the Mexican army, Medrano

then retreated to a border region, where he attempted to reproduce Mao's

experience in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area of the Jinggangshan. The Mexican case displays not only a broad dissemination of Maoism, but also its defcat and co-optation. Medrano never succeeded in building a

successful party or guerrilla army. Constantly on the run followthe breakup of Colonia Rubén Jaramillo, he was limited to small-scale

large and ing

engagements in support of mass organizing in a small area of the country.

Other Maoists helped found squatter settlements and get the residents legal title, electricity and water service, and then found that their mass base no longer had much interest in revolution. Confronted with this situation, leaders and their mass bases by the 1990s were backing the PRD, PT, or even

the Salinas presidency. While some of them still used Maoist language, they had been co-opted. While Maoism in Mexico in the early 1960s represented

a way of breaking with the previous history of communists helping to build the PRI's "great arch," by the 1980s most Maoists had either been crushed or swung back into the limits imposed by the state.

While many activists (such as Arturo Gámiz) adopted elements of Maoism, I have focused in this chapter on Chapa and Medrano as archetypicat Maoists. Chapa and Medrano were key figures in the promotion and praxis of Maoism in Mexico. The political trends that they led did nor just take

elements of Maoism that they found useful; they treated Maoism as an alloutlook. In this sense, they bear a strong resemblance to Latin America's most successful and well-known Maoist organization,

encompassing world

Peru's Shining Path. The question of why Chapa, Medrano and their compa

only

be answered speculatively, but it is mainly due to structural differences between Mexico and Peru. There are some intriguing parallels. The leading role of Chapa

triots'efforts neverbecame what Sendero was in Peru

can

echoes the leading roles played both by women and university professors in

Sendero. Chapa's SMACP, Medrano's PRP/ANOCEPPUA and Sendero all emerged through a process of splintering within the communist movement

set in motion by the Sino-Soviet split. Medrano's insistence on the sufficiency of Mao's work for understanding the universe brings to mind the ph1losophy

and social science-courses taught by Abimael Guzmán and Antonio Diaz Martínez at the UNSCH in Ayacucho, which used Quotations from Chair man Mao as their sole textbook. And travel to China played a key role in the

formation of archerypical Maoist organizations in both Mexico and Peru.

3 Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism The Chinese Revolution and Peru's Shining Path

it's not You see?--continued Mao-that's how to start a people's war; hard. Do you want to make war? It's a question of mak1ng up your mind -Mao speaking to two members

of the Peravian Communist Party, December 1963 led an Peru is the only Latin American country where a Maoist party insurrectionary movement on a scale that created a major and protracted

national crisis. This movement, led by the Partido Comunista del Perú (Sendero Luminoso), better known as the Shining Path, was the most significant instance of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America. This Maoist party was founded in the Peruvian highland city of Ayacucho and

initially

found its strongest support

at

Ayacucho's

Universidad Nacional de

San Cristóbal de Huamanga, where its leader, Abimael Guzmán, taught philosophy." The war launched by the Shining Path in 1980 affected the lives

of all Peruvians during its most intense years, approximately from 1985 to

1992, and

at

least

69,000 people died during the war.'

The war drew on and was fueled by poverty and social alienation which

have deep historical roots in Peru. In particular, the war was an expres-

sion of the long-standing divergence between Lima and Peru's vast Andean hinterlands. While the Shining Path spread to most of the country by the

late 1980s, it began in the 1970s as a largely localized phenomenon in the highland Ayacucho region. The Shining Path was particularly successful at connecting its Maoist ideology to the discontentment of Ayacucho's stu-

dents and intellectuals. This cohort of provincial intellectuals and students

subsequently drew on the acute poverty and underdevelopment ot the Aya

cucho countryside to mobilize the initial social base for the war which would define Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s. Both because of the scale of the war unleashed by the Shining Path and its

importance for recent Peruvian history, the Shining Path is a crucial object of investigation for any study of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in

Latin America. While the Shining Path was conditioned by Peru's particular history and social conditions, the leaders of the Shining Path were armed

Forgng

the Fourth Sword

of Marxism 49

with an ideology that they forged by interpreting the lessons of the Chinese

Revolution. As demonstrated by the quotation that began this chapter, the Communist Party of China gave aid and encouragement to Peruvian Mao ists in their preparat1ons to make revolution in Peru. As part of preparing

for revolution, manv Sendenstas spent timne in Chna, and their experience of the Cultural Revolnton was d1rectly related to their theory and practice of people's war

As the only self proclamed Maoist people's war to occur in the west ern hemisphere, the Sh1nng Path phenomenon at hrst seemed out of place, and, comng as it did in 1980 with the return to denocracy in Peru and the decisive move toward market soCialism in China, out of time as well. Steve Stern has described the Shining Path as an organization that emerged both within and against history. This phrase seems apt for encapsulating the enigmatic nature of the Shining Path. One of the early actions that Send ero carried out in 1980 involved hanging dead dogs from lamp posts, first Lima, then in Ayacucho, denouncing Deng Xiaoping and upholding the

Gang of Four, who had been overthrown in 1976 by Deng's supporters in the Chinese Communist Party. These sorts of actions seemed strange to most

Peruvians, yet they demonstrated fundamental points of reference in the mental universe that the Shining Path inhabited. The Shining Path is only really comprehensible in light of the influence that the Chinese Revolution exercised on Peru during the 1960s and 1970s. Many historians who have touched on aspects of recent Peruvian history involving the Shining Path have combined an awareness of the importance of ideology to the movement's leaders with astonishment at the actions the

organization took precisely because of its world outlook, such as the hang ing of dogs referred to above. In order to properly understand the Shining Path's motivations and actions, one has to understand the doctrinal disputes within Chinese communism in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The Shining Path's interpretations of these debates led directly to many concrete policy formulations on its part. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say

that Mao's criticisms of Peng Dehuai in the wake of the Great Leap Forward had a more direct bearing on the nature ot Shining Path peasant organizing

in Ayacucho than did the writings of Peruvian communist founding father José Carlos Mariátegui. But those Chinese debates lie far outside the realm of expertise of most historians of Peru. The influence of Chinese revolutionary politics in Peru did not come

about spontaneously or somehow by chance. The top leadership ot the Shin ng Path, and many other pro-Chinese communusts trom competing organ

zations, traveled to China and studied Maoism there. Not unlike Catholie

priests taking special classes in Rome, in China they honed their ideology

and developed a more consolidated, and more sophisticated, understanding of their mission. And they returned imbued with the authority of having studied in Beijung. Travel to China bestowed both knowledge and social

capital. On their return to Peru, they energetically championed their beliefs.

50

Transpacific Revolutionaries

And as rival Maoist organzations emerged in the 1960s, they fought polemical battles with the ferocious eal of rival inquisitors. Whar rhe Maoists forged in Peru, culminat1ing in the Shning Path's insurrection of the 1980s and 1990s, was the product ot strenuous effort. To the extent that this was accomplished seemingly against history," it is a testament to the large s«ale and

conscious

effort involved

In this chapter, I chart the hrstory of this Chinese influence in Peru. I begin wth the eftects of the Srno Soviet split on the Peruvian Communist and then examine the way in which rival Maonst groups land claim

Party

to theu authorty as bearers of the "correct political line." After looking at

the broader Chinese influence brought about in Peruvian society through the strength of the fractrous but numerous Maoist forces in the 1960s and 1970s, 1 move on to a more particular consideration of the Shining Path, undoubtedly the most important cxample of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in Lat1n America. I hope that this chapter will make clear that while China certainly aided Peruvian Maoists, agency always lay with PeruVian actors.

PERU'S REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION:

THE SOIL WHERE CHINESE IDEAS TOOK ROOT tradition that had its The Peruvians Maoists were part of a Peruvian radical the rwentieth cenfirst flowering in the wake of World War 1. At the turn of such as sugar, cotton, oil, textiles and mining had tury, Peruvian industries

created a proletariat that continued to grow with the expansion and greater circuits of capitalist producincorporation of Peruvian industry into global the growth of commerce tion and circulation. Berween 1880 and 1920,

economic as well as the political center of caused the population of Lima, the Most of the migrants who the country, to grow from 104,000 to 224,000. countryside. swelled Lima's population came irom Peru's heavily indigenous lower middle class in Lima had The growth of a proletariat and sizeable The framework of the Peruvian state was

political repercussions. or placating resttotally inadequate to the task of incorporating, co-opting that the 1895-1919 period of Peru less urban masses (iu is not tor nothing "Aristocratic Republic"). In 1918-1919, a Vian history is relerred to as the and the response to the working class movement tor an eight-hour workday that tollowed

serious

deterioration of

the face of the intlation (inadvertently brought down the Aristocratc RepubliK the 1919-1930 dictatorship) and gave birth to

iving

conditions

in

World War I both Biving ise to Augusto leguia's modern Peruvian radical tradition. As

ISna,

a st udent movement

versity relorm. The

unrest

stri1kes shook tor uniemerged to support the workers and push caused by the students and workers was brought These movenments brought Victor two successive

general

to an end by a coup led by Augusto leguia. Raúl Haya de la Jorre and José Carlos Mariätegui to prominence.

Forging In the

the Fourth Sword of

Marxism

51

following years, these two men matured into the principal leaders of the Peruvian left. Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, future founder of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) was a student leader in this 1918-1919 movement. José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Partido Socialista del Perú (which would later be renamed the Partido Comunista del Perú

[PCP]), played

an

important

role

as a

journalist and

critic

during 1918-1919. In 1919, Leguía sent Mariátegui into exile in Europe, where he

became a Marxist and founded the first Peruvian communist cell with three other Peruvians in Genoa in 1922. After his 1923 return to Perú, Mariátegui's home became the center of leftist debate and activity. Amauta, a political and cultural journal edited by Mariátegui, achieved continental fame. A central concern of Mariátegui's was the place of indigenous people in

Peruvian society. Peru had (and has) long been characterized by the diviSion berween the cosmopolitan city of Lima and the vast provinces in the

mountainslargely populated by indigenous people. Peru's 1940 census showed an Indian majority of over 75 percent in Peru's poorest departments

while nationally indigenous people were about 40 percent of the population. Mariátegui posited that indigenous identity was a central aspect of Peruvian identity, in opposition to the dominant notion that Peru's large Indian population was culturally and socially distinct from Peruviansociety and represented a problem of integration (or, for the less enlightened, just a problem). Mariátegui also defined the Indian problem as a socioeconomic

question, which could be resolved by overthrowing feudal social relations in the Peruvian countryside.

As Mariátegui summed up his position, his "new

approach locates the problem of the Indian in the land tenure system."1 Mariátegui died in 1930, only rwo years after founding the Socialist Party. As both a Marxist thinker whose originality and creativity achieved international recognition and as the founder of the communist movement Peru, the legacy of Mariátegui has been both extremely important to

and heavily contested by later generations of Peruvian communists. As we will see below, a Maoist reading of Mariátegui played an important role in how the Shining Path defined itself politically. Since he died at such a

young age (he was only thirty-five), and so soon after tounding the party undone. In many Peruvian communists felt he died with much work left

con-

ducting interviews or having discussions with Peruvian leftists in the course of my research, it was not uncommon to hear speculation about whether things might have turned out better for their movement had "José Carlos" lived longer. Mariátegui's status as a mythical founding father of Peruvian communism has meant that his ideas have often been subject to interpretation and dispute based on the rival claims of activists who feel that, were

he would a social-democrat, and so on).

Mariátegui alive today,

certainly be

a

Maoist

(or a Trotskyite,

or

Peru began to recover from the Great Depression already in 1933, earlier

than most other Latin American countries. The recovery reached full swing during World War Il, but then the economy encountered difficulties in the

52 Transpacific Revolutionaries postwar period. The PCP remained a secondary political force, conducting much of its political work through the labor union it led, the Confeder

ación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP). In 1948, pro-APRA naval officers launched a failed insurrection in Callao, which led to a powerful conservative reaction in the torm of a military government headed by Gen-

eral Manuel Odría. Inspired by Perón, Odría cnacted populist measures like increasing public works spending, but he also issued a decree suspending

habeas corpus and attempted to crush political dissent. While APRA was Odria's main target, other opposition forces, including the PCP, were also caught up in Odría's repressive net.

The repressive policies of Odría's 1948-1956 dictatorship (including censorship and arbitrary detentions) and unwillingness to hold elections galvanized a growing popular movement against him in the early 1950s, eventually forcing General Odría to call elections and leave power in 1956. The most powertul expressions of popular opposition to the Odria government were a

series of uprisings and strikes in Arequipa, a traditional bastion of opposition to the central government in Lima, where the PCP played an important role in organizing student and worker participation. Despite a temporary surge

in membership and its important role in the opposition movement, the PCP was unable to assimilate many of its new recruits into party life and failed in

its ambition to become a more significant national political actor. As Odría left power in 1956, the Sino-Soviet split began to take shape, soon resulting in the formation of a pro-China faction in the PCP.

1956-1964: CHINA'S ROLE IN THE BIRTH OF PERUVIAN MAOISM

On November 14, 1963, rwo leaders of the pro-China faction of the PCP José Sotomayor and Manuel Soria, left Peru for China to consult with the Chinese leadership on whether or not they should form a separate, proChinese party For several years, factions allied to the Chinese and Soviet positions had coexisted within the PCP. Their coexistence had been difficult

and acrimonious. The internal party dispute became public when pro-Soviet members of the PCP unsuccessfully attempted to stop the 1961 publication of Carlos De la Riva's pro-China Donde nace la aurora, which consequently

appeared with the following dedication: "To those who made my trip to the People's Republic of China possible. To those-'revolutionaries' or not

who try to make my life impossible for having taken that trip."

In the

early 1960s, the pro-Chinese faction began focusing its ettorts on organ1z-

ing peasants. In July 1962, communist lawyer Saturnino Paredes took an important step in this direction when he presided over the second national congress of the Peasant Federation of Peru (Confederación Campesina del Perú), but diverting resources to work in the countryside was opposed by the pro-Soviet faction." Unsuccessful policies exacerbated the differences.

The PCP's 1962 presidential candidate, General César Pando, received only

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism

53

1 percent of the popular vote, and many party leaders were arrested after a military coup annulled the elections in order to prevent APRA from coming

to power

Now that the Soviet Union and China had publicly parted ways,

Sotomayor and Soria wanted to consult with the Chinese Communist Party

about whether they form a new, Maoist party. The pro-Chinese faction of the PCP first emerged in the wake of a five month seminar that China hosted for Latin American communists in 1959. The official reason for the seminar was to teach the lessons of the Chinese

should

Revolution, but it was also intended to win over adherents in the dispute between China and the Soviet Union. It is unclear how many Peruvian communists attended, although at least three major leaders went: Sotomayor, De la Riva and (later leader of the pro-Soviet faction) Jorge del Prado. It is also unclear which countries were represented, although Sotomayor does make reference to a request by the Peruvians and Ecuadorians that the seminar cOver the iSsue of

minority nationalities in China. Sotomayor describes the program of study in the following words: The courses covered questions dealt with at length in the works of Mao Zedong and the works of the Chinese leaders: the united front, the peas

ant question, the mass line, the armed struggle in the Chinese Revolution, the Chinese party in conditions of clandestinity and while legalized, the struggles inside the party, Mao Zedong's philosophical thought. The

speakers made a detailed exposition of each of these topics, in rwo or more sessions, and finally gave an account of books and pamphlets which should be consulted. All, absolutely all, were works by Mao Zedong.7 In addition to the study courses, seminar participants visited major cities, factories, peoples' communes, cultural institutions and schools in order to get a more lively notion of Chinese socialism. While the Chinese instructors repeatedly said that the Chinese Revolution could not be mechanically cop ied in other countries and that the courses were for the purpose of extract

ing general lessons, Sotomayor writes, "However, the truth is that after five

months of study in Peking, they all returned certain that, on a fundamental level, the road traveled by the Chinese Revolution would have to be repeated in the countries of Latin America."18 On November 17, 1963, Sotomayor and Soria visited the Chineseembassy in Bern, where they spoke with the Chinese ambassador via a translator they had met in China in 1959. The Chinese embassy took a week preparing the rest of the Peruvians' trip, after which they continued on to China via Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Burma. This was to be the new route from Peru to China, now that travel via the Soviet Union was not an option. By the end of November, Sotomayor and Soria arrived in Beijing, where they

thepapers tor

were greeted by two Chinese cadres and a translator. One of the cadres had

been the protessor on the topic of the united front from the 1959 seminar, and they were taken to stay at the same house they had stayed at in 1959.0

$4 Transpacific Revolutionaries In the second week of November, the Peruvians met with bers of the standing committee of the politburo of the Chinese

cight

mem-

party.

Deng

Xiaoping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China and future

top leader of China after Mao's deaih, was the main speaker on behalf of

the Chinese side. Deng said that the Chinese party had been impressed by a speech that Sotomayor gave at the 1960 Moscow conference of communist

parties and agreed with the Peruvians on the need for the PCP's pro-Ch1na faction to form its own party. Next, Sotomayor and Soria met with Man

Zedong, who emphasized the importance of people's war as the strategy communists should adopt for seizing state power. The quote at the begin ning of this chapter is from Sotomayor's account of the audience with Mao. A meeting with Mao represented a special honor. By having the Peruvian

delegates meet with Mao, however briefly, the Chinese gave extra empha sis to the message that they felt the Peruvians were taking an important action and that the Chinese party supported them. After receiving nese imprimatur to create a new party, Sotomayor and Soria returned to Peru, arriving at the beginning of January 1964. Already on January 18, the Peruvian Maoists convened the Fourth National Conference of the PCP, where they cexpelled the leaders of the pro-Soviet faction and elected their new national leadership.2

The Content and Character of Peruvian Maoism at the Time of the Split Before moving on chronologically, let us examine what Peruvian Maoists understood the lessons of the Chinese Revolution to be in the early 1960s

when they launched their new party. In the early 1960s, Abimael Guzmán was only a secondary (although ascendant) figure in the PCP, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution had not happened yet (it began in 1966). Thus, by

looking at the state of Peruvian Maoism in the early 1960s, we can better understand the particular ways in which Guzmán and other Shining Path leaders further elaborated and changed Peruvian Maoism after having expe rienced and interpreted the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Carlos de la Riva's Donde nace la aurora is based on his own travels in China in 19$9 as part of the Peruvian delegation to the seminar for Latin American comnunists held by the Chinese party and gives us a sense ot

what lessons Peruvian Maoists were drawing from Chinese experience n

the early 1960s. De la Riva was a leading communist organizer, pamphle eer and painter in Arequipa, where he played an active role in tounding the Federacion Departamental de Trabajadores de Arequipa (FDTA) in 1951, as

purt of the early 1950s upheaval in Arequipa against the Odria dictatorship. Ncknamed "Carlos de la rabia" tor his quick temper, he could be a d1tti: cult cadre for the party to manage. I is indicative ot his independent spirit

that Donde nace la aurora was published in defiance of party proh1bitions against disc ussing internal divisions outside party ranks. De la Riva was an

Forging the Fourth Suword of Marxism 55 immediate opponent of Soviet de-Stalinization and Khrushchev's proposed peaceful road to socialism and played a major role in organizing the proChinese faction of the PCP22 De la Riva hoped that his book would "serve the revolutionaries of our

Peru and, referencing the book's title as a metaphor for the struggle for socialism, that "soon the dawn will break."23 Much of De la Riva's account of his time in China is purely descriptive. He discusses the places and things that he saw and the accounts of the transformation of both the economy

and people that he heard. There are several instances, however, where his account as an observer of China becomes much more didactic, and he seems to be distilling universal principles for communist actors. For example, in discussing the recruitment of workers by the Chinese Communist Party, he notes that the party recruited only "che best in terms of their personal con-

duct, their prestige, and their technical level."24 This was a timely issue for De la Riva because the PCP was having difficulty in absorbing new recruits from the movement to overthrow Odría.25 Two other particularly didactic sections of Donde nace la aurora are De

la Riva's treatment of the topics of guerrilla warfare and the united front during his recounting of the history of the Chinese Revolution. De la Riva is caretul to spell out some ot Mao's axioms of guerrilla warfare, such as

"when the enemy advances, we retreat." Further elaborating on Mao's military genius, De la Riva also details how a premature change in strategy from mobile warfare to positional warfare, which Mao had opposed, cost

the Chinese communists dearly.26 Likewise, De la Riva's historical account of the united front strategy that the Chinese communists deployed in fighting against the Japanese occupation is highlydidactic, detailing notonlythe

broad outlines of the policy but also particular problems of application such as the issue of maintaining the party's "autonomy within the united front." These discussions of particular issues involved in carrying out policy seem directed toward readers grappling with the problem of putting the ideas

De la Riva discusses into practice. De la Riva ends by drawing an explicit

parallel between China's recent history and a possible future for Peru, citing Marx's statement, "You will have to go

through 15, 20, S0-years-of-civil

wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power." This is precisely what had happened in China, De la Riva argued, and what he hoped would happen in Peru.28

PERUVIAN MAOIST FACTIONALISM AND LEADERSHIP AUTHORITY DERIVED FROM CHINA, 1964-1970 After forming the pro-Chinese Communist Party, the Maoists began suf 1ering divisions ot their own." The main trunk of the new party, the PCP Bandera Roja, splintered numerous times berween 1964 and 1970. Expelled

56 Transpacific Revolutionaries factions sometimes constituted new parties that also claimed the name of Communist Party, but became better known by the descriptive suffix (such

as Shining Path or Red Fatherland) they chose to set them apart from the other Communist Parties. From the perspective of an investigation of Chinese influence in Peru, what is most interesting about these divisions in the Peruvian Maoist movement is the way in which rival Maoist leaders invoked

the authority they had gained from studying in China and cited Chinese texts, particularly Mao's works, to support their respective positions. Com-

peting leaders invoked authority derived from having studied in China and demonstrated their mastery of Chinese texts to back their claims to have the best or most true interpretation of how to apply Maoist principles to

Peruvian realities. Attendance at a cadre training course in China in 1965 was an important event for Abimael Guzmán and gave him more prestige and authority, which helped to catapult him to party leadership, despite his youth (he had been born at the end of 1934).30 Guzmán had been seen as a promising future

leader since joining the party in 1958.3 As a rising star in a leadership field that had been narrowed by the Sino-Soviet split, study in China was the crowning event that gave Guzmán entrance to the top level of party leader ship. His trip to China was probably arranged through the Lima offices of China's Xinhua news agency, the only permanent official presence of the People's Republic of China in Peru until diplomatic recognition came in 1971. China almost certainly paid for the trip, since it paid for almost all visits by communists from the developing world for cadre training courses.

Guzmán has described his 1965 trip in the following words:

I went to a cadre school, a school that had rwo parts, the first was politi-

cal, it

started with the

study

of the international situation and ended

with Marxist philosophy, there were various courses and a second part which was military, held at a military school in Nanjing, where I studied theory and practice in a deeper way. from his earlier interview with El Diario, Guzmán related an episode 1965 training that particularly struck him, and that is illustrative of the way

In

an

in which he

saw

military and political

matters as

being interrelated:

When we were finishing the course on explosives, they told us that anyand the end of the course, we picked up a pen to0. It was a kind of it blew up, and when we took a seat it blew up, calculated examples to general fireworks display. These were perfectly out how to do show us that anything could be blown up if you figured How do you do that?" it. We constantly asked, "How do you do this? already learned They would tell us, don't worry, don't worry, you've can do, they have inexhaustible enough. Remember what the masses masses will do and will teach you ingenuity, what we've taught you the

thing can explode. So, at

Forging

the Fourth Sword

of

Marxism

/

all over again. That is what they told us. That school contributed greatly and helped me begin to gain an appreciation for to

development

my

Chairman Mao Tsetung.

Peru, Guzmán took a leave of absence from his post as a the center of the Commuphilosophy professor in Ayacucho and worked at in 1967. After nist Party organization in Lima until he visited China again Albania in April leading a party delegation to an international conference in On his

return to

1967, Guzmán made his second trip to China in August and September." This trip to China had a profound impact on him. The trip was occasioned went to China by China's decision to cut off funds to the PC, which Guzmán to inquire about." Despite the decision to stop providing a direct subsidy

to the PCP-BR, the Chinese Communists continued to foot the bill for this and future trips to China by Peruvian Maoists. This trip allowed Guzmán to witness the Cultural Revolution firsthand, which greatly impressed him.

He noted that much had changed since 1965. Where China had formerly been quiet and orderly, there were now massive marches, a resurgent cult of

personality around Mao Zedong, and the destruction of literature opposed to Mao's line.

The Cultural Revolution was at that moment, (...) things thatimpressed which we foreigners were received me, deep changes, from the manner in we had before and during the Cultural Revolution. For example, (. .) of books, I remember a an occasion to go to a cleansing (depuración) .

famous writer, Mao Tun, (.. .)

different, very deep changes, in all fields. Of in that place, I was politica! changes much greater. When I was

The marches course,

were

I was there in '65 it in the same center, with military protection. When a convent, silent; in '67...

like was'67 was deafening, at certain hours of the day, marches, (.. .). Well, attention, when I was informed that the the Central Committee was Communist Party had been dissolved, only if

another thing that caught

my

All the militants had to return-to-preve .) And that's how, infor theyhad sufficient credit to be communists. (.. of that which has been mation is another cultural action, we consist on Mao thought, for thefirst time I saw

left, as a singular organism.

. ) a n exposition

Zedong

information of that type." Revolution in above, he was a witness to the Cultural factional struggles that full swing. lt should not then be surprising that the Peruvian Maoists resembled therhetorical.battlesberween broke out As Guzmán describes among

from Mao Red Guard factions in China, with each side hurling quotations true bearers of Mao's line. Zedong at each other and claiming to be the within the Maoist One of the main points of contention that developed wartare. of building up forces for guerrilla camp concerned the proper way

58

Transpacific Revolutionaries

As a basic point of orientation, the PCP-BR had decided that "our funda

mental tasks and our principal forces should be thrown into the country. side37 with an cye to following the Chinese revolutionary model of waging a peasant-based war to surround the cities from the countryside. But despite the prior organizing experience ot general secretary Saturnino Paredes and

some other Bandera Roja activists, the party had no clear ideas about how to go about doing this, apart from expanding the organization of the com-

munist controlled Confederación Campesina del Perú. However, the link berween the work of expanding peasant syndicalism and making the leap to

revolutionary armed struggle was not particularly clear. Given that the end of all this activity was supposed to be armed struggle and revolution, the stakes of the ensuing debates were particularly high. In this context of tryout how to organize peasants not only to join a peasant union but also to wage a revolutionary war, the Peruvian Maoists looked more and more to the Chinese model for the answers that stymied them. Between 1964 and 1970, the Peruvian Maoists as a whole undertook two main tasks:

ing to figure

their efforts to organize in the countryside and their efforts to learn from the Chinese Revolution in order to answer the difficult questions raised by their efforts to organize in the countryside. Over the course of the second

half of the 1960s, just as China was emphasizing the correct understanding Peruvian of ideology for making revolution during the Cultural Revolution, learn from Maoists were more and more assiduously studying and trying to under the Chinese example and emphasizing the importance of correctly

standing the Chinese model

in order

to

make their

own

revolution.

Following his return from China, Guzmán went back to Ayacucho Those who instead ofLima. Hewas infused with a new faith and passion. the second knew him at the time still remark on how he came back from

trip to China as an even more driven and

convinced activist. Guzmán

began

to speak publicly on political and philosophical issues on a regular basis,

establishing a public visibility and influence that complimented his leading

himself

organizational position within the PCP-BR. He quickly established in Ayacucho, despite having been absent as the hegemonic force on the left for up

of the time between his 1965 and 1967 China trips.3 Guzmán built of in independent organizational base of support in Ayacucho support

most an

approach to waging peasant-based guerrilla Saturnino Paredes's gradualist approach. an

wartare

sharply opposed

to

Paredes's gradualism centered on the slow building up of peasant unions in the hope that the reformist struggles of the peasantry would someday

grow so great that the nature of their struggle would undergo a qualitative transformation and become an openly revolutionary struggle. Guzmån, on the other hand, advocated immediately putting the party apparatus on a

war tooting. According to Guzmán's plan, the PCP would have to conduct

could establish a strong base Just enough work amnong the peasantry that it of support, and then it should launch armed struggle. In the course of the

struggle, the

PCP would

gain

more

support and, having gained support

on

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism

59

the basis of

already being engaged in armed struggle, would do away with the knotty problem of transforming peasant unionism into people's war fare. Paredes and Guzmán dueled with each other using quotes from Mao Zedong. Paredes cited Mao's statement that "revolutionary war is a war of the masses, and can only be waged by mobilizing and relying on the masses." Guzmán responded with Mao's injunction to "learn warfare by waging war."" While Guzmán and Paredes's debate probably suffered in termsof clarity because of this approach, their rhetorical strategy of wielding Mao's quotations as a sacred text and using those quotations against each other served to highlight cach antagonist's claim be the true bearer of

Chinese revolutionary politics.

THE BROAD INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT IN PERU IN THE 1970S While the Maoist parties were the most concentrated expression of China's

influence in Peruvian society, China also had a more diffuse influence on Peru in the 1970s. This influence was greatest among university students, in the sociai sciences and in the union movement. The activities of Peru's Maoist parties contributed to this broad influence. Maoist teachers used works

published by China's Foreign Languages Press to influence students, profes sionals from various fields were invited to visit China as part of the solidarity activities undertaken by the Maoist parties, and the organizing efforts of the Maoist parties extended their influence into the union movement. As a result, Maoism became an increasingly legitimate politieal-option for many Peruvians. This was particularly true not only for intellectuals, but also for workers and peasants in areas with concentrations of Maoist organizers.

This increased legitimacy, in turn, benefitted the Maoist parties and helped to keep the largest ones afloat, despite their tendency toward fratricidal

disputes over differences in interpreting doctrine. The Chinese intluence in the universities was part of a general radical

ization of Peru's universities in the-late-1960s and 1970s. Young radical

professors commonly used Soviet texts from the 1930s and 1940s (edited and reissued in later decades) that were designed for systematically teaching Marxism. These Soviet texts were commonly used in Peruvian social science courses and achieved a wide distribution after the Velasco government

normalized relations with the Sovier Union in 1969,0 The common use of these Soviet manuals in Peru followed their earlier introduction in Cuba in the early 1960s, and it may well be that the attraction of these texts for

Peruvian professors depended in largepart.on the widespread use radical these manuals in Cuba."" Professors sympathetic to China not only made use of these Soviet manuals, but also introduced Chinese texts. At the Uni-

versidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH) in Ayacucho, Abimael Guzmán and the Shining Path ideologue and agronomist Antonio

wwwad

m

60 Transpac1fic Revolutionaries Diaz Martinez taught classes where the only assigned textbook was Quotations

from Chairman

Mao

Tsetung"

Numerous professors and intellectuals who did not join Maoist parties

were influenced by Ch1na. Iván Hinojosa has noted that Maoism contributed to shaping the "intellectual agenda of the period" and that "the universities were inundated with monographs and, to a lesser extent, undergraduate the ses, dedicated to peasant studies, agrarian economy, social movements, social clases, and so forth." For example, while only a small number ot protes sors actually beionged to the Sh1n1ng Path at the UNSCH, a larger number were sympathetic to social1st China. This is reflected in the large proportion

of professors from the UNSCH who traveled to China. An anthropologist

in

Ayacucho who was a student activist at the UNSCH in the 1970s estumates

that out ot approx1mately 120 professors at the UNSCH at that time about a quarter of them had traveled to China at some point. While most of the UNSCH protessors who traveled to China were not organized supporters of

Sendero, their travel to China helped to create an atmosphere on campus where Chinese ideas received legnimacy and a sympathetic hearing. Even well

respected liberals at the universiry, such as rector Efrain Morore Best (who hired Guzmán and whose imprisoned son, Osmán, became a prominent Shin ing Path leader), went to China on a cultural delegation in the late 1960s."

A noteworthy example of the Chinese influence on Peruvian social scientists was professor of education Carlos Castillo Rios. An author of multiple books on the theme of poverty and education in Peru, he also wrote a book

on the Chinese education system based on a sixty-day visit to China. Also

noteworthy are the two well-known Peruvian authors, Oswaldo Reynoso and Miguel Gutiérrez, who left Peru to work as polishers for China's For

eign Languages Press during the 1970s and 1980s, and each wrote novels inspired by their experiences living in China. That intellectuals unafiliated with any communist party traveled to, worked in and wrote about their ime in China both demonstrates and contributed to the relatively broad

egitumacy of Chinese-inspired politics in Peru in the 1970s. Outside of the academy and intellectual circles, the Chinese influence and heavily on the activity parties. By the late 1970s, the Red Fatherland party played a hegemonic more

dispersed

dependent

of the Maoist

role in the miners' and teachers' unions. Mining was the largest incomeBenerating export sector of Peru's economy, and "torcetul action by the

mineworkers caused enormous losses" in the late 1970s.* In the northern department of Cajamarca, Red Fatherland organized peasant seli detense patrols to stop crune, n etlect constituting a parallel selt government u t

side, but not directly opposed to, the Peruvian state

In the countryside

of Ayacucho, the Shining Path exercised enormous intluence by the late 1970s. Thus, in some parts of Ayacucho and Cajamarca and in some parts

of the workforce, such as among miners, Chinese ideas were quite intlu-

ential, or ar least Peruvian political parties basing themselves on Maoist doctrine were influential.

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism

61

THE SHINING PATH AT THE UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE SAN CRISTOBAL DE HUAMANGA

In 1970, Abimael Guzmán and his followers were expelled from the PCPRed Flag when Guzmán lost his factional struggle with party head Saturnino

Paredes. The new PCP-Shining Path faced a dire organizational situation. As Guzmán put it, "We separated in February '70, in '71 we had a II Plenary Session of the Central Committee in Ayacucho, there were twelve of us, twelve people, no more! And in Peru just fifty something."5 And so, in 1970, the Shining Path was born, with only handfuls of supporters spread around the country (in all departments except Madre de Dios) and a solid

core in Ayacucho based at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de

Huamanga (UNSCH)." Seemingly, Guzmán was not well-placed to rebuild the PCP, yet by 1980 Sendero was situated to launch its "people's war." Sendero was able to utilize its strong position at the UNSCH to recover from the damage caused by the 1970 split with Paredes and the PCP-Red Flag.

Abimael Guzmán was not only a charismatic and energetic leader, but he also held important administrative positions at the UNSCH which strengthened his abiliry to use the university as a recruiting and training ground. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guzmán was in charge of the Ciclo Básico, or core curriculum, and used this position to change introductory social science, biologY and philosophy courses into courses on historical materialism, the dialectics of nature and dialectical materialism respectively30 Other Senderista protessors also held important administrative positions that amplified their

ability to influence students and other professors. Antonio Díaz Martínez, a leading Senderista and an agronomist at the UNSCH, ran a rural social science and agronomy research institute funded by Switzerland and also controlled student access to housing and university food services.1 Sendero organized its student wing, the Frente Estudiantil Revoluciona

rio (Revolutionary Student Front) por el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui (FER-SL), to contest and control student government in the early 1970s. Sendero's student supporters participated in this organization, which also

collaborated on work outside the university with Sendero's-generated orga nizations such as the Movimiento de Campesinos Pobres (Poor Peasants

Movement) and the Frente de Defensa del Pueblo (People's Defense Front).? Srudents recruited by Sendero sometimes also recruited family members into the generated organizations. Serndero also formed the Centro de Tra-

bajo Intelectual Mariátegui (CTIM (Mariátegui Intellectual Work Center)), which drew in some professors for regular discussions of Mariátegui's works and issued pamphlets that interpreted Mariátegui in a Maoist light. Some

academics drawn into the.work.of.the CTIM were invited.to.visit.China and to work on translating Maoist materials there. Antonio Díaz Martínez, for

example, refined the translations for China Reconstruye from 1974-1976.3 Propaganda materials from China played an important role in Sendero's proselytizing. Pekin Informa and China Reconstruye were ubiquitous and

62

Transpacific Revolutionaries

Sendero distributed them for free in massive quantities. These magazines,

and other Chinese propaganda materials, arrived from China in Lima via the Asociación Cultural Peruana China, which served as a clearing house that made Chinese materials available to all interested newsstands, bookstores and political parties. Pekin Informa was then shipped via the fourteen-hour drive to Ayacucho, where it arrived regularly. At the end of the week, the previous week's edition of Pekin Informa would arrive in Ayacucho. Sen

dero also showed Chinese films regularly, featuring model operas from the Cultural Revolution and Mao greeting red guards in Tiananmen Square.

The well-organized and free distribution of Chinese materials filled an intel lectual gap in Ayacucho, where few people had access to a variety of news papers and printed materials with articles on world events and philosophy. The scarcity of other materials and the well-organized distribution of Pekín

Informa amplified the influence of Maoist ideas in Ayacucho." A central part of Sendero's growth in the 1970s was the recruitment of students training to become teachers. In 1963, Guzmán set up the Escuela de Aplicación Guamán Poma de Ayala, a training institute for rural teach-

ers, at the UNSCH. This normal school was an important site for Senderista recruiting within the UNSCH and was a vehicle whereby Sendero

recruits were placed as teachers in rural communities (on the state payroll). State attempts to close down the Escuela de Aplicacióón Guamán Poma de Ayala met with resistance from Sendero. Sendero's organization of rural

teachers, who in turn recruited their own students, was the key to Sendero's growth in rural Ayacucho.

In addition to utilizing Chinese materials, such as films, books and mag

azines, and arranging

for party members and

sympathetic intellectuals

to

travel to China, the Shining Path directly utilized Chinese ideas in conceiving and organizing its activities. This is clear from examining some of the Shining Path's documents, which make direct use of Mao's works and other Chinese sources, in addition to referring to Chinese experiences as examples. An intellectual history of the Shining Path or of international Maoism would

need to examine the myriad ways in which one could plausibly suggest Chi nese influences on Senderistaideas. However, for the purpose of establishing the Chinese influence on the Shining P'ath, we will restrict ourselves to citing

several representative examples where Shining Path documents (or documents written by important figures in the Shining Path) directly cite Chinese

sources or refer to Chinese experiences.

In order to implement their strategy of a peasant-based guerrilla war, the Maoists in Ayacucho had to get to know the region's countryside. To help in that work, in 1968 the party's Ayacucho Regional Committee (Comité

Regional de Ayacucho del PCP) puttegether a short handbook titled "Plan de investigación en el campo."36 The purpose of the handbook was to spur

investigative work that had been "practically abandoned37 and that would lead to "the formation of the armed forces in the countryside."38 The first

half of this booklet is comprised almost entirely of quotes from Mao Zedong

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism 63 and includes a full reprint of Mao's 1930 essay promoting the practice of on-site investigation, "Oppose Book Worship." The Mao quotes used in

this document highlight the importance of conducting investigations into social conditions for conducting revolutionary work and touch on some basic methodological principles. Some quotes touch on epistemology, such as, "The only way to know a situation is to conduct social investigation." Other quotes concern practical details: "An investigation meeting doesnt have to be large; three to five, or seven or eight people are enough."60 The shorter, second half of the handbook lists seven categories of issues that Maoist cadres were to pay attention to when conducting rural investigations, touching on historical, geographical, economic and social, political, ideological and military aspects of the location under investigation, as well

as "therole of imperialism in the countryside.

Almost all of the material

in this handbook dealing with the philosophical basis and methods of social investigation that the Maoists carried out in Ayacucho's countryside are taken directly from Mao, right down to a section with the subhead "Victory on the Chinese Comrades'

in China's Revolutionary Struggle Will Depend

Understanding of Chinese Conditions."62

As already mentioned, the Shining Path derived its name from the phrase "on the shining path of Mariátegui," which it affixed to some of its publications. When Guzmán's faction was expelled from the PCP-Red

Flag, Guzmán led Shining Path cadres in studying the works of José Carlos Mariátegui as part of the process of cohering the new party. As Guzmán

demonstrated in his 1978 talk "Let's Take Back Mariátegui and Reconstitute His Party,"* much of this "taking back" of Mariátegui was an act of interpreting Mariátegui's works in light of Mao Zedong. In " Let's Take

Back Mariátegui and Reconstitute His Party," Guzmán enumerates a number of fields of political theory and activism where he claims, "Mariáegui established the general political line of the Peruvian revolution." Guzmán gives his own synthesis of Mariátegui's writings and demonstrates how they correspond to Mao's ideas.63 For example, after quoting two paragraphs written by Mariátegui for the original political program-of the Socialist Party, Guzmán states, "Here

are condensed in a masterful way the problem of Peru's revolution and its

rwo stages: the national democratic, or bourgeois-democratic of a new type in the language of Mao Zedong, and the proletarian revolution."* After

quoting Mariátegui on the nature of communist-led armed forces, Guzmán states, "Here is the army of a new type that the revolution generates and

whichcanonly arise under the absolute control of the party, as Mao Zedong teaches."5' Later, directly addressing the issue of the convergence between the ideasof Maoand Mariátegui on so many points,

Guzmán explains,

"Participating directly in the class struggle of our country, Maritegui was able to develop as a Marxist and apply the universal principles in a creative form, thus the similarity of many of his theses with those of Mao Zedong."68

While the Shining Path made "taking back" Mariátegui a signature part of

64

its

Transpacific Revolutionaries

political project, this "taking back" involved a

deliberate rereading, if not

re-working, of Mariátegui in a Maoist light.

Antonio Díaz Martínez's book China: La revolución agraria also dem-

onstrates

Sendero's direct

borrowing

irom Maoist China. From 1974

to

1976, Diaz worked in China on the Spanish edition of China Reconstructs, a magazine published in several languages to spread the word of social China's accomplishments. He had considerable freedom to travel, and China: The Agrarian Revolution combines observations and interviews with his own description of China's revolutionary history, drawing heavily on Mao's Selected Works. Because of the approving way in which China treats ist

Chinese developments, it can be taken not only as a description of Chinese society through the eyes of a Peruvian Maoist, but also as a programmatic

statement of the PCP. As Díaz notes in his introduction, the revolutionary the laws of Marxism to our process he describes in China "creatively applies

conditions (those of a backward country)."69 At least in its broad outlines, China represents a statement not just about China, but also about what the

PCP intended to do in Peru as-well. Thus, the sections dealing with Chinese Communist policy in its rural base areas before 1949 are particu arly relevant as statements tor evaluating how the PCP intended to create and run its own base areas.70 Indeed, some of these sections have titles such as Why Isn't the Bourgeoisie Capable of Leading the Democratic Revolution in the

Backward Countries?" and "Why Is the Worker-Peasant Alliance Necessary in the New Democratic Revolution?" and use Mao's works as a basis for universal political lessons, rather than tor a discussion of China's particular

history. Díaz chose this form of exposition deliberately "not just to achieve a

better understanding of social development but also to be more didactic."71 Díaz's book also demonstrates Sendero's affinity for the policies that were prominent during China's Cultural Revolution. As discussed in Chapter 1, the Cultural Revolution was a very contentious period in Chinese politics. By repeatedly citing Zhang Chunqiao," a leading ideologue of the radical

Maoists during the Cultural Revolution and later one of the Gang of Four who were put on trial after Mao's death, Díaz signaled which stream of Chinese

revolutionary thought Sendero aligned itself with. This affinity is particularly notable in Diaz's repeated emphasis on the importance of ideology and ideological firmness in socialist construction and in human endeavor in general. For example, in discussing the construction of the Red Flag Canal in

Henan province, Diaz writes, "The work developed amidst a fierce line and class struggle inside the party: one opposed going forward with construction

by saying that it was too much effort for too little gain, the other proposed transtorming nature based on the collective force of the masses, without hoping for outsideaid and finding their-own solutions."73 Likewise, Diaz's discussion of the historical application of united front poliCies by the Chinese Communist Party echoed the relatively narrow conception of a united front advanced during the Cultural Revolution. In discussing how the communists altered their policies during the period of the Anti-Japanese

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism

6

War in order to be more inclusive, Díaz lists a series of new policies implemented by the communists in areas they controlled that he implies were only correct because of the circumstances of the Japanese invasion, such as "not economicaly eliminating the anti-imperialist middle bourgeoisie, not distrib uting the worst lands to the rich peasants" and "not physically eliminating

the landlords, not attacking intellectuals, not liquidating the tionaries, not monopolizing the organs of power with communists."74 Absent the Japanese invasion, Díaz seems to be saying that thesepolicies of lenience would have been incorrect, direccly foreshadowing Sendero's own policies in Peru's countryside. It is impossible to say whether or not the affinity Díaz expressed for the politics of the Cultural Revolution came from his being edu-

counterrevolu

cated in those politics while in China, or because he already heldsimilarviews and then gravitated to what he already agreed with, or some combination.

Regardless of the cause of his, and Sendero's, affinity for more draconian policies, the Chinese Revolution as understood through the lens of the Cultural

Revolution was held up as a model to be implemented in Peru. enaero used its preponderant position at the UNSCH, and particularly che teacher training programs of the UNSCH, as a base for extending its intluence throughout Ayacucho and Apurímac. Over the course of the 1970s,

more and more Senderista teachers were placed in the countryside, and some of their organizing efforts began to yield substantial rural support for Sendero.

These successes laid the groundwork for Sendero to absorb other revolu tionary militants in the Ayacucho/Apurímac countryside, including prominent peasant leaders such as Lino Quintanilla and Julio César Mezzich.75 Sendero was thus in a position to capitalize on gross political mistakes by the military government between 1978 and 1980 which allowed Sendero to effectively seize control of a part of the Ayacucho countryside even before declaring war against the government. One of the principle political differences between the pro-Soviet and proChina wings of the PCP in 1964 was the Maoists' insistence on armed strug-

gle as the only viable revolutionary path. Yet once Sendero Luminoso had adequately established its organizational strength in the late 1970s so that

it could begin to seriously contemplate-launching guerrilla warfare, a major

struggle broke out in the PCP-SL central committee over whether or not the conditions were appropriate for launching the people's war. Guzmán insisted on moving forward to begin armed struggle, despite the fact that Sendero

was a relatively small party with little mass support outside Ayacucho depart ment. Guzmán's opponents, core leaders of the PCP-SL who had played a major role in building the organization over the course of the 1970s, argued that Sendero had to grow larger before it could feasibly launch a people's war. Guzmán's opponents also argued that the impending end of the military dic-

be able to win mass support, while Guzmán argued that the end of the military dictatorship revealed the weakThis debate ness of the state and that Sendero should exploit that weakness. March 1980 out at central committee meetings from 1978 through

tatorship meant that Sendero would

played

not

66 Transpacific Revolutionaries

as preparations advanced for launching the people's war. By April 1980, all of Guzmán's opponents had either left the party or criticized themselves for their "rightist" position of opposing beginning the armed struggle. While

several prominent Senderista leaders iett the organization at this time, there was not a concomitant exodus of lower-level militants.76

This internal struggle, which strengthened the resolve of the remaining Senderistas, took place in the context of a developing favorable political situation in Cangallo, where Sendero would launch its people's war in May 1980. In 1978, Sendero launched a series of violent student strikes in the countryside of Ayacucho. During these strikes, students assaulted police posts. In

late November 1978, the Ayacucho Civil Guard Command ordered thewith drawal of all civil guards from four districts in eastern Cangallo in response to these strikes. Due to the imminent end of military rule, the injuries and deaths

caused by the escalating strikes, and the lack of importance that poor, rural areas held tor the central government, the military decided it would be most

prudent to simply abandon eastern Cangallo. Sendero established its control by bringing more cadres into the area and forming organizations for mobilizing and controlling the local people." At 2 a.m. on May 17, 1980, five Senderista militants, four youths led by a school teacher, began Sendero's people's war by attacking the voter registration office in nearby Chuschi and burning

the ballot boxes that had arrived for the following day's general election.78

CHINA, SENDERO AND THE PEOPLE'S WAR, 1980-1992

The expeetation-that-Sendero's Peruvian revolution would follow a similar path to the Chinese Revolution played a decisive role in Sendero's strategy. In the early 1980s, Sendero had some early success in developing its

organi-

zationin Lima, including organizing youth to throw Molotov cocktails at a neighborhood municipal building to mark the beginning of the people's war in Lima in June 1980. But, in order to more closely follow the strategy of

surrounding the city from the countryside, Sendero backed off of its initial Successes in organizing support in Lima." Sendero's overall strategy for tak ing power in Peru relied on ultimately provoking a U.S. military intervention. Mao once ironically thanked the Japanese tor invading China because that

invasion created the conditions for the growth and triumph of the Communist Party through the long years of the resistance war against Japan. Send-

ero's strategy was based on replicating that experience in Peru. The creation of rural base areas and surrounding the city from the

coun-

tryside was the strategy that Sendero decided to pursue. And thus Sendero's approach to organizing the peasantry was a key issue. Berween 1980 and 1983, Sendero expanded its influence rapidly through the Ayacucho countryside and began to expand more slowly into other parts of the country. Many peasant communities gave Sendero a relatively warm reception during

this initial

period and approved

of Sendero's

use

of armed force

to

address

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism 67 long-standing grievances of the communities. Sendero's executions of cattle

thieves and abusive local bosses sometimes won it the support of communities. This was particularly the case in communities that had not benefited

from the 1969 land reform promulgated by the reformist military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado. This included most communities in the southern highlands of Peru. Also, communities that had historically been

exploited by nearby haciendas (as opposed to communities of free-holding peasants) were more likely to initially support Sendero."0

In late 1982, the Peruvian government under president Fernando

Belaúnde Terry sent the military to Ayacucho to deal with the escalating Sendero threat. The Peruvian armed forces swept through the countryside with indiscriminate violence. Sendero's inability to protect many of the communities where it had been welcomed by a segment of the population lost it much of the support it had initially gained. At this juncture, Sendero's

narrow approach to the united front contributed to a remarkable spiral of violence in which Sendero had

difficulty interpreting flagging

peasant sup-

port as anything other than communities going over to the side of its enemy.

As peasant communities began to form self-defense patrols in opposition to Sendero, first independently and then under state sponsorship, Sendero began to treat some entire peasant communities as enemies and to wage war on them.

This was a remarkable and intamous turn of events for a revolu-

tionary force attempting to base itself mainly on peasant support. Sendero's narrow conception of friends and enemies prevented it from dealing flex-

ibly with the very difficult problem of flagging peasant support in the wake of

dirty

war.

In the

context of severe state

repression, vOICes of oPposition toSenderoemerged or gained strength in communities where Sendero had previously been welcomed. Having cultivated an approach of seeing "contradictions among the people" as "contradictions between the people and the enemy" (to use Mao's terminology), Sendero responded to these voices with violence. Sendero's violence against peasant critics was perceived as

illegitimate by peasant communities and created a spiraling effect where Sendero had

even

less support.

Effectively, Sendero's own policies

were

key

to it losing the support among the peasantry that its strategy depended on.3 it

Despite the Shining Path's ultimate failure in its revolutionary endeavor, relatively successful example of the domestication of Chinese revo-

was a

lutionary ideas in the Americas. The war that Sendero waged was a massive phenomenon, and it would be impossible to consider every potential way in which Chinese politics influenced remains to be done into various

Sendero, especially as much research regional experiences of Sendero and into

the internal life of Sendero itself. Certainly, the overall strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside was a direct and clear borrawing from China. But there were other show the continuways in which we can

clearly

ing Chinese influence on the Shining Path after the start of the people's war. During the war, the Shining Path's propaganda continued to make direct and explicit reference to Mao and the Chinese Revolution. from

Apart

68

Transpacific Revolutionaries

describe itself beginning all of the PCP-SL'3 in 1982,3 quotations and references to Mao peppered in the 1982 document major declarations during the 1980s. For example, Peruvians to join the "Letr's Develop Guerrilla Warfare," which called on Path's guerrilla struggle, Mao is directly quoted or

adopting

Shining

the

phrase

Marxist-Leninist-Maoist to

developing

referred to five times in twenty-four pages, apart from numerous reterences

In the 1985 document "Don't Vote: GenWin Power for the People," which argued that

to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.34

eralize Guerrilla Warfare to Peruvians should boycott the 1985 elections, Mao is directly quoted three

times in twelve pages.3 Following Abimael Guzmán's capture and advocacy

of a peace accord with the Peruvian government, the Shining Path faction titled "Overcome

1995 a peace accord issued a document in opposed that the Bend in the Road, Developing the People's War." The main body of this Mao and lists nine twelve-page document contains fourteen quotations from

works by Mao for further study.86 Even in internal documents used for guiding practical tasks, such as the conduct of armed struggle, the Shining Path made direct use of Chinese ideas. One example is a March 1983 Shining Path document that discusses basic practical issues concerning the armed struggle, such as bomb making and the formation of small armed squads and the coordination of tasks in those squads. This document advocates using the tactic of "tour groups and

a squad," whereby an armed squad is divided into four ditterent groups, each with different responsibilities in carrying off an attack: "shock," "fire," aid," and "escape." The document attributes this method of organizing armed groups to Lin Piao, a leading figure in Mao's Eighth Route Army The Shining Path also borrowed other practices trom China. In the Lima

shantytown where the PCP-SL tried to establish an urban base area, the Shining Path copied the Cultural Revolution practice of using wall posters (daziao in Chinese) as a medium for people to post their thoughtsandgrievances

In addition to posters glued to walls, Sendero also set up chalkboards that

Could be used in this way.3 The Shining Path also seems to have copied Chinese approaches to rehabilitating antisocial community members in Raucana,

Such as wifebeaters and alcoholics. The methods of reform through labor and i deological training sessions (enforced through coercion when those in need of reform didn't voluntarily participate) employed by the Shining Path in

Raucana are highly reminiscent of Chinese methods, although there is no direct evidence of Sendero copying Chinese practice here.

THE CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF MAOISM BY

THE SHINING PATH

While the leaders of the Shining Path drew heavily on Chinese ideas and expected their Peruvian revolution to reproduce the Chinese experience, they also adapted their ideas to Peruvian conditions. This process of domes

Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism

69

tication combined intentional adaptations of Chinese Maoism with adaptations imposed by the process of putting ideas into practice in Peruvian

conditions. In a nod to the necessity of domesticating Maoism to Peruvian conditions, the Shining Path named its ideology Marxism-Leninism-Maoism "Gonzalo Thought. " Just as "Mao Zedong Thought" was the term the Chi-

nese had used to denote their development of "Marxism with Chinese char

acteristics," the addition of "Gonzalo Thought" explicitly recognized that some particular adaptations and additions had to be made to the universal

ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in order to apply that ideology to Peruvian realities. The Shining Path's most explicit adaptation of Maoism to Peruvian condtions was the attempt to assimilate Mariátegui's work into a Maoist frame work. As I have argued above, this involved reconceptualizing Mariátegui in light of Mao, not a re-working of Mao in light of Mariátegui. But despite

the fact that the Shining Path's use of Mariátegui consisted in significant part in rebranding Maoism for a Peruvian audience, this rebranding of Maoism Maoism to conditions. an If the Shining Path's leaders did not see some need to adapt Maoism to Peruvian conditions, or at least to make their Maoism seem Peruvian, they

also involved element of domesticating

Peruvian

would not have seen a need to use Mariátegui as a way of domesticating

their Maoism. The domestication of Maoism to Peruvian conditions took place on multiple levels and on a daily basis. Because of Sendero's use of Mao's works as a guide for action, cadre at all levels of the party studied Mao and tried to guide their own revolutionary practice based on their understanding of the lessons learned from reading Mao. Whenever any Shining Path cadre made a decision about how to act in any given situation and mentally drew on

Mao's writings in order to decide on a correct way to deal with that situa-

tion, some level of creative adaptation and domestication took place. But while this type of domestication of Maoism took place literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s, the sources for what those cadre did and said are at this time very scarce, and

the Chinese-influence is.more diffuse than what I have used in this chapter. For example, when a mid-level Shining Path cadre in Puno or Ayacucho read Mao's "Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War," as many cadres did, and then articulated policies that would be carried out in her

area of responsibility based on her understanding of what she had read, she was participating a process whereby Maoism was Peruvianized. Inevitably, Shining Path cadre understood Mao's works with minds shaped by growing up and being socialized in Peruvian conditions. It seems inevitable that this Peruvian social conditioning gave rise to interpretations of Mao and Chinese revolutionary practice that would have seemed quite alien in China

itself. Unfortunately, this type of daily adaptation of Maoism is diffuse and hard to pin down in a documentary record. Ultimately, however, this everyday domestication of Maoism probably shaped the form (or torms)

70 Transpacific Revolutionaries that Peruvian Maoism took as much as the formally articulated ideology of "Gonzalo Thought" did.

CONCLUSION While the Shining Path was defeated and the war that it waged was a great tragedy for Peru as a nation, it was also the most successful transfer of Mao-

ist ideas to Latin America. It was a success because of a large and concerted

effort by the Chinese Communist Party and especially by Peruvian revolutionary intellectuals who treated Mao's works as a sacred text and built an organization based on their understanding of that sacred text. Beca use of the horrors of the civil war, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the Shining Path based itself on a set of ideas that were intended to guide Peru to a liberated future in which the sierra would no longer be dominated by the coast, Peru

no longer dominated by foreign powers, ánd women no longer dominated by men. However dogmatic and mechanical the Shining Path tended to be in its interpretation of Maoism, its success in grafting Maoism onto Peru's

political culture is evident in the way that some Peruvians continue to turn to Maoism as an answer to the perennial problems of imperialism, patriarchy and is it isn't far beneath the surface. The activities of Maoist students are read-

internal colonialism. While the Maoist trend in Peru subrerranean,

ily apparent on the campuses of San Marcos in Lima and the UNSCH in Ayacucho to this day. During multiple research trips to Peru, I have never had any dificulty in quickly finding pro-Sendero literature sold "under the counter"at various literature kiosks in Lima. Some even openly display posters of Abimael Guzmán. Armed factions of the Shining Path continue to operate in the old civil war hot spots of the Central Sierra and the Huallaga Valley. The story of Maoism in Peru is clearly not over yet.

4 Bolivia

Nationalists and

Maoists

Diverge

They came back from Moscow and they told us we had to change the name of our cell. And we asked for an explanation. We said, You guys, who go to Moscow every weckend, explain to us why we have to change our name?' They said he [Stalin) killed people. Of course he killed people! It's a

revolution!

-Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007. Echazú, a former member of the pro-China "Stalin Cell" of the Communist Party of Bolivia, is explaining how he found

out about de-Stalinization when party leaders returnedto Bolivia from the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956.

Bolivian interest in China was heavily influenced by the events set in motion by Bolivia's 1952 revolution, in which miners and peasants joined with the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario [MNR)) to overthrow the old regime in a brief insurrection. Despite these revolutionary circumstances, which might seem to indicate that Bolivia

would be fertile ground for Maoism, our Bolivian case study is something of a counterpoint to Peru. While there were substantial numbers of Boliv

ians interested in China, including some who interpreted their experiences visitors to China as political lessons for Bolivia, no significant Maoist insurgency ever emerged. Interestin China surged after the 1952 revolu-

tion led by the MNR and included a broad political spectrum, including the left-wing of the MNR, the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) and a social democratic party, the Party of the Revolutionary Lett (PIR). As in Peru, a Maoist party was formed in the 1960s which cultivated close ties with the Chinese Communist Party, with leaders frequently traveling to China for training and consultation. Yet ultimately, there was no transference of Mao ISt ideology on a scale similar to that in Peru. Given Bolivia's revolutionary tradition and the early interest of some MNR leftists in the Chinese Revolution, it might seem that Bolivia would be a more likely site for Maoist revolution than Peru. However,

repressive

military dictatorships continually dispersed Bolivia's left during the 1960s

72

Transpacific Revolutionaries

and 1970s, and the early pro-Chinese sympathizers of the MNR never made common cause with the Bolivian Maoist party. Chinese ideas remained rela-

tively confined to a persecuted minority. In contrast, Peru's reformist mili tolerated the broad circulation of Maoist tary government of 1968-1980

propaganda and widespread use of communist political materials as pedathe relatively small gogical tools, lending legitimacy to those ideas. Despite

size of the Peruvian Shining Path in 1980, it took advantage of a less repressive political context to deploy ideas that had been widely propagated and legitimized during the 1970s. The Bolivian Maoists lacked those advantages and were unable to detonate the explosive force of Bolivia's vast socioeco nomic disparities.

The attempts by part of the left-wing of the MNR to draw lessons from China's industrialization and agrarian reform shed new light on the political currents that were contending in the MNR's ruling coalition between 1952 and 1964. After the radical phase of the Bolivian Revolution ended around exercise greater and greater economic and political influence in Bolwia, left-wing forces in the MNR's ruling coalition looked to the policies pursued by China as an alternative to deepening economic dependency. These leftist MNRistas were deeply troubled by the

1955, and the United States

came to

failure of the Bolivian Revolution to achieve economic independence for Bolivia and hoped that China offered a nationalist development path suited

to Third World countries. While these pro-China forces were thwarted, first by other political currents within the MNR and en by the end of the MNR's government in 1964, they formed a significant segment of the MNR's coalition and had to be addressed by leaders such as president Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Not long after the fall of the MNR, a Maoist party was formed in Bolivia by communists with no links to the earlier pro-Chinese politicians in the

MNR. The Bolivian Maoist party, known as the Communist Pary of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist), cultivated close ties with China and sent numerous party members to China for training and to work on Maoist propaganda projects in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. The Bolivian Maoists had a mass base of support among miners in the Andean highlands but attempted to launch a "people's war" in the sparsely populated area of northern Santa Cruz depart

ment to the east. The armed uprising was quickly crushed, and the Bolivian Maoist project faded. Despite some striking similarities to the Shining Path, the Bolivian Maoists had not met with the success of their Peruvian comrades.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: FROM THE CHACO

WAR TO THE 1952 REVOLUTION The origins of both the MNR and the Communist Party date to the aftermath

of the Chaco War. In the early 1930s, the government of president Daniel Salamanca (1931-1934) launched a military campaign of exploration and

Bolivia 73 occupation of the underpopulated region of the Bolivian Chaco, partially to divert attention from the ills caused by the Great Depression. Bolivia's population at the time was overwhelmingly concentrated in the country's western highlands, with much of the eastern, lowland part of the country

sparsely inhabited. In June 1932, this military expedition occupied an aban-

doned Paraguayan fort inside the borders of Paraguay, sparking a three-year war that ravaged the populations of both countries. By the time peace was

secured in 1935, Bolivia had lost over 65,000 troops and most of the Chaco Boreal (about twenty thousand square miles). As Bolivia had a population of only two millionat the time, the loss of 65,000 troops (due more to hungers,

dehydration and disease than to actual fighting) was proportionate to the losses European countries had suffered during World War I. Overwhelmingly, the troops at the front were indigenous Bolivians who were coerced

into fighting. The social impact of the war was tremendous. Many highland

Indian villages were left devoid of men, and haciendas took advantage of the situation by stealing the lands ot Indian communities. With such heavy

dislocations in the Bolivian countryside as a result of the war, many ans resettled in the cities after the war, with Bolivian cities such as La Paz experiencing at least 30 percent population growth in the wake of the war The massive and seemingly senseless loss of territory and human life during the Chaco War called into question the nature of Bolivian sociery for many

and Cochabamba

Bolivians. Two major parties calling for a radical reorganization of Bolivian

society formed in the aftermath of the war: the MNR and the PIR.°While the PIR became a social-democratic party after the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) was founded in 1950 (with many activists leaving the PIR for the new PCB), at its founding it functioned as a pro-Soviet communist party. As with

the APRA and PCP in 1930s Peru, the MNR opposed the Bolivian oligarchy

from a nationalist viewpoint while the PIR deployed a class-based ideology. The MNR and the PIR would join together in attacking the rosca (as the tin oligarchy was known) and imperialism, but diverged sharply on other issues.

The MNR was particularly influenced by European fascism and called for a Bolivia governed by Bolivians" while denouncing the "imperialist-jews of Wall Street." Initially, the MNR tound its social base mainly among the

urban middle classes, which supported its cals for economic independence from the foreign countries that Bolivia depended on as a market for its tin. The PIR described Bolivia's predicament in MarxiSt language, emphasizing the division of Bolivia into antagonistic classes and the semicolonial nature

of the Bolivian economy. The PIR attempted to base itself on the working class, and it gained support among miners, particularly in the southern highland mining centers of Oruro, Potosí and Catavi/Siglo XX. The PIR was also leaders. strong in Cochabamba, the home of its rwo main

relatively

The decimation of indigenous men in the Chaco War was a sudden and cat-

Bolivia. Rural

astrophic event that highlighted the tremendous ethnic polarization of At the time of the Chaco War, Bolivia was over 60 percent indigenous.

74

Transpacific Revolutionaries

indigenous communities were divided between free villages and communities of colonos, laborers who resided on haciendas. Colonos were bought and sold as part of the property they resided on and were customarily expected to per-

form labor for free, including domestic chores. Free villages were constantly under pressure from surrounding haciendas, which grew at the expense of

village land. The nineteenth century had seen a great diminishing of village lands, and the absence of so many village men in the Chaco War provided a

renewed opportunity for massive land grabs." Many indigenous miners came from the ranks of the newly landless. While mining had been central to the Bolivian economy for centuries, in the 1940s and 1950s Bolivia was dependent on tin exports as its only secure tax base and source of foreign exchange. The importance oftin tor Bolivia's economy created structural conditions for narrow oligarchic rule, since only

three families controlled 80 percent of the tin industry. The extreme nar rowness of this oligarchy excluded the vast majority of Bolivians from any meaningful participation in the country's political life. This was an impor tant factor in bringing the urbaT middle classes, miners and indigenous peas-

ants together in the coalition led by the MNR which carried out the 1952 revolution. Bolivia's tin miners organized into an industry-wide union only in the 1940s. In 1942, a strike at Catavi was crushed when the government mas-

sacred thirty-five miners. The PIR was the party most closely associated with the striking miners, and many of its leaders were jailed as part of the

repressive wave unleashed by the government. But it was the MNR

that suc

cessfully seized on the massacre to attack the government from its position

im congress.TheMNR's stance helped it to win the support of the newly formed tin workers' union, the Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB). The miners' union would play a key role in helping the MNR come to power in 1952. Bolivians in the Despite the impetus that the decimation of indigenous

Chaco War gave to the formation of the MNR, and the fact that the miners

supported by the MNR were largely indigenous, the MNR itself was mainly ranks. In composed of mestizo and white Bolivians, especially in its leading 1943, the MNR allied with a coup led by the populist colonel Gualberto Villarroel. The Villarroel government deployed a form of nationalist popu lism not unlike that of Perón in Argentina. The Villarroel regime recognized workers' rights and facilitated the ftormation and expansion ot the FSIMB

and the cross-industry Bolivian Workers' Union (Central Obrera Boliviana, a COB), in which the FSTMB played the dominant role. It also sponsored

congress on indigenous rights. At the same time, the government engaged in anti-Semitie rhetoric,

and

its international sympathies lay with the European Axis powers. Villarroel's

in 1946 a popular uprising by a multiclass mob, which united residents of La Paz who had been alienated by his

policies were highly polarizing, and

policies (including workers and market women as well

as

the upper classes)

Bolivia 75 with the political parties opposed to the president, lynched him and overthrew the government. Although Villarroel was polarizing and semi-fascist, many workers saw him as a champion of their class. PIR militants took an active part in the lynching of Villarroel, and this action discredited the party,

ultimately leading to the exodus of many members in 1950 to found the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB). The new party with a new name, absent the

most

prominent old leaders of the PIR, was free of the taint of the 1946

lynching. In contrast, the MNR's association with the Villarroel government set the stage for its comeback with the 1952 revolution. The MNR won Bolivia's elections in 1951, but when these elections were annulled by the military, the MNR began to prepare an insurrection. The

1952 revolution lasted only three days. On April 8, MNR party members, worker supporters and a two thousand-strong contingent of the national police took over La Paz. The military counterattacked, and it briefly looked

like the MNR would suffer defeat as it had in a previous insurrectionary attempt in 1949. However, armed miners came to the aid of the revolution

joining with the MNR's forces to defeat the army in La Paz, Oruro and

Cochabamba. The clashes left about six hundred dead in La Paz, where the fighting was fiercest. On April 11, the army formally surrendered. By 1952, the MNR had shed some of its more fascist elements and resembled a left party. When MNR leader Víctor Paz Estenssoro returned to La Paz from exile on April 15 and some of his supporters shouted "down with the Jews," he responded, "There are no racial distinctions in this revolution."10

Within eighteen months of coming to power, the MNR had nationalized the mines, carried out agrarian reform and instituted universal suffrage. But while the MNR had transformed itself into a broad party with a

signiticant

left-wing, there were substantial obstacles to carrying the reforms further.

On the one hand, the leadership of the MNR had not committed itself to the

deep structural transformations of Bolivian society that many miners and left-wing MNRistas desired. But even if they had wanted to deepen their revolution, there were massive economic impediments. In the mid-1950s,

Bolivia entered a major economic crisis. Food prices skyrocketed, and the government was forced to implement ratiOning of-basie- goods. The MNR

government turned to the United States and the IMF for aid. Under forevgn pressure, the MNR set up a Stabilization Commission in 19S6 which

put a U.S. citizen in charge of the Bolivian economy and left him solely

accountable to the United States. The Bolivian economic crisis had reached such a depth that in 1957 the United States directly provided 32 percent

of the Bolivian government's revenue.

Within only a few years of com-

ing to power, economic circumstances had led a "revolutionary national

ist party to deliver the Bolivian economy into a protectorship under the United States. Whether or not the leaders of the MNR intended to carry out further retorms, and there is no evidence that they did, no retorms would

be possible without losing the afloat during the crisis. The left, now

foreign support that kept the economy consisting of trade unionists, communists,

76 Transpacific Revolutionaries Trotskyites and the left-wing section of the MNR, wanted the government to

pursue further reforms and take Bolivia down the path of socialist development. Thus, the leftists moved trom working with and supporting the MNR to a stance of opposition.

LOOKING TO CHINA AFTER 1952 In his book on the thirty years of Bolivian history following the 1952 revolution, Rebellion in the Veins, the historian James Dunkerley makes the observation that an interesting feature of the MNR left was its "orientation towards the Chinese example of national liberation." After citing an instance in which president Víctor Paz Estenssoro legitimized the MNR's policy of not nationalizing the entire economy and its efforts to seek foreign investment by invoking Mao Zedong's support tor some private enterprise in China in the early 1950s, Dunkerley moves on to other matters. Paz

was a founder of the anticommanist MNR, yet the influence of the Chinese Revolution on the left-wing of the party forced him to deal with Mao's ideas and even to use them to bolster himselt against criticisms irom nis

left. His citation of Mao Zedong, and the general "orientation towards the Chinese example" of the MNR's left-wing more generally, is revealing in that it shows how the Chinese Revolution had become part of the MNR's

frame of reference. The MNR-sponsored Central Obrera Boliviana's 1954 program and statutes directly refer to the "great resonance" of Mao's vic-

tory and the importance of the Chinese experience of "agrarian reform, the nationalization of the main sources of production and the development and diversification of Two leading members of the MNR's left traveled to China in 1959 and

theeconomy.

1960 and wrote accounts of their travels that implicitly criticized the MNR's failure to achieve economic independence and the stagnation of its modernizing efforts, and held up the Chinese process of industrialization and land reform as a model for getting the Bolivian revolutionary process back - on track. The two MNR members were Mario Torres Catleja, the general secretary of the FSTMB for many years, and Germán Quiroga Galdo, a diplomat and president of the Bolivian congress's Chamber of Deputies in the late 1950s. Their accounts of going to China demonstrate the ways in which Bolivians oriented "towards the Chinese example of national liberation" thought about the meaning of the Chinese revolution for Bolivia. Like

Mexico's Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Quiroga and Torres were mainly interested in China's example as a Third World country that seemed to be having great success in industrializing and-improving the welfare of-the population by increasing life expectancy and promoting education. They thought that certain structural similarities berween Bolivia and China, such as being countries with large rural populations, made China's moderniza-

tion efforts particularly relevant for Bolivia.

Bolivia

77

Mario Torres Calleja visited China for a month in July and August of 1960. He was invited to visit by Chinese unions in his capaciry as the general secretary of the FSTMB, Bolivia's largest and most powerful union. While in China, Torres visited China's major cities and toured a wide variety of industrial and agricultural establishments, where he met with union leaders, industrial managers and administrators. Toward the end of his visit, he also

had a private audience with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Although only in China for a month, he saw many different parts of the country, and he remarked that "the skill that the Chinese have achieved in organizing time is incredible. The visitors that travel to this new world of energy ha ve the days of their stay planned down to the second."5 In contrast to Torres, Germán Quiroga Galdo came from Bolivia's small elite class. He lived for years in Europe and the United States, and his travelogue often compares China to the many other places this cosmopolitan

Bolivian had visited. Quiroga served as Bolivia's ambassador to the United Nations for four years at the beginning of the MNR's rule, under the Paz Estenssoro presidency. As an experienced diplomat with revolutionary nationalist sentiments who had attended the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African states at Sukarno's invitation, it is not surprising that the Chinese sought Quiroga out and invited him to visit China. In 1959,

he accepted the invitation and toured the country, visiting the major cit-

ies and also some rural people's communes. Quiroga shared with Torres a sense that Chinese economic development could serve as a lesson for Bolivia because the Chinese socialist experiment was "carried out in a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, characteristics that precisely distinguish the Latin American peoples."16 Torres's main observations and concerns during his China trip revolved

around China's economic progress, which astounded him. At certain parts of his book, he lists page after page offigures that demonstrate the growth of

Chinese production of a range of products, including steel, iron, coal, electricity, paper, sugar, cotton and much more. Torres commented that China's

statistics aren't frozen numbers: they have an incredible-mobility-and-

the data changes from day to day. Everything is perpetually developing and growing. The new relations are produced, engendered by the lib eration of the productive forces and the creation of new instruments of labor, which are determining factors for raising the indices of extractive and industrial

production

to

fantastic

proportions."

Torres's visit in 1960 came at the tail end of the Great Leap Forward, so many of the production statistics he saw probably were in fact too fantastic to be real. But he was struck by the incredible productive power of the newly formed people's communes that he visited. He noted that "in the course of the trip I could observe the impressive movement of great concentrations of peasants devoted to feverish labor: the People's Communes. This was

78

Transpacific Revolutionaries

my first vision of that human ocean that, swollen with the uncontainable

forces of labor, daily conquers the great power of transforming the world and life." In paricular, Torres admired the "order, discipline and work" of the communes.

Quiroga was similarly impressed by Chinese economic advances since the 1949 revolution, although he situated the developments more explicitly in terms of China's breaking out of economic dependence by recounting the subordination of China to imperialism following the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century. Although Quiroga declared himself an anticommunist, he went on to write that he would have to be blind not to see the magnitude of China's accomplishments." He described China as a great anthill, where everyone was organized for "quantity, speed and economy." Quiroga then situated the Chinese agrarian reform as the central factor in the transformation of semifeudal and semicolonial countries." While Quiroga discussed the

Chinese economy and agrarian reform specifically, his generalizations about semifeudal and semicolonial countries clearly drew the reader's attention to the relevance of the Chinese experience to Bolivia and invited comparisons to the Bolivian land reform process initiated by the MNR government. At one

point, Quiroga openly criticized the incumbent Hernán Siles (1956-1960) presidency for backing off the revolutionary commitments of the Paz government, thus using the Chinese experience as a demonstration of the direction

that he thought Bolivian economic and social policy should have been going in. Indeed, while often avoiding a direct discussion of how Chinese policies might be transplanted to Bolivia, he made a striking statement about their universality when he stated, "It is in China, much more than in the Soviet Union, where the battle is being waged that will resolve the controversy over

the socioeconomic forms that will prevail in the future" and "the conclusions that China comes to will merit the adherence of the majority of the human

race."22 Quiroga further highlighted the relevance of Chinese policies for Bolivia by remarking on the similarities of both countries as countries with

large minority nationality populations and remarked on the similarities he perceived between China's minority nationalities and Andean Quechua and

Aymara speakers.23 Quiroga made passing mention of the large number of Latin Americans

he saw in Beijing. He remarked particularly on the many Peruvians, Colombians and Uruguayans he saw and described most of them as parliamentar ians." His discussion of Chinese interest in Latin America was brief and mainly centered on the Chinese desire for Latin American support in its efforts to replace Taiwan in the United Nations. He met with Zhu De, a top Chinese leader, twice and discussed Bolivia and China's status at the United Nations with him." Quiroga felt that-the Ehinese communists overesti mated the anticolonial sentiments of Latin American leaders and th China would not encounter the sort of Third World solidarity that it hoped for in its efforts to join the United Nations. Quiroga also noted the popularity of Fidel Castro in China during his visit and the attention that the Chinese were

Bolivia 79

paying the social

movement

in

Panama

to

Canal Zone.26

gain sovereignty

over

the Panama

Toward the end of his visit, Torres attended a reception held by Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu for

Shaoqi

various

delegations

from Latin

America, Africa and Asia. A delegation of Bolivian congressmen that came separately from Torres was also present. Because of his status as a leader of the Bolivian workers' movement and as a high-ranking MNR Torres

was

granted a private reception by

official,

Mao and Zhou. At this audience, Tor res discussed the Bolivian revolution with his Chinese interlocutors, and Mao and Zhou expressed a desire for diplomatic and commercial relations with Bolivia. The presence of both Torres and a Bolivian congressional

delegation in China in 1960 are remarkable given that Bolivia had no

formal diplomatic relationship with China. The left-wing of the MNR undoubtedly would have preferred to recognize the People's Republic of China diplomatically at this time. But diplomatic recognition did not come until 1985 because of opposition first by the United States and later by the Bolivian military, which held power for much of the time between 1964 and 1985. The lesson that China's development path offered a model, or at least a point of reference, for revolutionary Bolivia is implicit throughout both

books and is made more than implicit on a few occasions. At one point,

lorres reterred to the genetic and psychological similarities of Bolivians and Chinese people, deriving from the ancient Asian migrations that populated the Americas,28 The author of the preface to Torres's book made the point that Torres "takes something that serves his people, his clas, his struggle" from his trip to China. And Torres made clear that, while China's experi ence cannot be copied in Bolivia, its experience should serve as a point of

reference for the "most advanced sector of the MNR."30 The example of China as a critical counterpoint to the course of the Boliv

ian revolution becomes clear in light of an elucidation of the same points by Ricardo Anaya, a leftist member of the opposition. Anaya visited China in 1959 in his capacity as a leading member of the PIR and as an economics professor at Cochabamba's-Universidad-Mayor de San Simón. Although in the 1940s the PIR had functioned as Bolivia's communist party, the for mation of the PCB in 1950 left the PIR with reduced numbers. The PIR remained influential among intellectuals, however, because of the promi

nence of Anaya and other intellectuals still aligned with the party. In 1961, Anaya delivered a talk at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón on China's reform and the people's communes that he had witnessed during

his trip to China. The talk was then published in the university's Revista de la facultad de ciencias económicas.3 The textof his talk is preceded by an article by Charles Bettelheim, a French professor of economics and prominent international organizer of Chinese solidarity activities. Despite Anaya's position as an opposition figure, his observations on the Chinese agrarian reform were remarkably similar to those of Torres and

80

Transpacific Revolutionaries

the Chinese land reform revolution's triumph in 1949 and the unfoldover the decade berween the 1959 visit. Anaya represented ing of the Great Leap Forward during his unaware this decade of agrarian reform as step-by-step advance, apparently of the great economic dislocations and famine wrought by the Great Leap

Quiroga. Anaya highlighted the different stages of

Forward. Anaya went on at some length about the financing and organizawhat he saw tion of the people's communes and concluded by summing up communes and China's agrarian reform as the defining characteristics of the in general.

The only significant difference berween Anaya's treatment of the Chinese

of Torres and Quiroga is that Anaya It explicitly used the Chinese-successes to criticize the Bolivian government. is worth quoting Anaya:

agrarian retorms and the

accounts

It is obvious to say that this study of China's agrarian reform has been made by a Bolivian in order to extract lessons for the agrarian reform process in our own countryr Its polemical tone has as an object to highlight the contrasts between a reform, like the Chinese, which marches forward, and a reform that goes backward, like the Bolivian. The con-

clusions of this study have the objective of proposing directions for reorienting Bolivia's agrarian retorm, which at the present moment has

lost the notion of its objectives and methods.32

Jesús Lara: An Instance of Communist Orientalism Jesús Lara, a prominent poet who often wrote in Quechua and also a central committee member of the Communist Party, visited China at more or less the same time as Quiroga, Torres and Anaya, but he wrote a markedly

different account of his trip. He visited China in 1959 and traveled around

China with delegations from various Latin American countries. Although he didn't specify the nature of his visit, it seems likely that his trip coincided with the 1959 cadre training school that China held for Latin American communists (discussed in Chapter 1). It may well be that he explored China with the Peruvian communist painter Carlos de la Riva. Jesús Lara's trip to China inspired a book of poetry that differed in content as well as form from the previous three works we have examined. While Torres, Quiroga and Anaya were all principally concerned with China as an exemplary anti

imperialist development model for Bolivia, Lara reminds us of that China was an exotic place even for many progressive Bolivians. In contrast to the travel narratives that Lara wrote about his trips to

Hun-

gary and the Soviet Union, he chose to write about China in the form of a

book titled Lotus Flower: Message of Love to the Chinese Woman.33 In this book, Lara mixed homage to the heroism of the Chinese Revolution with frank appreciation for Chinese women, who held an exotic fascination for

Bolivia

81

him. Lotus Flower consisted of a series of romantic poems addressed to an anonymous Chinese woman. There are verses such as the following: Perhaps you came to me in that

Woman of the People's Commune Who in the warm sound of her kettledrum

Overwhelmed my heart With her emotional welcome And sang her present well-being

And her solid faith in her future And proclaimed that the droughts And the floods Were bad memories of the past.34

And additionally: Happy little worker Owner of her machine and more owner Of her future and her life Has her heart in that, the People's Republic,3

In the above, the anonymous Chinese woman that Lara addressed the poems to seems to embody the accomplishments and promise of the Chinese revolution. In other passages, Lara expressed an attraction to Chinese women less inflected with revolutionary enthusiasm: Perhaps I found you in that girl

On that enjoyable night in Wuhan Who danced so much with me And sliding between my arms Was like a handful of lilies.3

Lara's bookpfpoetryservesasa reminder ofthe eultural distance between China and Bolivia and the ways in which even Bolivians who admired the Chinese revolution may have found it hard to conceprualize China as any thing but an exotic or romantic other. Lara's frank orientalism raises the issue

of orientalism in the writings of the other Bolivian travelers to China at this

time. While Torres, Quiroga and Anaya all focused on issues of economic modernization, Lara's book reminds us that in invoking their own authority as travelers to China and witnesses to Chinese economic progress, Torres, Quiroga and Anaya were writing about a soCiety that was very "other

to

Bolivians in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thus the meaning to be derived

from Chinese economic development by Bolivian travelers during this period may have been particularly malleable to the political ends that Boliviantrav

elers wanted to drive home with the use of their newly acquired authority.

82 Transpacific Revolutionaries

The Bolivian Use of the Chinese Revolution in the 1950s and Early 1960s Regardless of whether their travel narratives accurately depicted the reality

of Chinese society and economics in the late 1950s and carly 1960s, the positions taken by Torres, Quiroga and Anaya, examined above show how

some Bolivians made use of the Chinese Revolution to criticize Bolivia's continuing economic dependence and the limited nature of the MNR'3 land reform. Members of the MNR left-wing made these criticisms implicitly, and

the PIR, explicitly. But for both the PIR and the MNR left-wing, the Chinese Revolution represented the promise that a more thorough land reform might serve as the basis for industrialization and modernization free from the restraints placed on Bolivia by dependence on U.S. loans and markets.

To return to Víctor Paz Estenssoro's reference to Chinese policy discussed earlier, we can see that when Paz Estenssoro made uncharacteristic refer-

ences to Mao and the Chinese development model, he was addressing critics

within the MNR and outside his party who upheld the Chinese Revolution as an alternative economic model for Bolivia. Both the early references to

China in the 1954 COB program and statutes and the fact that Paz felt the need to directly invoke China against his critics suggest that the positions taken

by Torres, Quiroga

and

Anaya

were not

political

outliers but rather

(by important politicians) of a line of thinking what development model as a potential alternative to

Significant representations

the Chinese reforms. they saw as the shortcomings of the MNR's Bolivian Revolution In retrospect, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the of 1952 seem worlds apart. While both revolutions ushered in significant that

saw

social reforms, the Chinese Revolution began a process of socialistconstruc on a much larger scale tion that involved a much broader array ot changes, and that included periods of tumultuous utopian China's

size), (by virtue of mobilization nothing like what ocurred in Bolivia. Howupheaval and mass in the 1950s and

ever,

interest that Bolivian sinophiles showed in China Chinese 1960s, and the relevance that they thought the

the

early Bolivia, show that politicians In

at

saw more

the time in

a

common

of Bolivian intellectuals and than ditferent between China and Bolivia.

significant

set

particular, they hoped the Bolivian revolutionary

onto a course

similar

to

model held for

that followed

process could be diverted

by the Chinese Revolution.

A TRANSITION IN THE CHINESE REVOLUTION'S

INFLUENCE IN BOLIVIA and U.S. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, economic crisis to takeprotector

MNR government ship of the Bolivian economy forced the

austerity

the MNR's that alienated the party leadership from key sectors of that had social base, such as miners and part of the urban middle class, measures

Bolivia

83

brought the party to power and given the regime legitimacy. The state-run mining corporation, Comibol, was reorganized so as to explicitly sacrifice the welfare of the workers to the "development of the National Revolution." But despite the MNR leadership's argument that "with the National Revolution the traditional worker-employer relation disappeared,

the

miners were unwilling to quietly accept the imposition of prerevolutionary

working conditions. The miners called a series of strikes, and by 1964 the MNR had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of much of its former social base and seemed to have lost its ability to keep order. The military had never been enthusiastic about the MNR, and in November 1964 General René Barrientos overthrew the government. In the new context of military dictatorship, the argument that Bolivia

could peacefully break out of its dependence on U.S. economic support by deepening its agrarian reform and setting out on a path of industrialization according to the Chinese model became untenable. Not only had the MNR attacked the social base of its left-wing, but also a military regime that

would repress socialists and left-wing nationalists came to power. The idea of changing government policy peacefully to a socialist model thus became moot. However, as in Peru and Mexico, there were some communists who

continued to view China as a model for carrying out an armed revolution in a Third World country. We now turn to those communists.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BOLIVIA (MARXIST-LENINIST) During the period between the Twentieth Congress of the Communist.Party

of the Soviet Union in 1956 and the open rupture berween the Chinese and Soviet parties in 1963, a faction formed within the Communist Party of

Bolivia (PCB)that aligned itself with China's criticisms of the Soviet Union. This faction formed the Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist) PCB ML)] in April 1965 at a congress held in Catavi/Siglo XX, a mining area with a reputation for militancy. Opposition to the policies of the PCB's leading triumvirate of Mario Monje, Jorge Kolle Cueto and Simon

Reyes had been brewing for some time. The PCB(ML) brought together party activists who criticized the PCB about a variety of issues. Federico Escóbar Zapata, a communist leader of the miners' union at Siglo XX, was the PCB(ML)'s first general secretary. Escóbar had held the post of control obrero, elected worker representative to management of the state-run Comibol mining company, at the Siglo XX mine. In this position, Escóbar was able to influence the hiring of miners, favoring members of the communist party. The leaders of the PCB had used the strength of the party's influence among miners to negotiate behind closed doors with the MNR govern-

ment, in the process compromising the demands of the PCB's base. Escóbar saw

these

negotiations, conducted without consulting with the miners, as a

betrayal of the miners' struggle.38

84

Transpacific Revolutionaries Although Escóbar had spent about a month in China and had visited

Cuba around 1960," his main concerns revolved around the struggles of

Bolivia's miners.0 However, an influential set of the PCB{ML)'s cadre were activists who were very concerned with international communist politics

and ideology. These activists came from several backgrounds. Presumably, most were young urban intellectuals, such as the party's Stalin Cell from La Paz.41 Others had experience, considerable experience in some cases, in the

world of international communist politics. Diva Arratia, a red diaper baby whose tather had been a congressional depury for the PIR, led Bolivia's

delegation to the 1953 World Youth Festival in Bucharest when she was twenty-one2 As the leader of Bolivia's delegation, she was invited to visit China,the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. She attended a world peace conference and met Pablo Neruda and Cuban communist poet Nico-

lás Guillén. After spending most of 1953 and much of 1954 in the socialist bloc, she returned to Bolivia and gave a speaking tour about lite in the

socialist countries. A highlight of the tour involved being denounced by a priest in Potosí during a radio broadcast of the Holy Week mass.

Bolivian students who were studying in Havana and Moscow and who had been in contact with Chinese party members also decided to side with the Chinese. Victor Reinaga, a founding politburo member of the PCB(ML),

estimates that about a dozen Bolivian students in Havana and more in Mos cow sided with the PCB(ML). The students in Havana were initially detained and then deported to Bolivia via France, since Bolivia had broken off relations with Cuba." One student leader, Oscar Zamora Medinacelli, was

named second secretary of the PCB{ML) at the founding congress. Zamora had extensive experience with the international relations of the communist parties. Zamora initially rose to prominence as a communist student leader

in Tarija in the 1950s. In 1960, Zamora took up a position on the secretariat of the International Union of Students (UIS) in Prague. The secretariat con-

sisted of about thirty members, including representatives from each of the sOcialist countries and from a smattering of nonsocialist countries. The UIS Was the main vehicle through which the socialist bloc coordinated its interntional policies directed at students (something like a student version of the

better known World Federation of Trade Unions)." As the Sino-Soviet split

er upted, Zamora attended a student conference in Albania that was set up In opposition to the UIS and then traveled to China where he met with Mao

edong and Zhou Enlai.

Betore

returning to Bolivia, Zamora

went to

Cuba,

here he secured financial support from Che Guevara for the founding ference of the PCB(ML).46 Although Zamora had been absent from Bolivia he parlayed his international connections and his access to randstourintoyears, a position as second in command of the new party. con-

At the founding of the PCB{ML), members such as Oscar Zamora, Diva rratia and the roughly two dozen students who had left Havana and MosCOw represented an important bloc of party cadre who had firsthand experiCnce of the international

politics of the

communist

movement.

Despite the

Bolivia

85

fact that the majority of the members and support base of the PCB{ML) were made up of miners whose concerns were much more prosaic,"" there

was a substantial bloc of cadre within the PCB{ML) who were concerned that the party not only support the political positions of the Chinese communists but also that the PCB{ML) develop close relations with the Chinese

Communist Party. The former party leaders I interviewed painted a picture of a remarkable amount of interaction between the Chinese and Bolivian parties. Oscar Zamora, who took over as general secretary when Federico Escóbar died in

1966, traveled to China immediately upon assuming the office to consult with the Chinese party. Jorge Echazú, a former member of the La Paz Stalin

Cell, became the Bolivian correspondent for China's Xinhua news agency. Echazú, who was also a politburo member, estimates that at least two hundred Bolivians went to China for multi-month cadre training courses where

they received political and military training between 1966 and 1970. The PCB(ML) sent a handful of people to China to teach Quechua. Another handful of PCB{ML) members worked on Spanish-language

propaganda

activities in Beijing, including Hugo Zavala, a law professor from Oruro who lived in China from 1972 to 1983 and did Spanish, Quechua and

Aymara

shortwave radio broadcasts called "Pekín Informa para Latinoamérica" on Radio Pekin. Diva Arratia also went there tor eye surgery in 1965 ater being injured in a car accident. Pekin Informa and other Spanish-language Chinese literature were distributed by the PCB(ML) for free to miners at the Siglo XX mine.18

Although the PCB(ML) is interesting from the perspective of its extensive ties to China, it did not accomplish much of significance during the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its mass base among miners, the PCB(ML) is best-known t

S

E

for its short-lived attempt at armed insurrection in the northern country-

side of the department of Santa Cruz." For this effort, the PCB(ML) had created an organization called the Unión de Campesinos Pobres (Union of Poor Peasants (UCAPO]). The UCAPO was mainly composed of migrants from the highlands who had heeded government calls to colonize Bolivia's sparsely populated jungle regions. Successive Bolivian governments have been eager to establish a larger population in some of the sparsely inhab-

P

ited eastern regions, both as a spur to development and to solidify Bolivia's claim to the region. After uprooting themselves and homesteading under

difficult conditions, these colonists found themselves totally abandoned a

by the government, which had promised to aid their colonization efforts. The PCB(ML), experienced at mobilizing rural highlanders in the mining regions, found a social base in these colonists. The UCAPO "people's war"began-as a series of land takeovers in late

1970, including a large hacienda owned by a powerful local landlord. Oscar Zamora had renamed himself "Comandante Rolando" to head up this armed force. However, he was quickly caught by the armed forces. He had

considerable amounts of Maoist literature on hand but only two revolvers.

86

Transpaci/1C NevO

returned

to

quickly summarily sent into exile. Although unable to reinvigorate the UCAPO after Bolivia clandestinely, Zamora was reformist government of General Juan José his demoralizing capture. The conflict with

Zamora

he

was

an end to the Torres (October 1970 to August 1971) negotiated them some of the land they had the militarily defeated squatters, granting war" sputtered out. The decision to launch occupied. And thus the "people's remote from seems strange. The region was this armed struggle in the jungle

regions where the PCB(ML) at the very least, would Certainly, one might think that

mining the highland population considerable support and, might have counted on centers

and the

work with. large population to would have served as a warning against Che Guevara's disastrous experience east. In a strikareas of Bolivia's guerrilla warfare in the sparsely populated the cities have had a

surrounding to led the PCB{ML)'s leadership With peasant armies from the countryside rather than in its traditional launch a "people's war" in the jungle decide the ing example of dogmatism,

Maoist doctrine of

to

areas of support. base both among miners and While the majority of the PCB(ML)'s mass Bolivians, the party's settlers in Bolivia's eastern lowlands were indigenous centered on demands corresponding efforts at mobilizing this mass base to mobilize identities. The PCB(ML) did not attempt to miner and settler demands for indigenous rights or indigenous its supporters on the basis of Bolivian politics, white and mestizo national liberation. As is common in number of the PCB(ML)'s leadera disproportionate made Bolivians

up

who now supports Evo One indigenous former cadre I interviewed, ascribed the Morales's Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government, to.a failChina's PCB(MLJ's attempts to mechanically reproducenative to experience Bolivia" deeply. He of the masses ure to investigate the "ideologies at least partly due to the ethnic clearly felt this inadequate investigation was composition of the PCB(ML)'s leadership.51 the It is hard not to wonder whether, under slightly different circumstances, not have come to resemble Peru's ShinBolivia's

ship.

experience of

PCB(ML) might

and

efforts

great ing Path. In both cases, there was considerable travel to China revoluwere made to master the doctrine of Maoism with a view to making

tion in the Andes. Each party was led by what I have described in the chapter

on Peru as true-believing "Maoist inquisitors," And each party commanded a

small but not insignificant localized mass base at the time it tried to launch its

armed strugle. Yet, in Peru the Shining Path grew and grew after launching tS war while the Bolivian party was quickly routed. Had the Peruvian armed

orces been more energetic in Path as a second-tier political

1980, would

we

only

remember the

Shining

party that soon faded into obscurity, similar

to today's PCB(ML)? Or had chance been more favorable te Oscar Zamora, might he have become Bolivia's Abimael Guzmán? Of course there were dit

ferent social and political conditions in the rwo countries, and berween Ayacucho and Siglo XX. But from the perspective of organized connections with

the People's Republic of China and attempting to put Maoism into practice in

Bolivia 87 the Andean highlands, the histories of both parties run until the point when each launched armed struggle.

remarkably parallel up

CONCLUSION lf our Peruvian case demonstrates a relatively successful transfer of Mao-

ist ideas to Latin America, the Bolivian case must ultimately be considered a comparative failure. There were promising sparks, but the ideas did not catch fire. At the time of the 1952 revolution, leftists within the MNR's gov-

erning coalition drew parallels berween Bolivia's and China's revolutionary processes, and as the MNR's agrarian reforms petered out and the United States remained a dominant force in Bolivia's economy, some prominent

MNRistas advocated taking a path to modernization and economic independence based on the Chinese model. After the fall of the MNR government in 1964, the Bolivian Maoist party, the PCB(ML), cultivated close links

with the People's Republic of China. But despite the close contacts between the PCB(ML) and China, the Bolivian Maoists were unable to becomea

major force in Bolivian politics, and their efforts to start a "people's war" quickly fizzled. Despite the failure of the transmission of Maoist politics to Bolivia, vari-

ous political actors who were inspired by the Chinese Revolution remain

influential, if not prominent, in Bolivia today. When Bolivia gave diplomatic recognition to China in 1985, old left-wing MNRistas such as former minis rof peasant affairs Nuflo Chávez and Alfredo Franco joined together with

formerPIRisas.such.as Oscar Vega, a disciple of Rieardo Anaya, to found the Asociación Boliviana de la Amistad con China (Bolivia-China Friendship Association [ABACH]), which promotes Chinese economic and cultural ties with Bolivia.x Oscar Zamora's politics have changed with China's, and the former advocate of people's war became an ardent supporter of Deng

Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Zamora served as Bolivia's ambassador to China in 2000, and he estimates that he traveled to China berween twentyfive and thirty times between 1963 and 2004.53 Jorge Echazú, the former member of the Stalin cell and a Xinhua cor respondent and politburo member of the PCB(ML), split off from Zamora's

main branch of the PCB{ML) in 1970. His splinter group, now renamed the Communist Party of Bolivia [Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM)], is small, but

ndividual parry members participate in the government of Evo Morales, despite Echazú's claim that his party aided the Shining Path logistically dur ing the 1980s and 1990s. Before being ousted in a shake-up, Alberto Echazú, a politburo member of.the PCB{MLM). and brother of Jorge, was vice minister of mining, and Guillermo Dalence, also a PCB{MLM) member, served

as minister of mines. The role of the PCB(MLM) in Morales's ministry of mines was a legacy of the Bolivian Maoists' influence and support in Bolivia's

mining communities.

Conclusions

China is writing today one of the most brilliant pages of world history, with the transformation that it is accomplishing among its people.

-Lázaro Cárdenas, 1959

The concrete dynamics of the transfer of Maoist ideas to Latin America,

when considered at all, have been assumed to have taken place more-or-less

as Richard Wolin recently described in the case of French Maoism: Fascinated and impassioned by political events that were transpiring nearly half a world away, they began to identify profoundly with Mao's China, which they came to perceive as a panacea for metropolitan France's own multifarious political ils. None spoke Chinese, and reliable

information about contemporary China was nearly impossible to come by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders. Little matter. The less these normaliens (students at the Ecole normale supérieure} knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes. As we have seen, China had hardly forbidden access to outsiders. At least in the Latin American case, the spread of Maoism depended on a highly

organized set of relationships between Chinese and Latin American revolutionaries. While China was distant, it was also accessible. The Chinese made efforts to share their experience and ideologY with interested toreigners.

Latin Americans went to China to see firsthand the Chinese socialist experiment and, based on that experience, determine what lessons the Chinese

example had for Latin America. The quality of the knowledge gained in these exchanges is certainly open to question, and many Latin American travelers def1nitely projected their own particular dreams of liberation onto

the Chinese experience.

But, the creation of Latin American Maoism was the

product of transnational nerworks grounded in particular historical relationships, not the fevered imaginings of students in total isolation from lived

Chinese experience. The People's Republic of China's initial interactions with Latin Ameri cans took place within the context of international structures already built

Conclusions 89 up around the international communist movement. Vicente Lombardo went to China in 1949 as part of the leadership of the World Federation of Trade Unions, and Oscar Zamora became acquainted with the Chinese in Prague while serving on the secretariat of the International Union of Students. However, as the Sino-Soviet split deepened in the late 1950s and early 1960s, China developed its own forums for promoting is brand of Marxism. As examples in the preceding chapters have shown, half-year

political and military classes were an important element of Chinese efforts to refine the ideology of communists already inclined to favor Chinese positions. China funded travel by Latin Americans to China and committed

training

Latin Americans. It also committed time and resources to producing propaganda in an array of languages, even broadcasting on shortwave radio to the Andes in Quechua and Aymara. Given the numresources to

ber of visitors to China who met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, some sig nificant portion of the time of the two most powerful men in China during the 1949-1976 period was spent meeting with foreigners. These meetings demonstrated China's commitment to building goodwill toward China and

S

th n

le ne

at

the

political capital

of sympathetic foreigners. But despite the considerable resources that China committed to aiding Latin American communist parties and promoting Maoism internationally, the movement of Chinese ideas to Latin America ultimately rested in the hands of Latin Americans who wanted to apply Chinese ideas in their home countries. The particular forms that Latin American agency took in domesticating

Chinese ideas ranged from the mundane tasks of distributing literature and disseminating propaganda in other forms to the creative leaps of trying to find specific national forms for Chinese concepts. A Mexican informant of mine, Simitrio Tzompazquelitl, recalled getting beat up by the

police as a youth when he went to Mexico City to get Chinese literature to distribute in his home town of Puebla." His experience is

representative

ast

ly

of both the manifold mundane tasks (traveling from a smaller city to a

larger one to get propaganda produced in China to distribute) undertaken

de

by numerous anonymous Latin American Chinese sympathizers and the risks involved even in carrying out these small tasks. China-was

rs.

to provide materials, but it was the numerous Latin Americans who not

lu-

se in

an

wiling

only did the grunt work of getting those materials distributed, but also ran the risks involved. Apart irom the daily grind of agitation and propaganda work, Latin

American agency also took more creative forms. Florencio Medrano's elfort

to

to create a Chinese-style base area in a squatter settlement on the outskirts

he

of Cuernavaca was one such attempt. The dueling events held by the rival

a

ed

Mexico-China Friendship Societies represented differing.creative attempts to fashion a vision of how China was relevant to Mexico. Oscar Zamora's

effort to launch a people's war in Bolivia's jungle and the Shining Path's more -

successtul war effort were forms of Latin American creative domestication of

t

Chinese ideas. In all of these efforts, Latin American agency was principal.

90 Transpacific Revolutionaries The Chinese supplied the propaganda materials and some training, but Latin Americans were on their own to decide how to use that material and training. To the extent that Latin Americans were able to disseminate and domesticate Chinese ideas, they relied on formal contacts with the People's Republic of China and organized networks and party structures in their home countries. Latin American and Chinese agency took place within the

context of relatively cohesive structures which usually tried to use organizational discipline and divisions of labor in order to effectively utilize cadres' time and efforts to maximize the reach and impact of propaganda efforts. The Shining Path, well-known for its strict organizational discipline, is the most successtul example of this form of organization, but most of the other pro-Chinese groups we have considered aspired to similar

levels of structural sophistication and discipline. The organized nature of Latin American agency highlights the fact that the influence of Chinese ideas in Latin America was overwhelmingly due to the efforts made by groups of people trying to propagate those ideas. The influence of Chinese

ideas was not mainly due to the fact that such ideas were floating in the air as part of the plethora of radical new ideas that were influential during the 1960s.

REVOLUTIONARY ASYNCHRONICITY

While Latin Americans, not the Chinese, interpreted how Maoist ideas applied to Latin American conditions, their interpretations were often not

partieularly-creative. The concept of "revolutionary asynchronous develop

ment" put forward by John Lewis Gaddis is useful in understanding the mechanical and dogmatic way in which Latin American Maoists often inter preted the lessons of the Chinese Revolution for their own countries.' In the process of summing up many of the discoveries of the new Cold War literature, Gaddis notes the "surprisingly literal" way in which Mao understood

the experience of the Soviet Union as that of an elder brother from whom the younger brother must learn. As Gaddis sums up:

We have seen how [Mao] expected an American invasion of China in 1949 because the United States and its allies had sent troops to Siberia and North Russia in 1918: the Korean and Indochinese conflicts, as he perceived it, were the functional equivalent of such foreign inter

vention. He had allowed a brief period of experimentation with state sponsored capitalism, analogous to Lenin's New Economic Policy. He

had then collectivized agriculture and launched a Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization, both based carefully on the Soviet model. He

was even willing to wait "eighteen or even more years" for diplomatic recognition from the United States, because it had taken seventeen to

recognize the Soviet Union.

Conclusions 91 Gaddis shows that from 1949 to 1957, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party as a whole attempted to mechanically reproduce the Soviet experience of economic development and modernization.

Most trends of Marxist thought posit that societies go through stages

of development that have universal characteristics, regardless of when or where that stage of development takes place. Just as the Chinese perceived Soviet development policies from the 1920s as suitable to beginning socialist construction in 1950s China, Latin American and Chinese Maoists posited

that until 1949 China had been characterized by semifeudal/semicolonial conditions, and thus the strategy and tactics that the Chinese Communists

devised to suit those conditions held universal lessons for other semifeudal/ semicolonial countries. On one level, then, revolutionary asynchronicity can be seen as implicit in Marxist universalism. But perhaps there are reasons in addition to Marxist ideas of stages ot

development, and thus of forms of revolutionary action that are supposed

to scientifically correspond to different levels of development, that account for the mechanical "revolutionary asynchronicity" that was so common among Latin American Maoists. Over two hundred years ago, while discussing the rise of Islam, Edward Gibbon noted that "in all religions, the

life of the founder supplies the silence of his written revelation: the sayings of Mahomet were so many lessons of truth; his actions so many examples of virtue; and the public and private memorials were preserved by his wives and companions."7 If the actions of a moral founding figure, Muhammad

or Mao Zedong, represent "so many examples of virtue," then why would followers of those figures not try to replicate them? Perhaps the efforts of Latin American Maoists to replicate the actions of Mao and the Chinese revolutionaries he led, regardless of place and time, were sometimes a form of religious reenactment of virtuous or moral action as much as they were a reasoned application of Marxist principles to appropriate historical conditions. Certainly, that religious element to reenacting the Chinese revolution in Latin America would be consistent with the ways in which Mao's works were treated as a sacred text by leaders such as Abimael Guzmán, as dis-

cussed in Chapter 3. Florencio Medrano's decision to try to start a Maoist people's war in the border region between Oaxaca and Veracruz, mimicking Mao's actions in the Jiangxi-Fujian border region, seems to have been based more on a leap of faith than on a rational assessment of objective conditions.

It seems reasonable to assert that while a particular notion of historical materialism that universalized the forms of subjective activity that corre-

particular sets of objective conditions (in this case semiteudal1sm/ semicolonialism) played a major role in how Chinese ideas were understood spond

to

as relevant to Latin America, an unstated form of religious adherence to

and understanding of Maoist ideas was also present. This religious element in the transfer of Chinese ideas to Latin America contributed to revolutionreenact the virtuous ary asynchronicity as Latin American Maoists tried to

actions of the founder of their "religion."

92

Transpacific Revolutionaries

THE COLD WAR, COMPETING VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION AND CHINA'S APPEAL FOR LATIN AMERICAN NATIONALISTS In a recent article, Prasenjit Duara discusses how the Cold War in the devel-

oping world was marked by "the imposition through clientilistic, and fre quently unpopular, ruling structures in developing nations of designs for enlightennent by an enormously superior military power." The elites of the Soviet Union and the United States put forward their contending visions of modernization, one socialist (or allegedly socialist) and the other capitalist. The socialist vision of modernization had considerable appeal for Latin American nationalists, as it emphasized state ownership of major indus try and greater economic equality-Additionally, the socialist vision had the

advantage of defying the United States, a considerable psychological payoff for nationalists who saw the United States as the main neocolonial power in Latin America. Yet China had a particular appeal tor some Latin American nationalists

with socialist inclinations, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fol-

lowing his January 1959 trip to China, former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas articulated part of the appeal of the People's Republic of China to Latin American nationalists well when he wrote: The Chinese, after bloody struggles with their traditional enemies,

lashed by endemic diseases, the floods of their great rivers, which left numerous victims, the blights that frequently decimated their crops and left them in stifling poverty, understood that only united, in a common

effort, could they resolve their deep problems, and that was how they began the great work that they are today carrying ou. China is writing today one of the most brilliant pages of world history, with the transtormation that it is accomplishing among its people,

which makes it worthy of admiration and esteem. The Chinese people have extraordinarily sensitivity and tact. They work intensely day and night in order to better themselves, to make their country great; they understand how to behave in order to succeed.

Cárdenas echoes the Bolivian Nationalists from Chapter 4 in his paean to the Chinese

people's ability

to overcome

underdevelopment,

natural

disas

ters and the ravages of decades of warfare through collective efforts at mod-

ernization. Apart from the appeal of the heroic, collective efforts of the Chinese peol e that drew Crdenas's attention, China had two advantages as a model Tor socialist modernization over the Soviet model, which dominated on a

global level (and which was ultimately imposed on Cuba). First, China was Tecognizable as independent of the USSR, especially after 1958, in ways the Dther Soviet bloc countries were not. Maoist modernization can be seen as way of articulating the aspirations for socialist modernization offered by

Conclusions

93

the Soviet model, while eschewing the undesirable possible consequence of being dominated by the Soviets similar to Eastern Europe, North Korea or

Mongolia. Second, China offered a model of development and modernization that was working (or perceived to be working) in a Third World counThe discourses of both the capitalist and socialist modernizers lumped

large parts of the world together as Third World, underdeveloped, developing, neocolonial or semicolonial. According to these ways of understanding problem of modernization, it was natural for China to be seen as sharing major structural characteristics with Latin America, despite the vast differ ences between these regions. Thus, China was a more natural model for Latin American modernization than the Soviet Union. of appeal as a potential model for modernization window The China' s Latin American nationalists was relatively brief. The emergence of China as

to

recognizably independent from the Soviet Union coincided with major propaganda efforts that trumpeted the major economic triumphs of the Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s. As we have seen in the narratives of the

Bolivians in Chapter 4 and Cárdenas above, these events caught the attention of noncommunist nationalists and elicited their warm approval. Yet, as the

Sino-Soviet split created tensions between China and Cuba, and the Cultural Revolution created a situation of perceived chaos in China in the mid-1960s, China lost its appeal for many Latin American nationalists.

WHY HAVE THE MAOISTS BEEN LARGELY IGNORED UNTIL NOW?

A central thesis of this book is that Maoists and others who were influenced by the Chinese Revolution played an important, yet often unacknowledged, role in Latin America's New Left. This begs the question, why exactly have the Maoists been ignored? I have a multipart answer to this question, which Ithink sheds light on how disciplinary norms have led to an important blind spot in our understanding of recent Latin American history. The first factor IS a common tendeney-ameng historians to mainly look to Europe and the United States for connections with Latin America in the Cold War period. In histories of the colonial period, when slaves were being brought across the

Atlantic in their millions from Africa and a regular trans-Pacific trade was

carried on between the Spanish colony in the Philippines and Latin America, connections with Asia and Africa are widely acknowledged and studied.

However, in modern Latin American history, and in particular Latin Amer Ica during the Cold War, the search for connections between Latin Amerca

and Asia have apparently been counterintuitive for most historians. This is, of Tthink, a hangover from the traditional, and now largely dethroned, way

the United States looking at the Cold War as mainly a competition between and Soviet-led

blocs, centered in North America and Europe, rather than

as

a global phenomenon with multiple important centers of power and agency

94

Transpacific Revolutionaries

that encompassed revolutionary movements and efforts at decolonization in the Third World. The traditional school of Cold War historiography saw agency as mainly located in the power centers of Moscow and Washing

ton and largely ignored the agency of Latin Americans and other Third World actors. Historians of Latin America have long contested that denial of Latin American agency. However, it is only recently that historians of Latin

America have begun to examine how Latin America fits into a global Cold War that is more broadly conceived than the traditional, U.S.- and Soviet

centered model. This has contributed to the blind spot in regard to China's

influence in Latin America. The second factor is a lack of knowledge of Chinese history among most Latin Americanists. Secondary fields of expertise are often not vigorously

pursued because of our discipline's emphasis on specialization. However, this emphasis on regional (and, indeed, subregional and sub-subregional) specialization can lead us to miss connections that would otherwise be clear.

For example, it is clear to any historian of modern China that when Flor encio Medrano tried to create a Maoist base area in the Veracruz-Oaxaca border region, he was trying to copy Mao's efforts of the late 1920s. Yet how many historians of Latin American social movements and guerrilla groups would catch that? Or, take the case of Peru. As discussed in Chapter 3, there

is a voluminous and growing literature on the Shining Path that situates the Shining Path within the context of Peruvian society and culture. That is very important. Yet the importance of Chinese history and politics to the Shining Path's development and the unfolding of its plans means that some

knowledge of Chinese history and politics is essential to gain entrée into the "closed communication system" used by Sendero in its internal (and even in

many public) documents.! The third factor is the generalized revulsion at the most visible representatives of Maoism in Latin America, the Sh1ning Path. Many, although

certainly not all, studies of guerrilla groups and social movements in post-

1960 Latin America have been motivated by some degree of sympathy for the movements being studied. The Shining Path never elicited much solidarity or support in the academies of Europe and North America, and its academic supporters in Latin America have been focused on movement tasks rather than on historical writing. Despite the skepticism that some histori

ans, including myself, have about the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's claim that Sendero killed more civilians than the Peruvian government killed, the fact that such a claim can even plausibly be put for ward speaks to a level of brutality that, when combined with the political and military defeat of the movement, makes it singularly unattractive even

for most of the academics who have gone tailing after other Latin American

guerrilla groups. The fourth and final factor why the Maoists have been mostly missed in the historiography of Latin America's long 1960s and Cold War is probably

due to their weakness in Latin America today. Because of the weakness of

Conclusions

95

the Maoists today, it is easy to assume that they were never important to begin with, or at least not as important as the clear forerunners of the main political trends in contemporary Latin America. After China went capitalist

in the years after Mao's death in 1976, the Maoists became a weak political trend even in most of the countries where they had been influential. In light of their current weakness, it can be easy to miss the window of time when

they were an important political trend in Latin America. Yet, if we forget about the Maoists, we miss a key element of Latin American history.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1.

eds. and from Roberto Márquez and David Arthur McMurray, Nicolás Guillén, 2nd ed. Selected Poems of rans., Man-Making Words: The 39. original Span(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), Tomo 1958-1972, Obra poética Nicolás Guillén, ish version can be found in II (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1974), 31. Guillén, a prominent

Quoted

figure

in the

négritude

China.

movement,

wrote

this poem atter his 1958 visit

to

La Paz on March 13, 2007. Daniel Tretiak, "China and Latin America: 3. See, for examples of articles, im An Ebbing Tide in Transpacific Maoism," Current Scene: Developments

2. Interview with Víctor

Reinaga in

Mainland China 4, no. 5 (March 1, 1966): 1-12 or Ernst Halperin, "Peking and the Latin American Communists," China Quarterly 29 (January-March, China and Latin 1967): 111-154. The book is Cecil Johnson, Communist

America, 1959-1967 (New York: Columbia Universiry Press, 1970).

4. Johnson, Communist China, 12. S. Piero Gleijeses's study of Cuba's Africa policy, Conflicting Missions: Havana, CaroWashington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North

lina Press, 2002), is probably the best-known and most outstanding example

of this trend.

6. An exemplary work in this vein is Michael Szonyi's Cold War 1sland: Que York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which moy on the Front Line (New The connection details how the Cold War reshaped society on Quemoy. Gilbert between these-two-trends in.recent scholarship is well-illustrated by Neuw and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's Joseph Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Methods of 7. Rod Aya, "Theories of Revolution Reconsidered: Contrasting Collective Violence," Theory and Society 8, no. 1 (July 1979): 40-45, quoted French and Russian in Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the 14. Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), from an Old to Shift 8. Eric, Zolov, "Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons: The Contracorriente S, no. 2 (2008): 48-49. a New Left in Latin America" A The Latin American Left, 1968," under

9.

Jeffrey Gould, "Solidarity

Siege:

American Historical Review-114,ne. 2 (April 2009): 374. Currents of Afro-American 10. Julius Sherrard Scott Il, "The Common Wind: Duke Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (PhD dis., The Impact of the Haitian University, 1986). See also David P. Geggus, ed., of South Carolina

Revohution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University

98 Notes Press, 2001) and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),

157-174. 11. Peter Linebaugh, "All the Atlantie Mountains Shook," Labour/Le Travail 10 (Autumn 1982): 119, cited in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13. 12. See, for example, the methodological discussion of Chinese village studies in the 1970s based solely on interviewing refugees from a mainland village

who had fled to Hong Kong, in Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: Under Mao and Deng, expanded and updated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2-9.

13. For Vesey's personal history and deep interest in the Haitian Revolution as a revolutionary model, see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise

and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 170-171 and Scott, "The Common Wind," 307-308. Latin 14. Gilbert M. Joseph, "What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing

America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies," in Joseph and Spenser,

In From the Cold, 4.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Chairman Mao Tse-tung's Important Talks with Guests from Asia, Africa and Latin America (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), 3. in Selected Works 2. Mao Zedong, "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," Press, 1967), 413. ofMao Tse-tung, vol. 4 (Peking: Foreign Languages"the was Gu Bo person with overall formally 3. The "returned Bolshevik" Braun played the guiding role for in the Party Center," but as responsibility the "returned Bolsheviks" as the Comintern representative, sat on the Politburo and was in charge of military decision making, it does not seem an

exaggeration to describe Braun as the party leader. 4. Mao's concluding speech at the CCP's Seventh Congress, May 31, 1945. Cited in Yang Kuisong, "Changes in Mao Zedong's Attitude Toward the Indochina War, 1949-1973," Cold War Internmational History Project Workthat ing Paper 34 (February 2002): 2. Yang relied on editions of Mao's works are not available in English. 5. "Mighty Advance of the National Liberation Movement in the Colonial and Dependent Countries," For a Lasting Peace, For a People's Democracy, January 27, 1950. This was the newspaper of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau). The text of Liu's speech was also transmitted to North America independently in English Morse code on November 23, 1949; see

Robert C. North, "The Chinese Revolution and Asia," International Joumal 6, no. 1 (Winter 1950/1951): 20.

6. See discussion and citations in Chapter 2, as well as Yang Kuisong, "Changes in Mao Zedong's Atitude Toward the Indochina War, 1949-1973," 3. 7. The full treaty is reproduced in Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and

Xue Litai, Uncertaim Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 260-261. 8. Yang Kuisong, "Changes in Mao Zedong's Attitude Toward the Indochina

War, 1949-1973," 9-11.

9. Ibid., 14. 10. Ibid., 12-14. 11. The five principles are listed in Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Sphit: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 36.

Notes 99 12. Perhaps secret should be put in scare quotes, since the New York Times ran

a full translation of the speech on June 5, 19S6. 13. Although the doctrine of a peaceful transition to socialism had not been

advocated by the Moscow-based leadership of the international communist movement previously, many communist parties had adopted ractics that prefigured Khrushchev's new line. 14. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 39.

15. See Sociaist Upsurge in China's Countryside, comp. Central (Committe of

the Communist Party of China (195S; rep., Honolulu: University of the Pacific Press, 2002). On the "revolutionary and heroic" legacy of Soviet collectivization, see Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1987).

16. Published in People's Daily (Renmin Ribao), April 5, 1956

17. The Historical Experience ofthe Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), 18. 18. Mao Zedong, "On the Ten Major Relationships," in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), S:304. 19. Both articles, originally dated April 5 and December 29, 1956, have been the Dictatorsbip of the as The Historical

published together

Experience of

Proletariat (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959).

20. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 71. 21. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 99-104; Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 187-190. 22. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard Universiry Press, 2003), 35-37. 23. The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), 24. 24. Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966). The original Chinese edition was first published in 1964. 25. See the chapter on Peru for an archetypical case.

26. Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People's War (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968), 108. 27. To get the Latin American side of the story, one must visit multiple archives at multiple sites in multiple countries and track down an array of colorful

figures and sort fact from fiction in the stories that they tell. To do that, one has to speak Spanish. It probably will not surprise the reader that few specialists in Chinese foreign affairs speak Spanish. (Additionally, there is the

difficulry of finding funding for travel to several Latin American countries, as opposed to mak1ng one convenient trip to Beijing.) And so we have this

lamentable situation wherein enlightening books are published on Chinese foreign policy, the Sino-Soviet split and China in the Cold War, but despite the

clearimportance of liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America to the Chinese Communist Party (at least according to Chinese rhetorie), we have relatively little information about how the Chinese party and state

interacted with those liberation movements.

28. Interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006. 29. Leonardo Ruilova, China popular en América Latina (Quito: EdicionesInter nacionales, 1978), 99-100; R. Evan Ellis, China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 35. 30. Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in

the People's Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 90; Dan iel Tretiak, "China and Latin America: An Ebbing Tide in Transpacific Mao

is1m," Current Scene: Developments in Mainland China 4, no. S (March 1,

100

Notes

1966): 2; Jiang Shixue, "On the Development of Sino-Latin American Relations," China International Studies no. 9 (Winter 2007): 76-102. The statistics are from Jiang, who takes them from Chinese customs statistics (zhonguo

haiguan tongj").

31. Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (New York: Penguin, 1974), 224; Ruilova, China popular, 103-104; Daniel Tretiak, "The Chinese in Latin America," China Quarterly no. 7 (July-Sept. 1961): 151. 32. William E. Ratliff, "Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949-1960," Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 1 (Feb. 1969): 57-58. Those wanting to pursue the issue of Chinese cultural diplomacy beyond my brief discussion here should consult this article. 33. Tad Szule, The Winds of Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1963), 187.

34. Longer lists can be found in Ruilova, China popular, 99-102 and Ratliff, "Chi nese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949-1960," 61-63. See also William E. Ratliff, "Communist China and Latin America, 1949-1972," Asian Survey 12, no. 10 (Oct. 1972): 846-863. On Lázaro Cárdenas's January 1959 trip to China, see Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: 1-Apuntes,

1957-1966 (Mexico Ciry: UNAM, 1973), 3:83-84, 88-91, 101-103. 35. W.A.C. Adie, "China, Russia, and the Third World," China Quarterly 11 July-Sept. 1962): 207. 36. Interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007 (Echazú was a former Xinhua correspondent for Bolivia). 37. Interview with Andrea Gómez in Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006. 38. Jiang Shixue, *On the Development of Sino-Latin American Relations." 39. Ernst Halperin, "Peking and the Latin American Communists," China Quar

terly 29 January-March 1967): 118-119; Osvaldo Peralva, O Retrato (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Globo, 1962), 24-25.

40. Ratliff, "Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949-1960," 64; Peralva, O Retrato, 120. Peralva mentions Brazilian participation in the training course but does not name the other participating Latin American communist parties.

41. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 104. The training facility remains off-limits to nonmilitary personnel. 42. José Sotomayor Pérez, Leninismo o maoísmo? (Lima: Editorial Universo,

1979), 4748; José Sotomayor Pérez, Revolución cultural proletaria (Lima: Ediciones Nueva Democracia, 1967), 71. 43. The term revisionist in Marxist parlance serves to label, and usually to condemn, those who have "revised" the revolutionary heart out of Marxism and dates from the time of Lenin's polemics against the evolutionary socialism of Eduard Bernstein. Those who find the naming practices of Latin American Maoist groups hard to follow should just be happy that we are not discuss-

ing Turkey, where Maoist splinter parties distinguished themselves from each other by using different symbols in their acronyms [for example: TKP (ML) and TKP/ML were the acronyms for rwo ditferent groups using the name

Turkish Communist Party

(Marxist-Leninist)].

44. "Introducing Peking Review," Peking Review 1, no. 1 (March 4, 1958): 3.

45. Halperin, "Peking and the Latin American Communists," 146. example, CVR interview with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on May 28, 2002, 26; interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007; interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007. See also IPS Caja 492, exp. 1, #394 (dated May 24, 1966),

46. For

discussed in Chapter 2. 47. José Maria Sisón, with Ninotchka Rosca, José Maria Sisón: At Home in the

World (Greensboro: Open Hand, 2004), 46.

Notes of 48. There may also be lingering concerns about the legality those funds, even though the act occurred decades ago.

101

having received

49. Interview with Diva Arratia del Rio in La Paz on March 1, 2007; interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006. 50. Jorge Palacios, Chile: An Attempt at "Historic Compromise." The Real Story

of the Allende Years (Chicago: Banner Press, 1979), S; Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Chile, El Pueblo: 50 nimeros de "El Pueblo" en la clandestinidad (Toronto: Ediciones Marxista-Leninistas, 1978). 51. See Chapter 3 for more information on Peru. The Peruvians weren't the only ones to target Deng Xiaoping. When Deng visited Washington, D.C., in January 1979, Maoists based in the United States who were demonstrating against Deng got into a big fight with the police. See "5 Men Arrested After Attack on China Chancery," Washimgton Post, January 25, 1979; "Violence Flares

Briefly in Day of Varied Protests" and "Two Maoists Disrupt Teng Ceremo nies," Washington Post, January 30, 1979. $2. Interview with Martin Rodríguez and Victor Reyes on February 20, 2006, in

Mexico City. 53. Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People's Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman && Littlefield, 2003) deals with this Chinese apparatus for managing foreigners extensively. However, because the book is focused on the Chinese management of foreigners from the devel

oped world, Making the Foreign Serve China does not capture important elements of the experience of foreigners from the Third World in China.

54. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 87; Oswaldo Reynoso, Los eunucos

inmortales, 3rd.ed. (Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 2005), 17-22. 55. Interview with Eduardo Ayllón on July 15, 2010, in La Paz. S6. For example, none of the four major books on Latin America during the

Cold War published in the last few years include any discussion of Maoism as a continental ideological force, apart from a chapter on the Shining Path as a phenomenon local to Peru in one volume. See Greg Grandin, The Last

Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold; Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010);

Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insur gent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America's Long Cold War

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 Lombardo Toledano, Diario de un viaje a la China ueva (Mexico City: Ediciones Futuro, 1950), 108-109. Translation always mine unless oth-

1. Vicente

erwise mentioned. 2. The countries sending union

North

Korea, South Korea, the

delegations

Burma, Sri Lanka, China, Philippines, lIndia, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, were

Thailand, Mongolia, Pakistan, the USSR and Vietnam; ibid., 106.

3. As discussed in Chapter 1. Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue

Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: StanUniversity Press, 1993), 105. This point is discussed in a more global context in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War His tory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 159. 4. The idea of a global, long 1960s (roughly 1955-1973) has been put forward in Karen Dubinsky, et al., eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shapinngo Global Consciousness (Toronto: Betrween the Lines, 2009), among other places. ford

102

Nortes 5. When referring to the both the Partido Popular and the Partido Popular Socialista, l use the acronym PP(S). The name change occurred in 1960. 6. Lombardo, Diario de un viaje, 66-67.

7. Ibid., 81. 8. 1bid., 88-89. 9. 1bid., 81-84, 88, 90-92, 97-99. 10. 1bid., 109-118, 126-134. 11. Ibid., 136-141. 12. 1bid., 140. 13. Ibid., 141.

14. Ibid., 144; translation mine. 15. Ibid., 145. 16. A rightist deviation might typically involve compromising in a way that would adventurist deviation would negate the goals of the revolution, while an involve continuing armed struggle under conditions where mass support did not exist, or where negotiation was called for.

17. Ibid., 144-156. 18. 1bid., 157-158. 19. 1bid., 159-160. 20. 1bid., 162-163. 21. A serious comparison between the

nese and Mexican revolutions has been made in Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Revolution & Row, 1969). John Mason Hart compares the Mexican Harper with the Chinese Revolution of 1911 in Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1987). 22. Lombardo, Diario de

un

viaje,

187-189.

23. 1bid., 192-204. various aspects of the Chinese 24. The manner in which Lombardo reports on the Revolution echoes the way in which official Chinese publications discussed

drew

official

issues. It is unclear, though, if this is because Lombardo these Chinese publications in drafting his travelogue, or if it is due to the fact that his on

Chinese interlocutors did not themselves stray tar trom otficial formulations.

25. A scholar of Lombardismo, Barry Carr, succinctly characterizes Lombardo's State: politics this way in "The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary Marxism's Contribution to the Construction of the Great Arch," in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation:

Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 332. 26. On the radicalizing effect of the railway workers' and reachers' strikes on the communist movement in Mexico, see my interview with Camilo in Mexico

Ciry on February 16, 2006. He claimed that the 1958 teachers and railway workers movements contributed to the impulse within the PCM, and in the movenent generally, to look for other ways of doing things than the way the

PCM did things. On the events of 1958-1959 in Mexico, see Antonio Alonso, El movmiento ferrocarrilero en México, 19S8-1959 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1972); Barry Carr, Marxism and Co1munism in Twentieth-Century

Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 203-219 27. Victor Alba, "The Chinese in Latin America," The China Quarterly 5 (Janu-

ary-March 1961): 54. 28. Diplomatie recognition occurred in 1972.

29. Leonardo Ruilova, China Popular en América Latina (Quito: Ediciones Internacionales, 1978), 136. Interview with Adolfo Mexiac in Cuernavaca on March 11, 2006.

Notes 30.

103

El Frente Unico Pro

organizan. Tunón Pablos, Mujeres que Esperanza Derechos de la Mujer, 1934-1938 (Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Miguel se

1992), 95. Angel Porrúa, 31. Jocclyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Dur ham: Duke University Press, 2005), 111. Olcotr's. 32. Quoted in ibid., 164. The translation is presumably 142. 33. Tunón Pablos, Mujeres que se orgaizan, Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006. Erika 34. Interview with Andrea Gómez in

Cervantes, "Esther Chapa fue promotora incansable del voto fermenino,"

Comunicación e Información de la Mujer, http://www.cimacnoticias.com/ noticias/03abr/s03040106.html (accessed July 7, 2007). On the contributions see Carr, "The of Mexican Marxists to ruling party hegemony in Mexico, Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State." Mexicana de Amistad 35. "Declaración de Principios y Estatutos de la Sociedad #81. con China Popular" in IPS Caja 492, exp. 2,

36. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #475 (dated May 31, 1966).

Andrea 37. Interviews with Adolfo Mexiac in Cuernavaca on March 11, 2006; in Gómez in Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006; and Simitrio Tzompazquelitl Mexico City on March 21, 2006.

38. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #SS2 (dated June 4, 1966). numerical 39. IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #199 (dated July 23, 1966). This is the only estimate I have found for membership in either SMACP at any time. 40. IPS Caja 492, exp. 1, #394 (dated May 24, 1966) 41. IPS Caja 492, exp. 1, #108 (dated May 14, 1966). 42. IPS Caja 492, exp. 2, #80 (dated May 30, 1966). 3, #371 43. IPS Caja 492, exp. 3, #369 (dated July 8, 1966); IPS Caja 492, exp. (dated July 8, 1966). IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #167 44. IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #161 (dated July 22, 1966); (dated July 22, 1966). del México actual (Mexico 45. Roger Bartra, El reto de la izquierda: Polémica City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1982), 185. 46. IPS Caja 495, exp. 2, #273 (dated September 12, 1966). March 9, 1967). 47. IPS Caja 515, exp. 3, #122 (dated IPS Caja 493, exp. 3, #204 48. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #616 (dated June 10, 1966); (dated August 26, 1966). Mexico City on March 21, 2006. 49. Interview with Simitrio Tzompazquelitl in

Resistance to 50. Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico Under Siege: Popular 88-89. Modeled on Presidential Despotism (New York: Zed Books, 2002), unsuccessful from Fidel Castro's 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks (also in ChihuaBarracks assault on the Madera a military standpoint), Gámiz's soldiers. 120 attacked hua was a disastrous undertaking. Seventeen guerrillas Gämiz, Eight guerrillas died during the bartle, and most survivors, including were soon tracked down and killed. the Grupo Popular GuerS1. Baloy Mayo has also noted the Maoist influence on de Génaro y Lucio: Anál1sis y resultados La

(

rillero; see Baloy Mayo, guerrilla (Mexico Ciry: Editorial Diógenes, 1980), 49. Lombardo's memoir S2. Although, as indicated above in our quotation from and Mexico, Lombardo and also regarding economic development in China modernization the PCM saw the revolutionary nationalist aspect of Mexico's of Mexico to the United as being secondary to the continued subordination

States and other mperialist powers. "Herachio Bernal". 53. Arturo Gámiz García, Segundo Encuentro de la Sierra

Resolución 3. Breve Resumen Histórico (Ediciones Línea Revolucionaria,

1965), 1.

104

Notes

S4 Arturo Gámiz García, Segundo Encuentro de la Sierra "Heraclio Bernal" Resolución 4. Medio Siglo de Dictadura Burguesa. La Burguesia ha Fra-

casado. Es lncapaz de Resolver los Problemas Nacionales (Ediciones Línea Revolucionaria, 1965), 5-6.

S5. In the 1980s, when the Chinesegovernment asked Virginia Chapa to destroy or return most of her materials from the Maoist era, Virginia passed her large stock of Maoist propaganda along to Mexicans working in solidarity with

Peru's Sendero Luminoso. Interview with Martín Rodríguez and Victor Reyes on February 20, 2006, in Mexico City.

56. Both of which were PPS-led mass organizations-that is, organizations that generally followed the political guidance of the PP'S but that had a broader membership than the party itself. $7. The major examples being in China, Vietnam, France, Italy, Spain and Greece.

58. For background information on Medrano and the details of his trip to China, see Elena Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1980), 244-24S, 251; Ramón Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1999), 107-108; Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, "La guçrrilla se extiende por todo el país,"

National Security Archive at George Washington University, http://www.

gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB180/070-Grupos%20armados.pdf (accessed July 7, 2006),9. There are some discrepancies in the sources regard the details of Medrano's trip to China, and the Fiscalía Especial document

ing Medrano traveled to China in 1970, not 1969. Because of the discrepclaims paragraph should be taken as document places Medrano's approximations. Also, while the Fiscalía Especial

ancies

in the sources, the dates

given

in this

hometown in Tlatlaya, Estado de México, Poniatowska gives his birthplace el silencio, 2.51. as Guerrero; see Poniatowska, Fuerte es 244. 59. Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, the Fox adminis60. This was the name of the government body named during violations by the Mexican tration (2000-2006) to investigate human rights which emerged dursocial and political movements army and police against truth commission efforts in other ing the 1960s and 1970s. It was inspired by countries. At the last minute, the Fox administration suppressed the report which was posted on the National

special prosecutor, Security Archive's Web site. Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla,

of the

61.

subsequently

108. Pérez also claims that Medrano was in Poniatowska and the government, each China for three years, contradicting six months (despite offering different of which claim he was in China for

years for his trip).

62. 63. 64. 65.

Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 244-245.

1bid., 245, 250-254. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 197, 259. Ramírez Sáiz, El movimiento urbano popular 66. See, for example, Juan Manuel Veintiuno Editores, 1986). en México (Mexico City: Siglo 191-192, 197-198. At the es el silencio, 181-183, 185, Fuerte 67. Poniatowska, she the number of squatters as ten thousand, same time as Poniatowska gives claims there

were

five thousand families.

68. Ibid., 190-195, 197-200,262-263. 69. Ibid., 200-202. 70. 1bid., 256-258, 264-265. relies on Pérez's This quote almost certainly 71. Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla, 49. Medrano said. memory of what

72. Ibid., 67.

Notes

105

73. Ibid., 65, 106. 74.

Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 253-254.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. José Sotomayor Pérez, Leninismo o maoismo? (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1979), 24; "; Yaven?-prosiguió Mao--así se puede comenzar una guerra popular; no es difícil. ;Quieren ustedes hacer la guerra? Es cuestión de decidirse." 2. The PCP-SL still exists, and, in early 2012, two factions of it are still waging armed struggle in Peru. Thus, end dates for the insurrection are somewhat

arbitrary. Most major military operations were over by 199s. 3. Guzmán became best know under his nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo (the title "Chairman" [Presidente in Spanish] comes from the post he held as chairman of the"standing committee of the political bureau of the central committee of the PCP-Sendero Luminoso).

4. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima: Defensoria S.

6. 7. 8.

del Pueblo, 2003), 13. Steve Stern, "Introduction to Part One," in Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13. Peter Flindell Klarén, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219. Cells are generally the most basic organizational unit of a communist party. Thomas M. Davies J, Indian Integration in Peru: A Half Century of Experience, 1900-1948 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 3. These are only rough estimates. Many thousands of indigenous Peruvians were not counted by the census, and it is not clear exactly how Indians and mestizos

were distinguished by the census takers. 9. For various legislative efforts at dealing with Peru's Indians, see Davies, Indian Integration in Peru.

10. See José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Inlerpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). See especially the essays

"The Problem of the lIndian" and "The Problem of Land." 11. Mariátegui, "The Problem of the Indian," 28. 12. Sotomayor, jLeninismo o maoísmo?, 14. Soria was best known by his alias,

"Cantuarias." 13. Carlos De la Riva, Donde nace la aurora (Arequipa: Ediciones Nueva Era, 1961), 5; "A quienes hicieron posible mi viaje a la Repüblhca Popular China A quienes-revolucionarios' o nó-, tratan de bacerme la vida imp0sible por

haberlo realizado..."

14. SINAMOS, Grupos maoístas (Lima: CENPLA/SINAMOS, 1975), 14-16. 15. Partido Comunista Peruano, Conclusiones y resoluciones del IV Congreso Nacional del Partido Comunista Peruano (Lima: 1962), 58-68; Soromayor, sLeninismo o maoísmo?, S1; CVR interview with Carlos Tapia in Lima on June 29, 2002, 1-2.

16. The request was ignored; Sotomayor, Leninismo o maoismo?, 47-48; José Sotomayor Pérez, Revolución cultural proletaria (Lima: Ediciones Nueva

Demoeracia, 1967), 71. 17. Sotomayor, jLeninismo o maoismo?, 48.

18. 1bid. 19. It is not clear whether this translator just happened to be in Bern, or whether

he traveled there for this meeting. 20. Sotomayor, sLeninismo o maoísmo?, 15-18.

0 in Lima Omm s, who ath of1 Brazil. h's Stalin Stali imunist Party Party by Ommunist of eru, 3. DePath on Septe and la Riva, 2nd 24. Ibid., 60. onde ed. (New in David nber 21, ork: nace la a St. Scott 2006 Gustavo 25. Sce aurora, 134 Martin' s Palmer,170-171. Jorge del Press, 1994), ed., Shin 1994

Trotsky

Prado, "Informe de conferencia nacional," nacional del P.C.P. 26. De la organización del Conclusiones y comité central 27. Ibid., Riva, 100-103. Donde (Lima: Editora resoluciones nace la de la la l Lima, 28. Illa 1960) aurora, 1bid., 95-97. conferencia ing the133-134.The quote can Trial in be found Karl CollectedCommunist 29. The Works (New York: Cologne," in Karl Marx, Marx "Revelations Sovietpro-Chinese and International Publishers, faction wasfaction wasknown FrederickConcern the main known the the Engels, 1979), 11:403. periodical PCP-Bandera each English, PCP-Unidad. The names Roja, and the copying the title faction tee's proof published (with Bandera were derived from the Chinese 30. newspaper in December Hongqi 3, Red Flag 31. Mandarin]). Communist Party Roja, Interview with1934, be exact. Central CommitJuan in

a

in

as

as

to

2006; interview

32.

in

Luis

Pérez with Oswaldo 1958 as the Coronado in year Guzmán Reynoso Guzmán Reynoso: Una joined the in LimaAyacucho on PCP,

en-Documenting aproximación Comisión de la the Peruvian

a

38. Inte

on

SeptemberSeptember

12, see, among 21, 2006. For other su vida sources, Abimael y *

pensamientoreelpolitico," Guzmán and ElenaVerdad y Insurrection (DPI) microfilm Reconciliación escuela de in Callao (CVR) interview 12. cuadros, Iparraguirre 1una on with que escuela May

10,

comenzaba con el estudio que tenia dos 28, 2002, 15; "FuiAbimael filosofia marxista, eran de la situación partes, una primera una en una escuela militar en varios cursos y una internacional y terminaba politica, manera más profunda." Nan Kin, con segunda parte donde 33. Abimael estudiaba teoria ymilitar, cumplida Arce BorjaGuzmán, práctica de una and Janet"Interview with Chairman and translated from Talavera, A World to Gonzalo," interview 34. la

a

Win, no. 18 by Luis July 1988 CVR interview with Abimael editions of El Diario. (1992): 79. Reprinted May 28, Guzmán dates are 2002, 18, 21. This second and Elena lparraguirre in October approximate, bur Guzmán tip to China lasted rwo Callao on

3S.

Republic celebration of China. of Ibid., 26. Guzmán

decision

36.

the

definitely returned to Perumonths. The anniversary of the 1949 betore the founding of the People' s

represents

rhis

decision by the Chinese as providing an overall economie generally true, although there support to other comunist policy Ibid., 16. were Ellipses appear in parties.

This is

to

stop

where the audio audics

recording

the CVR

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though, the discrepancies

do

substantially

not

change

the

content

107 of the

interviews Estaba en ese momento la Revolución Cultural, (. . ) cosas que me impre stonaron, cambros Profundos, desde la forma de atencrón en que eran

recabrdos los extranjeros antes y en la Revolución (ultural. Por ejemplo, (...)tvmos una ocasón de ra una depuración de l1bros, recuerdo a un

escritor famoso, Mao Tun, (.. .) Los desfrles cran distintos, cambios may profundos, en todos los cam pos. Claro, cambios politicos muchos más grandes. Cuando yo estuve en ese lgar, yo estuve en el mismo centro, con protección milrtar. Cuando estuveel65 era conventual, silencioso; el '67.. El '67 era estnuendoso, a ciertas horas del dia, marchas, (. . ). Brer, otra cosa que me lamaba la atención, cuando se me imformó que el Partido Comu-

mista habia sdo disuelto, solamente quedaba el Comté Central, como orgaismo wnico. Todos los miltantes deberian volver a comprobar si tenian crédito suficiente para ser conunistas. (. ..) Y asi, luego la mformación es otra acción ultural, residmos en eso que ha sido (. . .) una exposIcIon sobre el pensam iento Mao Tse Tung. por primera vez que veia informauon de ese tpo.

37. Partido Comunista del Peru (Bandera Roja), IV Conferencia Nacional del Partido Comunista Peruano (N.p.: 1964), 35; "Nuestras tareas fundamentales y nuestros esfuerzos principales deben volcarse al campo." 38. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacuchoon September 11, 2006; CVR interview with Carlos Tapia in Lima on June 29, 2002, 4.

39. Saturnino Paredes, En Torno a la Práctica Revolucionaria y la Lucha Interna

(Peru: Editorial Bandera Roja, 1970). 40. Degregori, "La revolución de los manuales: La expansión del marxismo0 leninismo en las ciencias sociales y la génesis de Sendero Luminoso," Revista

Peruana de Ciencias Sociales 2, no. 3 (Setiembre-Diciembre 1990). 41. On the use of Soviet manuals in Cuba, and Che Guevara's reasons for the use of these manuals (which were the same as those later widely adopted in Peru), see K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 46-47. imposible es morir ." Universidad sata42. Ranulfo Cavero, UNSCH, *. nizada, as/ixiada y violentada (Huancayo: Naokim Editores, 2005), 43-44; .

.

interview with JoséCoronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; Degregori, La revolución de los manuales," 116. 43. Iván Hinojosa, "On Poor Relations and the Nouveau Riche: Shining Path and the Radical Peruvian Left" in Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths, 65. On the radicalization of Peruvian universities in the 1970s, see Nicolás Lynch, Los ovenes rojos de San Marcos: El radicalismo universitario de los anos setenta

(Lima: El Zorro de Abajo Ediciones, 1990). 44. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006. Also inter view with 2enón Naveda in Lima on September 20, 2006. 45. Carlos Castillo Rios, La educación en Chima: Una pedagogia revoluciond ria (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1973); Oswaldo Reynoso, Los ewnucos mortales

(Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 1995); Miguel Gutiérrez, Babel. el paraiso (Lima: Colmillo Blanco Editorial, 1993). Gutiérrez worked in China trom 1976 to 1979 and Reynoso from 1977 to 1989. See also Cesar Angeles L., "El socialismo en la novela peruana (o viaje a la China de Miguel Gutierrez

y Oswaldo Reynoso)" lntermezzo Tropical 4 (July 2006):75-86. 46. Hinojosa, "On Poor Relations and the Nouveau Riche," 72. 47. Orin Starn, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 1999).

108

Notes

48. CVR interview with Abimaei Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on May 28, 2002, 27; "Nosotros nos vamos a separar em febrero del 70, en el 71 tenemos una li Sesión Plenaria del Comité Central en Ayacucho, éramos doce, jdoce personas, nada más!, y en el Peru cincuenta y tantos."

49. Ibid. The name " sendero luminoso," or "Shining Path," is unofficial. Sendero always referred to itself as the PCP, but due to the piethora of other PCP factions also calling themselves the PCP, Sendero became known by its slogan

"por el sendero luminoso de Mariátegui,"

which

appeared (with some

varia-

tion in wording) on the mastheads of some of its publications. S0. Degregori, El surgimiento de sendero huminoso, 185-186. 51. Cavero, UNSCH, 33-35; CVR interview with Carlos Tapia in Lima on June

29, 2002, 4-5. 52. Sendero itself uses this term, "generated organization," for the mass organi zations it leads. It signifies that the organizations were created ("generated")

by the party.

53. Degregori, El surgimiento de sendero lurminoso, 184-185; interview with

José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; Catalina Adrianzén, "Semblanza de Antonio Diaz Martinez (asesnado en el Penal de Lurigancho, Lima, el 19 de junio de 1986),* Boletin Amerncanista 38 (1988): 24-25. Diaz and other Latin Americans who didn't speak Mandarin would retine first drafts of Chinese to Span1sh translations done by Chinese translators.

54. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006.

55. Abimael Guzmán Reynoso: Una aproximac1ón a su vida y pensamiento politico," 4-5, 13 on DPI reel 12 and SIN Report (n.d., but appears to be

irom 1987) on DPl reel 9. According to this source, Guzmán was brielly arrested in 1972 and 1979 because of violent protests against clos1ng the school. However, these are the only relerences I have found to Guzmán's arrests for protests at the Exuela de Apiicación Guamán Poma de Ayala. It seems strange that this detaul would be msung in other sources on the history of the Shinung Path. Given that this source is a polue report that synthesizes earlier polace records on Guzman, it may indi ate that arrest warrants were ISsued but that he was not in tact arrested.

S6. Plan of Investugation in the Courntrysude." Thus document can be found at the CVR's arch1ve in Lama, Carpeta 0457-0475, docunent 0462. 57. The quote is from the last page of the document betore page numeration

begins. 58. Ibid., 25. S9. The most authoritatnve, crtwal Engush translation of this document is Mao Zedong, "Oppose Book1sm, in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to "

Power: Revolbutionary Wrtings, 1912-1949 (Armonk, NY. M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 3:419-426. The Chinese word benbenzhuyi can be translated as either

bookism" or "book worship." Earl1er translations of the document pub lashed in Beijung used the term "book worship" rather than "book1sm." 60. "Plan de investigacion en el campo,

.

61. Ibid., 17. 62. Ibid., 10. 63. "Retomemos a Mariátegui y reconstituyamos su partido," in Luis Arce Borja,

ed., Guerra popular en el Perá: El pensamiento Gonzalo, 59-92 (Brussels: Luis Arce Borja, 1989).

64. Ibid., 72

65. Whether Guzman is correct or not in his claim that he is taithtully interpret the scope of this is ng Mariategui by cast1ng h1m in this Maoist lught beyond have chapter. Some Peruvan intellectuals, such as Alberto Flores Galindo,

Notes

109

tried to rescue Mariátegui from the Peruvian communist left. See lván Hino del Diluvio)," Quehacer 88 (marzol josa, "El Retorno de Mariátegui (Después abril 1994): 87-91 and Alberto Flores Galindo, La agonia de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern (Lima: DESCO, 1982). But certainly many Peruvians have found Guzmán's arguments about the convergence between

Mariátegui and Mao plausible. 66. Guzmán, "Retomemos a Mariátegui y reconstituyamos su partido," 75.

67. 1bid., 81. 68. lbid., 90. 69. Antonio Diaz Martinez, China: La revolución agraria (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1978), 16. 70. 1bid., 22-47. 71. Ibid., 16. 72. Ibid., 52, 121-122, 143. 73. Tbid., 91. Needless to say, had the "transforming nature based on the collective force of the masses" side not triumphed, the canal would not have been built and the example would not have made it into Díaz's book. 74. Ibid., 36. 75. On Quintanilla and Mezzich, and the peasant movements they participated in, see Lino Quintanilla, Andahuaylas: La lucha por la tierra (Lima: Mosca

Azul Editores, 1981) and Florencia Mallon, "Chronicle of a Path Foretold?

Velasco's Revolution, Vanguardia Revolucionaria, and 'Shining Omens' in the Indigenous Communities of Andahuaylas," in Steve Stern, ed., J. Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). On the incorporation of their organization into Sendero, see "Abimael Guzmán Reynoso: Una aproximación a su vida y pensamiento político," 18 on DPI reel 12 and José Luis Rénique, La batalla por Puno: Conflicto agrario y nación en los Andes peruanos (Lima: Instituto de Estu dios Peruanos, 2004), 205-207. \While Mallon was uncertain whether or not Quintanilla had joined Sendero, his membership has now been well established. See also Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR) interview with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on January 27, 2003, 12-13. 76. On Sendero's build-up to war in 1980 and the internal struggle in Sendero, see Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of thee Millenarian War in

Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 21-36, for a succinct summary. Guzmán's notes on the ninth plenary session of the central

77.

78. 79. 80.

committee (May-June 1979) are particularly helpful for conceptualizing this process. These notes are held at the archive of the Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación in Lima. Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacu cho, 1895-1980 (Stanford, CA: Staníord University Press, 2010), 173-185. Gorriti, The Shining Path, 17. Gorriti, The Shining Path, 55-56, 67. For examples, see Billie Jean lsbell, "Shining Path and Peasant Responses in Rural Ayacucho," and Ronald H. Berg, "Peasant Responses to Shining Path in Andahuaylas," in David Scott Palmer, ed., Shining Path of Peru and Nelson Manrique, "The War for the Central Sierra," in Stern, ed., Shinng and

Other Paths.See also Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian

Reform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 81. Carlos Iván Degregori, "Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho," in Stern, ed., Shiming and Other Paths. 82. There is some danger here of overgeneralizing the experience ot pea sant

communities with Sendero. The many local studies of Sendero and peasant

110

Notes communities show that there was considerable variation in communities"

experience with Sendero. See the various local studies in Palmer, ed., Shin img Path of Peru and Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths, as well as Gorriti,

The Shining P'ath; Rénique, La batalla por Puno, Lewis Taylor, Shiming Path Guerilla War m Perw's Northem Highlands, 1980-1997 (Liverpool: Liver From Victims to Heroe5 University Press, 2006) and Mario Fumerton, pool Peasant CownterRebellhon and Cunl War m Ayacncho, Peru, 1980-2000 (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publ1shers, 2002). the Chinese practice of referring to to 1982, the PCP-SL had followed 83 Prior tself as Marxist-Leninist and referring to its ideology as Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought. The adoption of Marxism-Len1nism-Maorsm conve and later "Gonzalo niently allowed the PCP-SIL to add first "Guding Thought" Fundamen"Documentos PCP-SL, Thought to the name of its ideology. See Gonzalo, 395-411 tales," in Guerra popular en el Peri: El pensamento en el Perú, 181Guerra in popular 84. Desarroliemos la guerra de guerrillas," 204 de guerrillas para conquistar el poder 85. "No votar: Sino general1zar la guerra Guerra popular en el Ptri, 205-216. para el pueblo," in desarroldel Perú, ;Superar el recodo, 86. Comité Central, Partido Comun1sta lando la guerra popular! (Peru: 1995). Ediciones Voz Popular, 1983), n.p. 87. Documentos de Información (Peru: el silencio: Raucana, historia de 88. Carlos Alberto Cast1llo Vargas, "Rompiendo cómo se formó del Partido Comunista del Perú, o una posible base de apoyo Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, (Lic. thesis, Universidad el 'nuevo poder." 2006), 132. see Allyn RickChinese practices of prisoner reform, 89. Ibid., 135-136. On China Books, Prisoners of Liberation (San Francisco: ett and Adele Rickett,

1981). NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 2007. Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 1. Interview with Jorge In cell. name of their were told to change the Echazú and his comrades Stalin by sudden and surprising criticisms of Echazú's telling of the story, the to Echazú and leaders communist Bolivian Khrushchev were explained by the to "he killed people." his cell-mates as amounting the 1930s. but much less dramatically so than in 2. This remains the case today, ¬haco Wa, of the and more generally on the impact 3.For population growth A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles see Laura Gotkowitz, 1880-1952 (Durham, NC: Duke Universie for Land and Justice m Bolvia, Press, 2007), 107. 1941 and the PIR in 1940. 4. The MNR was founded m revolución nacional irom Herbert Klein, Origenes de la 5. Both quores taken la "Juventud," Editor1al del Chaco (La Paz: bolviana: La cnsis de generacton

1968),392-393. 6. Ibid., 393-394

1912 at the t n e ot the of the condtions of ndigenous peasants the of "The Donestie Dynamics revoluton can be tound n Alan Kughe, and Grndle S. m Merilee Mexican and Bol1van Revoluuons Comnpared," Bolvia in Comparative Per Revolution: Pilar Donungo, eds., Proclamung 59. latin American Studies, 2003), spective (London: Insttule of 1952Boliva, in Polucal Struggle Kebellon vn the Vens:

7. A summary

8.

James LDunkerley,

1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 6-7

Notes

111

9. On the strike, the PlR and the MNR, see Klein, Orígenes de la revolución nacional boriama, 409-410; Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights, 168-169. 10. Dunkerley, Rebelhon in the Veins, 42. 11. lbid., 85-86 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Central Obrera Boliviana, Programa ideológico y estatutos de la Central Obrera Boliana: Aprobados por el Congreso Nacional de Trabajadores (La Paz: COB, 1954), 13-14.

14. Who was also a noted imternational supporter of the MNR. 1S. Mario Torres Calleja, China-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos (La Paz: Empresa Editora

Universo," 1961), 21-22. Quiroga Galdo, Chima: los Libres," 1960), 13.

16. German

Gigante despierto (Bolivia: Ediciones "Pueb

17. Torres, Chma-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos, 38. 18. Ibid., 14-16. 19. Quiroga, Chi»a, 30. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. lbid., 48. 22. Ibid., 45. 23. Ibid., 288. 24. lbid., 19-20. 25. bid., 280, 282-283. 26. Ibid., 273-278. 27. Torres, China-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos, S1-54. 28. Ibid., S5.

29. Ibid., 5. 30. Ibid., S1. 31. Ricardo Anaya, "Las conunas populares en la economia china" Revista de

la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas 2, no. 2 (julio 1961): 17-27. 32. 1bid., 27. 33. Jesús Lara, Flor de loto: Mensaje de amor a la mujer china (Cochabamba:

Editorial América, 1960). 34. Ibid., 45-46. 35. 1bid., 49-50. 36. Ibid., 46.

37. Quotations are in Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 109. 38. Interview with Edgar Ramírez in La Paz on February 15, 2007; interview

with Félix Muruchi in La Paz on March 12, 2007; interview with Victor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007; interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007; Partido Comunista de Bolivia, Documentos del 11 Congreso Nacional del P.C.B. (La Paz: Publicaciones

P.B., 1964); Luis Oporto Ordónez, "La mina de "Siglo XX* (Potosi)

en la historia reciente: Federico Escóbar Zapata, 1924-1966," Revista del Museo Nacional de Etnografia y Folklore 5 (1995): 25-36; Federico

Escóbar Zapata, "Mi vida," Cultura boliviana 4 (May 1964): 7-9, Par tido Comunista de Bolivia (Marxista-Leninista), Federico Escóbar Zapata: Hijo de la clase obrera (La Paz: Ediciones Liberación, 1974). One can get a sense of the daily lives and struggles of the miners at Siglo XX in Domitila

Barrios de Chungara, with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (New York: Montrhly Review

Press, 1978). 39. Interview with Emilse Escóbar in La Paz on March 2, 2007. 40. Interview with Victor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007; interview with

Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007.

cell. About ten 41. The most basic organizational unit ot the PCB was the party names. had a cell. Many cells to twelve members would comprise some of the cultural confusion that illustrates 42. Arratia has an anecdote that train in could take place in this international milieu. When she got off the

Bucharest, the young man whose job it was to officially greet arriving delegacheek and once on the tions weleomed the Bolivian by kissing her on each mouth.

She promptly slapped him.

La Paz on March 1, 2007. 43. Interview with Diva Arratia del Rio in on March 13, 2007. 44. Interview with Victor Reinaga in La Paz March 20, 2007. 45. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on

46. Everyone I interviewed who had attended the PCB{ML)'s founding congress attested to Guevara's role in providing funds via Zamora for the conference, Cuba's deportation of Maoist students. The meaning of Gue

prior despite vara's support for the founding of the PCB(ML), although a tempting subjecr to speculate on, will have to await the attention of someone with more expert knowledge of Guevara.

rank-and-file miners 47. One gets a good sense of the issues most dear to the Me Speak! and in Domitila Barrios de Chungara, with Moema Viezzer, Let María L. Lagos, Nos hemos forjado así: al rojo vivo y a puro golpe. Historias

del Comité de Amas de Casa de Siglo XX (La Paz: Plural Editores, 2006). interview with 48. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007; with Diva Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007; interview

Arratia del Río in La Paz on March 1, 2007; interview with Hugo Borda in La

Paz on March 11, 2007; interview with Víctor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007; interview with Eduardo Ayllón on July 15, 2010, in La Paz. 49. This brief and unsuccessful attempt to launch a Maoist "people's war" is sometimes noted in histories of Bolivia but has yet to be studied in its own for Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 190-191 and

right. See,

example,

Xavier Albó, *From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari," in Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 407-410.

50. Even today, Brazil registers land titles to Brazilian settlers within Bolivia, and a substantial part of eastern Bolivia along the Brazilian border has effectively been colonized by Brazil. See Ramiro V. Paz, Dominio Amazónico, 2nd ed. (Santa Cruz: Impresiones San Antonio, 2005). S1. Interview with Hugo Borda in La Paz on March 11, 2007.

52. Interview with Oscar Vega in La Paz on February 7, 2007. During my vari ous meetings with Vega, who enthusiastically did what he could to aid my research while I was in La Paz, the close connections between ABACH and

the Chinese embassy were demonstrated by repeated interruptions of our meetings by phone calls with the Chinese embassy. 53. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: 1-Apuntes, 1957-1966 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1973), 3:101. 2. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2-3.

3. Whether Wolin's description really does apply to France, I cannot say. But given the relationships that Latin American Maoists had with French Maoists, and Wolin's lack of attention to Charles Betelheim, a French professor who

Notes

113

played a key role in international Maoist nerworks (and who we met briefly in

Chapter 4), I suspect that he is wrong on this pointin regard to France as well. 4. Interview with Simitrio Tzompazquelitl in Mexico City on March 21, 2006.

Tzompazquelitl later did a lengthy stint in prison for organizing street vendors into a Maoist union.

5. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 212-213, 362 nl39. While Gaddis is inspired to use the term from a similar discussion in Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalim to

Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 214-215,

Gaddis is the one who fleshes the idea out. 6. Gaddis, We Now Know. 7. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Declime and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788; London: Penguin, 1994), 3:182.

8. Prasenjit Duara, "The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive

Essay," Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 264. 9. Cárdenas, Obras, 3:101 10. For a discussion of efforts, especially by historians of Latin America, to move beyond the historiography centered on the heights of diplomacy and politics Moscow and Washington, see Gilbert M. Joseph, "What We Now Know

and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaninghully into Cold War Studies," in Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke Universiry

Press, 2008), 16-29. For recent works that do examine connections berween Latin America and other regions of the global south during the Cold War, see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa,

1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: Universiry ofNorth Carolina Press, 2002) Missions and Jerry Dávila, Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolo nization, 1950-1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

11. Franz Schurmann's concept of Chinese communist ideology as a "closed com munications system" is a useful starting point for approaching the works of the Shining Path and other communist groups. A "closed communications system employs common categories of thought and a common language

that requires special training to understand and use. Franz Schurmann, ldeology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), S8.

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