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Peru: “Neither imitation nor copy”, an example!

Peru is a country with a long revolutionary tradition and has a combative people who have always built their history on the streets and in combat, from their resistance to the Spanish invader, to the present day.

Peru is a country that has achieved land reform. She was not a gift from General Velazco in 1978 as official history tries to tell. It began in 1963 with the struggle of the Indigenous peoples and peasants under Hugo Blanco’s leadership in the lands of Convención y Lares, including in arms, to defend themselves against the landlords who murdered, enslaved, and even branded the skin of the Indigenous who considered their property.

Peruvian women have, since Ni Una Menos movement, starred in the struggle against patriarchy and for a way out in which the de facto power they have in that society is also a power of law. Peru resists fighting from north to south to the proliferation of large mining that destroys the environment and contaminates the waters for the profit of the few. Peru, in the streets, embodies a major fight against corruption that has contaminated the political system in a collusion between Brazilian contractors and Peruvian governments, from Fujimori, through Alan García, Humala, PPK and now arriving Vizcarra. Since birth, Peru resists. Now, history again calls that country to set an example in the crisis in Latin America, in this gap between the death of the old and the birth of the new.

We went through Latin America by closing one cycle and opening another. A cycle inaugurated by rebellions against neoliberalism. From Caracazo to Argentinazo, through the uprisings in Ecuador and Bolivia that marked the first decade of the 2000s. A cycle closed by governments (independents of imperialism under the leadership of Chavez and social liberals under the leadership of Lula) that did not break with the logic of currency-rich underdevelopment and the corrupt political regimes captured by large capitalist corporations. In this interregnum, morbid elements like Bolsonaros, Piñeras, and Macris emerge. They wear the rags of the past and their deepest program that solves the crisis, but there are also important social and political movements that can give new meaning to the struggles and, from the honest balance of “progressive” experiences, overcome betrayals and misconceptions by pointing out a socialist overcoming of the crisis we are going through. Parties such as Social Convergence (FA) in Chile, PSOL in Brazil and Nuevo Perú are political expressions of this need. Puerto Rico and the insurrection that took the president show what is the right method, the independent action of the masses.

Peru was a late victim of the general determinations of the “progressive” wave. It had Humala’s nationalism moderated by Lula and the interests of Odebrecht. It received a level of unsustainable corruption in the construction package of Brazilian contractors that led the political regime to collapse, three former presidents to prison, one to suicide and the population to revolt. But the Peruvian left wing knew how to break and build in time a referent outside the “progressive” class conciliation. Nuevo Perú and its leaders, such as Verónika Mendoza and Tito Prado, have committed to mobilization as a means of fighting corruption and have insisted on the need for new elections and a new constitution for the country. They won the first round. They have bet on the possibility of building the new, the development of the new social and political movements, without longing for the old left. Peru makes its way ni calco ni copia, as Mariátegui said, once again gives us an example and we need to learn from it.

Bernardo Corrêa
(MES and PSOL leader / participated in the Nuevo Perú International Relations Commission)


Writing office

  • Pedro Fuentes
  • Bernardo Corrêa
  • Charles Rosa
  • Clara Baeder