By La Jornada, June 26, 2023
Mexico City. The union and peasant leader and former Peruvian guerrilla, Ángel Hugo Blanco Galdos, died yesterday in Sweden at the age of 88. He was an integral part of the Latin American left since the 1950s and spent 40 years of his life in and out of prison and in exile.
Born in Cuzco on November 15, 1934, Blanco Galdos was a leader of the indigenous peasant struggle that culminated in the agrarian reform of 1968, and participated in the Constituent Assembly of 1978.
His father was a peasant defense attorney, so he learned Quechua from a young age. He adopted the concept of "ecosocialism" with which he proclaimed the right of indigenous people to defend their lands from environmental damage caused by business.
In his childhood he was changed when he found out that a landowner marked his initials on the buttock of an indigenous man with a hot iron, a practice known as carimba, Blanco Galdos recounted during an interview with the Fourth International in 2015.
He began studying agronomy in La Plata, Argentina, in 1954, "because I liked the countryside," and he admitted that "the 1910 Revolution in Mexico influenced Cuzco."
He dropped out of school when he became interested in worker and union causes that led him, during his life, to travel to Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and the United States.
In his youth he sought to soak up the thought of the left, among Trotskyist groups. "At that time the approach was that the proletariat was the vanguard, and since there were no proletarians in Cuzco, I came to Lima to enter factories." He indicated that it took time to find a large factory, with a union formed, he told La Cuarta.
“I finally found a factory where there was a union (…) and I went to work there. That's when (Richard) Nixon, who was vice president of the United States, arrived in Peru, and among various small groups on the left (...) we prepared a counter-demonstration that turned out to be much larger than we imagined. And then came the repression. I had to leave the factory and I went to Cuzco,” he added.
Between 1961 and 1963 he led a Quechua uprising in that area, where he is considered to have been the bridge between indigenous workers and white intellectuals. He organized some 2,000 peasants in the Departmental Federation of Peasants of Cuzco, who occupied landowners' properties, and formed a self-government, in which Blanco was "secretary of Agrarian Reform."
In August 1962, Blanco with a group of companions founded the guerrilla Remigio Huamán Brigade. “The support of the peasantry was almost absolute, exciting. He fed us, clothed us, guided us, protected us, ”he explained. On May 15, 1963, the army captured him and three years later sentenced him to 25 years in prison on the island of El Frontón. During that time he wrote his book Tierra o Muerte, las luchas campesinas en Perú .
In 1970, the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado granted him an amnesty, but expelled him to Mexico. He then traveled to Argentina, where in 1971 he was deported to Chile; During Augusto Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973, he took refuge in the Swedish embassy. By then, intellectuals from all over the world knew of his struggle and participated in a solidarity campaign on his behalf, supported by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Bertrand Russel.
In 1976 he came to Sweden as a political refugee. The United States Committee for Justice for Political Prisoners in Latin America obtained a visa for him, which allowed him to tour American cities, where in 1977 he spoke before thousands of sympathizers of the worker, peasant, and indigenous movements.
In 1980 he was a deputy and presidential candidate in Peru, for the Left Revolutionary Alliance, and later a senator of the Mariateguista Unified Party until 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori carried out a self-coup. Blanco found out that both Peruvian intelligence and the Shining Path group sentenced him to death and he then took refuge in Mexico.
He declared himself away from Trotskyism in the 1990s. When he was living temporarily in Mexico, the movement of the Zapatista National Liberation Army broke out, which had a strong influence on him.
In 2002 he suffered a stroke in Cuzco and was transferred to Mexico City for treatment, where he remained until 2003. His last years were spent in Sweden, along with his six children and several grandchildren.
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