Mural in southern Stockholm commemorating the day of Heroism.
“The blood that was spilled will never be forgotten”
– Revolutionary prisoner within the Canto Grande prison 1991.
Every year on June 19, Heroism Day is celebrated in Peru and around the world. The day commemorates the uprising among prisoners of war in Peru who fought to defend the revolution and their lives during the most brutal prison massacres in 1986.
On that day, in the midst of the people’s war, the so-called “leftist government” in Peru carried out a massacre of hundreds of revolutionary prisoners of war. The prisoners had taken over their prison and turned it into another trench in the service of the revolution, and even when confronted with a combined attack by the air force, army, navy, and police forces, the revolutionary fighters fought to the death rather than surrender. Hundreds were murdered, without trial and in the most brutal manner. This murder did not come easily, and it is the heroic resistance of the prisoners that provides us with the most powerful ideological lessons and examples for us today.
The Peruvian state, cowardly as they are, murdered around 300 prisoners of war who had turned their prison cells into part of the people’s war. These daughters and sons of the people showed what it means to persevere in the revolution, to never give up even under the most difficult circumstances.
When the People’s War in Peru, which began in 1980, gained momentum under the leadership of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) and its chairman Gonzalo, people from all corners of the country were mobilized in the People’s War. In order for the lackeys of imperialism in Peru to maintain their position, the most cruel methods were used. Especially after the PCP’s successful organized breakouts of prisoners of war, most spectacularly the guerrilla attack on a prison in Ayacucho that freed hundreds of prisoners, the reactionary regime adopted a policy of concentrating “suspected terrorists” in prisons in Lima. But even behind bars, these prisoners did not give up. The fighters lived collectively, as far as possible in these hellholes, in order to better resist the enemy’s attempts to break down their bodies and minds. They carried out political, ideological, and physical training and produced art and crafts intended to support and spur on the people’s war in Peru and the revolution throughout the world.
One of the most famous of these was a magnificent multicolored carpet celebrating the founding of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, with the symbol of the globe breaking free from its chains. This concrete evidence of proletarian internationalist politics and indomitable Maoist spirit was smuggled out of the prison on El Fronton Island and taken on a world tour in support of the People’s War, astonishing and inspiring the thousands of people in Asia, Europe, and America who saw it. The paintings, recorded revolutionary choral music, and other works of art produced by the prisoners helped promote and finance the worldwide movement in support of the People’s War in Peru, and together with the poems, songs, plays, and other works created while they were in the clutches of the enemy, they continue to play a role in the struggle today.
Instead of being “taken out of action” when they were captured, these men and women continued to strive to give concrete expression to the slogan “it is right to rebel” in every way they could. Most importantly, they found ways to use their collective strength and the government’s inability to extinguish their burning spark to expose the regime and call on the millions of masses to support and wage an ever-growing people’s war. When it became clear that the authorities intended to try to “solve” the problem through desperate and bloody measures, with transfers and killings, the prisoners took over the country’s most important institutions for political prisoners and declared: “We will resist. They will not take us out of here alive. We demand guarantees against the government’s plans.”
The government shamelessly pretended to negotiate with the prisoners, who had made reasonable demands that the government comply with a previous agreement to recognize them as “special prisoners” and not as “terrorist criminals,” and that the transfers be halted. But soon the government carried out the massacres it had long planned. It sent in its marines armed with heavy machine guns and anti-tank weapons, combat helicopters, and naval artillery. The prisoners in El Fronton held out for two days of close combat with the help of slingshots, homemade crossbows, and a small handful of captured weapons. The prisoners in Lurigancho held off the armed forces’ commandos and marines for a whole day; most of the prisoners were methodically murdered after the prison was recaptured. The fighters at the women’s prison in Callao also held off the enemy for about 24 hours, at the cost of several dead and many wounded.
As we know, this despicable act by the regime backfired. It helped to expose and isolate the regime and to show millions of people that the people’s war, under the leadership of the PCP, is the only way to solve Peru’s problems. Instead of the political defeat that the regime had sought to inflict on the People’s War by “reestablishing its authority” and demonstrating its endless capacity for genocide, it was the prisoners who dealt a blow to the Peruvian reaction and its imperialist lackeys.
But the enemy’s thirst for the blood of the people is, of course, never quenched. In 1992, when the Fujimori government was planning yet another massacre in the Canto Grande prison in Lima, the prisoners occupied the men’s and women’s wings and demanded that a commission be set up to monitor the planned transfers of prisoners and guarantee their lives. On May 6, Fujimori sent in 500 elite soldiers with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, dynamite bags, and plastic explosives, as well as a combat helicopter with rockets. When they were repelled, a thousand soldiers tried to storm the prison the next day, again in vain. Finally, on May 9, the female and male prisoners concluded that they had fully achieved their goals and marched out arm in arm singing the Internationale. The cowardly reactionary beasts singled out and murdered many prisoners suspected of being leaders. Among these communist heroes were several very important party members.
Despite the difficulties faced by the People’s War after Chairman Gonzalo was captured in September 1992, the People’s War in Peru has never ceased. Even though imperialism and reaction, together with revisionism, have done everything in their power to crush the party and the revolution, they are failing day by day. New power continues to develop, and the People’s War continues to expand.
As part of this, the PCP has continued, despite the ongoing genocide by the fascist Peruvian state, to fight in the spirit expressed by Chairman Gonzalo in his historic speech on September 24, 1992. From inside a cage, where the government tried to humiliate him and the entire revolution in front of the press, he dismissed his prison sentence as simply “a bend in the road.” He defiantly called for the continuation of the people’s war, declaring: “Even if the road is long, we will walk it to the end. We will reach our goal and we will win. You will see it.”
From the prisons, the reaction, the Peruvian state under the leadership of Yankee imperialism, gave birth to the right-opportunist line (ROL). This ROL, organized from the reaction with capitulationists, is the head of the new revisionism through its denial of Gonzalo’s thinking and of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. They have waged tremendous campaigns of lies against the PKP and Chairman Gonzalo in order to declare the People’s War and the Party dead, Gonzalo a “renegade from terrorism” and a capitulator. The ROL denies the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of the Third World countries. They say that they have ceased to be so because of “neoliberalism,” which has been applied since the early 1990s and, in Peru’s case, also because semi-feudal relations were destroyed by the People’s War and Peru became a dependent capitalist country, and “that the current struggle is for democratic rights, a new constitution, and sovereignty.” Thus, these renegades deny what has been established by Maoism and Gonzalo’s thinking—imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism, and semi-feudalism cannot be crushed by anything other than the new democratic revolution carried out, defended, and developed with people’s war that continues uninterrupted all the way to communism.
The Day of Heroism urges us to fight harder and more resolutely against imperialism, the global system that brings war, misery, poverty, and starvation to the peoples of the world; against reaction, all those who defend in various ways the continued existence of the current order; and against revisionism, all those who distort the people’s struggle and lead it astray.
Uprisings continue to break out among prisoners of war, not only in Peru, but throughout the world. Among comrades fighting in people’s wars and national liberation struggles around the world, the reactionaries are using the most horrific measures against the people’s fighters. In the people’s wars in Peru, Turkey, India, and the Philippines, countless comrades are behind bars. In Palestine, resistance fighters are being imprisoned throughout the country. This day shows that even under the most difficult circumstances, the revolution can continue, that it is not external but internal factors that are decisive, that it is the political and ideological line and unwavering determination that prove stronger than the enemy’s unlimited capacity for terror.
We salute the Communist Party of Peru, the red faction of the international communist movement, the combatants of the People’s Liberation Army, and the masses participating in the people’s war. Continue to embody the day of heroism. The people’s war is invincible! Long live the people’s war in Peru!