In Lima, Complexities and Agonies

Last month’s massacre of prisoners being held as terrorists in Peru took place against the backdrop of the 17th postwar congress of the Socialist International. It dramatized the moral and political complexities that can complicate the most decent attempts at solidarity with the wretched of the Earth.

The International went to Peru precisely to show support for Alan Garcia’s new Socialist regime and its refusal to pay more than 10% of its export income to service its foreign debts. Had the congress proceeded normally, there might have been debate over the precise percentage that should cap such payments, but the international had accepted Garcia’s principle a year ago.

More broadly, since 1976 the International has, under the leadership of Willy Brandt, been making the most determined--and partly successful--effort to take democratic socialism out of its European cradle. It has more Latin American than European member parties now; it has played a significant role in trying to mediate the Salvadoran and the Nicaraguan conflicts, and in April it met in Botswana to assert its commitment to the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa.

The Lima congress, then, was to be a celebration of 10 years of Socialist involvement in the Third World as well as an act of solidarity on behalf of a hopeful new Socialist government. Sendero Luminoso, the Khmer Rouge-like guerrilla movement, wanted to disrupt that scenario. The Senderistas, it should be noted, are opposed by Garcia’s Marxist critics on the left as well as by the government.

I arrived four days before the opening of the congress to act as secretary of two committees. Our hotel was ringed by soldiers and police; armed guards were on every floor, and one had to have an identity card with a photo in order to move freely about. It was suggested, however, that we remove our badges when we left the congress perimeter. An excursion to a beach restaurant was haunted by the suspicion that the cab driver might be a political kidnaper.

The uprisings in the prisons began on Wednesday, June 18. By Friday morning, when the congress was scheduled to open with speeches by Brandt and Garcia, we knew that the prisoners had been put down in a bloody assault. In a meeting with Armando Villanueva, the secretary general of Garcia’s party, the Socialist leaders made it emphatically clear that they were deeply disturbed that the first reports indicated that 150 or more prisoners had been killed while 10 attackers had lost their lives. All of them approved the use of legal force to deal with illegal force, yet all felt that excessive, murderous force had been used.

We must be as scrupulous about the rights of prisoners in Peru, one Socialist said, as we are when it comes to Chile. Brandt and several other leaders met with Garcia over the next day or so to convey these sentiments, and found him quite responsive to their concerns. But the mood of the congress had become as bleak as Lima’s winter skies, and we learned that a woman attempting to mortar our opening session had accidentally blown herself up.

At that opening session Garcia gave a radical speech, bitterly attacking capitalist imperialism; Brandt reiterated the Socialist commitment to the Third World; the “International” and the “Marseillaise” were sung by a choir. As our delegation discussed where we would hit the floor in the case of an attack, we wondered how many Americans would understand that the congress was under siege because of its alleged moderation.

Still, Garcia was as good as his word. Within days he had announced that there was indeed evidence that prisoners had been killed while attempting to surrender, and that the guilty would be punished. Villanueva’s home was attacked. A tourist train was blown up. There were reports that the Peruvian right, furious that Garcia had imprisoned some of those responsible for the massacre, was considering a coup d’etat .

So Sendero Luminoso won? It, of course, wants a military takeover and the defeat not simply of Garcia’s Socialists but also of the mass parties that constitute his opposition on the left. The worse, it believes, is the better, for it prepares the way for an apocalyptic victory of the Indians of the interior.

But even if the ultra-left fails in provoking the rightist repression that it wrongly and tragically believes is its road to power, it did indeed disrupt the congress. An event that should have signaled the possibility of north and south working together in the task of democratic development became the stage for a massacre.

Therefore, should the Socialists abandon their belief that democracy and social justice must be international? Of course not. To have gone to Lima is to have understood anew some complexities, indeed some agonies, of the struggle to end the systemic inferiority of the vast majority of humankind. But it is also to have realized how imperative it is that the social and economic sources of desperation and bloodshed be ended once and for all.