Hugo Blanco (1934–2023) was a Peruvian revolutionary involved in grassroots struggles across Peru, Latin America and the world.
He led a militant fight for land rights in Peru in the 1960s, for which the Ricardo Pérez Godoy military junta sentenced him to death. However, domestic and international pressure reduced this to a 25-year prison sentence.
Blanco was eventually pardoned in 1970 after eight years’ imprisonment, but was immediately exiled from the country on his release.
Blanco was arrested, imprisoned and exiled from Peru many times for his revolutionary activism and organising grassroots resistance.
He was in Chile during the United States-backed coup against Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship.
Blanco is recognised as a pioneer of ecosocialism, a relentless fighter for Indigenous rights and for his longstanding commitment to internationalism.
June 25 marked two years since Blanco’s death at 88. María Blanco — an activist and organiser with grassroots feminist collective Género Rebelde — sat down with Green Left’s Ben Radford, on June 26, to talk about her father’s life and legacy.
***
Your father left a mark on Peru and across the whole continent, even the world. What are some of the enduring elements of his legacy?
I think it’s the struggle for land, water and territory — and the fight against colonialism. It was from the start and continued to be so throughout his life. And then, internationalism — the idea that no struggle can survive in isolation.
Solidarity, as the Mexicans say, is the tenderness of the people. That’s fundamental for a movement or a social struggle to survive and endure over time.
It seems your father had an inclusive way of working with people, of not taking a sectarian approach…
Yes, I think so. My dad was a Trotskyist for a good part of his life. This was when the Berlin Wall was still standing. People who were left-wing but disagreed with Stalinism were hunted down and assassinated. When Stalin turned his back on internationalism, deciding to focus on Russia rather than pushing for international revolution, all of that helped kill the [Russian] revolution.
So, I think my dad saw a lot of sense in being Trotskyist, because in Trotskyism there was space for different opinions, and there was always that internationalist perspective.
But when the Berlin Wall fell, he didn’t really see much sense in being just a Trotskyist anymore. He stopped being involved in parties and stopped believing that parties were going to change things.
He would still sometimes encourage people to vote for a left-wing candidate, but not because he thought that’s how things would change — he always said he didn’t believe that. He thought only social movements and grassroots organising could really make change.
Still, he thought it was good to have MPs from the left, or people who cared about the environment or about [Indigenous] territory.
Your father was a pioneer of ecosocialism, even before it was a widely recognised. What can we learn from his vision of environmental justice?
I think was very important for him — and it is for me, too — that the struggle for environmental justice goes hand in hand with the anti-colonial struggle and with the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal struggle. Because you can’t care for Mother Earth unless we get rid of colonial capitalism. That’s also tied up with the patriarchal system.
None of those systems care for the Earth. On the contrary, they see it as an object to be exploited, violated, conquered.
When there is no more colonialism, the peoples who have always lived in a different way with nature — flowing with it, instead of fighting or trying to dominate it — will hopefully be able to live that way again.
Of course, that might sound a bit idealistic, because nowadays even some Indigenous communities are involved in mining or illegal logging. But generally speaking, you could say that Indigenous peoples will return to protecting their water and territory.
As we see, for example, with the Wampís in northern Peru — the Indigenous peoples from the northern Amazon. They’ve created their own nation, the Wampís Nation, and they’re achieving a new level of autonomy to combat the illegal loggers — basically organised crime —operating in the north. The police do nothing. In fact, they’re in cahoots with the loggers.
The Wampís also defend their territory from illegal mining. Just this month, they asked the government for help in expelling illegal mining activities from their rivers. The government did not respond, so the Wampís Nation announced that they would begin their own territorial self-defence operations.
So, the Wampís now look after their own safety, and the safety of their forest and river.
This idea of declaring autonomous governments, which has taken root in the Amazon — other Indigenous peoples in the Amazon have followed that path. There are maybe three others that have declared autonomous governments.
I always support the fight for autonomy — I think it’s a very important path, and it’s something you see in many places.
Other powerful international examples are the women of Rojava in Kurdistan, and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. But there are many others fighting for autonomy too.
Here in the Peruvian highlands, we have the rondas campesinas [community-based security] — a way of patrolling your territory without weapons and controlling who comes in and out. It’s also a way of keeping out, for example, mining companies or illegal loggers.
I believe in strengthening the rondas campesinas. In Jauja [a city and province in the central highlands], they’re strong. The rondas are the strongest in Cajamarca [a city in Peru’s northern highlands] — they managed to halt mining giants [Newmont and Buenaventura, who planned to open the Conga gold and copper mine]. One of the land defenders, Máxima Acuña, won the Goldman Environmental Prize [in 2016] as a result.
Here, the rondas are not as strong yet, but there are initiatives.
For example, in Pisac, there’s a community with a ronda, the community of Paru Paru, and in Calca there are communities with their own rondas. There are similar initiatives in other countries as well.
In Guatemala, for example, there was something very beautiful, in response to the genocide there in the early 1980s. When it had been one year since my father’s death — now it’s two — some of us from the editorial team of Lucha Indígena [Indigenous Struggle], the newspaper he founded, decided to travel and visit Indigenous communities and organisations defending water and territory, to commemorate his internationalism and struggle.
We visited many organisations and communities in Mexico and Guatemala.
In Guatemala, some communities had survived the genocide by hiding in the jungle for 12–13 years, constantly moving and resisting the military. They formed completely autonomous communities, with their own education and style of religion — Christian Catholic, but very influenced by liberation theology and the Mayan cosmovision, with women preaching, which you never see in Catholicism elsewhere.
I think that autonomy, wherever it’s created, is vital — a powerful form of resistance and also a kind of life insurance, you could say, against an increasingly predatory colonial capitalism.
Do you have any other examples?
Autonomous struggles exist everywhere. Wherever you travel — if you’re looking for them, you’ll find them.
We should support them, help them, drive them — and help them connect with one another. I think that’s also hugely important, so that they have the solidarity they need when the time comes.
In Mexico, you could really see that — there was so much solidarity among different collectives, groups and organisations. That’s because many of those groups are linked to the National Indigenous Congress, which was promoted by the Zapatistas — so they’ve got this network, nationally. I’d love to see something like that in Peru.
In Mexico, when there’s repression somewhere, everyone in the National Indigenous Congress speaks out, posts on social media, organises actions and so on. That really helps — it can lead to the release of detained activists, for example.
We met one group called the Apizacan Democratic and Independent People’s Union [UPADI]. It’s an organisation that started as a railway workers’ union, because Apizaco is a town that grew around the railway, in Tlaxcala, not far from Mexico City.
When the railway shut down, many of the workers started small businesses — some became street vendors, others opened market stalls. They stayed together in UPADI, looking out for each other — making sure street vendors weren’t thrown out, that market owners didn’t overcharge for rent, electricity, water and so on.
They’re still very organised — they’ve also declared themselves part of the National Indigenous Congress and they show solidarity with what’s happening in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico — and they also receive solidarity in return.
They operate very much like a union — every time a new mayor takes office, they negotiate with them as a strong, united organisation. The authorities don’t dare raise their water, electricity or property tax rates ... because they know they’ll fight back hard.