Latinnews Archive
Latin American Weekly Report - 22 June 1973
Peru: working class opposition
The opposition of organized labour to the government continues to provide the military regime with its worst problems. President Velasco's 'return' was clearly aimed at distracting attention from the political situation, but he had little new to offer.
The death last week of a worker who had been injured in a clash with police in Chimbote last month, led the Confederacion General de Trabjadores del Peru (CGTP) to call a one-hour general strike on 15 June. The protest will have barely affected production figures but the communist-led CGTP had seemed so cowed recently that it is a measure of the pressure building up from below that a strike was called at all. The government remains in dispute with the country's teachers, and in the northern town of Piura, more than 1,000 secondary school students stoned the local headquarters of the Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilizacion Social (SINAMOS) in protest against the organization's attempt to control every aspect of popular expression.
Strikes and anti-government demonstrations have become epidemic in Peru since the beginning of May, and the carefully staged mass rally to celebrate the return of President Juan Velasco Alvarado to public duties on 7 June was intended to distract attention from a growing atmosphere of political crisis. But anyone expecting an important announcement, which might dramatically advance the Peruvian 'revolution', was disappointed. The President's brief address to a rather thin gathering in the Plaza de Armas seemed principally designed to allay middle class fears concerning possible changes in economic policy, such as the expropriation of private savings to finance social property enterprises, or the oft-denied urban reform.
In Chimbote 3,000 steelworkers who had been striking since the riots on 24 May returned to work on 12 June, under the threat of dismissal if they did not do so. Since then at least 10 arrests have been made by state security agents, including the union leader Jose Gutierrez Rojas. Like Hernan Cuentas at Cuajone, Gutierrez is accused of being a qualified engineer passing himself off as an ordinary labourer in order to stir up trouble amongst the workers. He, along with the other detainees, is labelled as a trotskyist by the authorities.
The trouble in Chimbote, a dreary sprawling town of 250,000 inhabitants, was touched off by a long simmering struggle for control of the local fishermen's union (Chimbote's chaotic growth over the past 20 years has been almost entirely due to the fishmeal boom). The union was until recently one of the main bases of the government-backed Central de Trabajadores de la Revolucion Peruana (CTRP). The dispute led to the calling of a one-day general strike on 24 May by the departmental labour federation (FESIDETA). And this, in turn, sparked the clashes with the police in which a schoolboy was killed and many demonstrators injured. Cristobal Espinola, a member of the CGTP's national executive, was among the wounded, and his subsequent death led the CGTP to call last week's national stoppage. The government, as is now habitual in such cases, declared a state of emergency in the province of Santa, and imposed a curfew. This did not, however, prevent the strike from continuing at the navy-run state steel mill, SIDERPERU, where Espinola worked. The strikers were demanding the punishment of those responsible for the 'massacre.' In circumstances which are still not clear -- though the government called it 'sabotage' -- part of the new cold-rolling mill was flooded, causing damage which officials say will mean importing up to 60 million dollars worth of sheet steel.
Despite last week's protest, the CGTP has not come out against the government. It condemned police brutality, but also blamed 'extremists' and 'saboteurs' in the steel plant. It also disowned responsibility for the sacking of the local SINAMOS office, which was one of the principal targets of the rioters -- as in Piura. But increasingly, Peruvian workers are unwilling to accept the directives of their national leaders. And this poses a tremendous threat to the government's plans for accelerated industrialization -- a process which will depend to a great extent on the cooperation of the workers. But this week mining and metallurgical workers began an indefinite national strike.
With miners beginning marchas de sacrificio from two points in the Andes, and a short-lived general strike in the peaceful Amazonian town of Pucallpa, the panorama was made even worse for the government by the crushing defeat of the SINAMOS-backed 'participationist' candidates to the complex new teachers' cooperative system. The system was designed to put an end, once and for all, to union militancy in the schools, where a devastating strike in September 1971 almost brought the government to its knees. The government denounced an electoral fraud in Lima, where the opposition coalition -- the Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la Ensenanza del Peru (SUTEP) -- won some 95 per cent of the votes. The election was annulled, but this decision was reversed when it became clear that there would be a nationwide strike as a result. The government is now seeking a compromise which would give the participationists a one-third minority representation on the governing body of the cooperative. SUTEP has rejected this too, and a strike still looms.
It is impossible to tell how much of this malaise filtered through to this week's annual meeting of the World Bank's consultative group for Peru in Paris.The finance minister, General Francisco Morales Bermudez, went armed with a shopping list of 87 projects requiring almost 2,000 million dollars in foreign financing. The list includes five items for spending more than 330 million dollars in Chimbote, including expansion of the SIDERPERU complex. If the interest still being shown by an interminable stream of foreign missions passing through Lima is anything to go by, he is likely to return well satisfied with his visit to Europe.
Return to top