Review of Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru

Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru
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On: 2003-05-05

After the Spanish conquest of Peru noblemen (encomenderos) responsible for administering the land were granted the labor of an Indian community. Minor judicial officials (corregidores) were supposed to defend Indian rights. In practice, the encomenderos and corregidores, and later the mestizos seized the lands. They indentured the Indians as tenant farmers, sold them into slave labor, or drove them out of the fertile river valleys into the mountains. By 1964, 200 years of Spanish rule had cut the Quechua population in half and the large landholders (gamonales or hacendados) that constituted only one percent of Peruvian farmers held 62% of the land.

Peasant land invasions in the sierra began in 1952; the first peasant union (sindicato) was formed in 1957. The formation of sindicatos, peasant strikes, and land invasions in the sierra continued through the 1960Ã½s and marginally improved the peasant condition. (Ibid.)

In 1958, the charismatic Hugo Blanco, a Quechua Trotskyite educated in Argentina, began organizing peasant strikes in Cuzco. About four years later Blanco and a small band of Indians formed a militia and engaged in guerrilla warfare in La ConvenciÃ³n and Lares provinces near Cuzco. On Christmas day 1962, thirty peasants and five policemen died in a clash. The government formally charged Hugo Blanco for the deaths. In May 1963 troops consisting of Guardia Civil and Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP) encountered Hugo Blanco and his militia group. Fortunately for Blanco, a PIP officer discovered him first as the Guardia Civil officer had orders to assassinate him. The government held Blanco for three years before judging and sentencing him to twenty-years in prison. The Velasco government exiled Blanco in 1971. He published Land or Death the following year. In late 1992, Hugo Blanco was in Mexico recovering from a brain hematoma. (Hugo Blanco, Land or Death and various other sources.)

I read this book while researching the politics of Peru in the 1960Ã½s for a novel I am writing. Unless you have a similar interest in these peasant uprisings from the point of view of a Trotskyite fomenting revolution, or BlancoÃ½s candid appraisal as to why revolution failed, or insight into the mind of a Communist revolutionary, do not waste your time with this book. It is poorly written, or badly translated, or both, and the Communist rhetoric is tedious.