Hugo Blanco, who has died aged 88, was Latin America’s best known Trotskyist leader and an indefatigable fighter for land and justice in his native Peru and elsewhere. In the early 1960s, building on existing organisations, he and a handful of others created a peasant federation that challenged the landowners by persuading indentured labourers to go on strike. The son of a mestizo (mixed-race) lawyer father and a small-scale landowning mother, he had won the confidence of the Native Peruvian peasants by working, as they did, on a coffee plantation.
As tensions rose in the Convención valley, around Quillabamba, the police and army were sent in, and violent clashes took place. Blanco was accused of the murder of a policeman and forced to flee deeper into the mountains. “It was not really an armed movement in the classic style,” he said, many years later. “There was no guerrilla foco [nucleus, as in the guerrilla wars based on the Cuban experience] and no political party.” Instead, there was simply a peasant movement, “seeking justice against the feudal property of the landowners”.
Blanco did belong to a political party – the Revolutionary Workers’ party (POR), the Peruvian section of the Fourth International. The POR was the biggest component of a front that Blanco co-organised, known as the Revolutionary Left Front (FIR). But the decision to adopt a tactic of armed self-defence was taken by the peasants, not the party. “Of course, in my head,” said Blanco, “I imagined we would not stop until we seized power, but the people were not thinking like that. That’s why our slogan was not ‘revolution or death’, but ‘land or death’.”
In 1963, Blanco was captured, and narrowly escaped summary execution. He was later held in solitary confinement for three years, despite a significant protest movement that sought to free him. Meanwhile, the military government implemented a rudimentary agrarian reform in the Convención valley, in an attempt to defuse the peasant movement. But the example of the sindicatos, or peasant unions, organised by Blanco inspired a short-lived guerrilla movement elsewhere in the mountains.
In 1966, he was sentenced by a military court to 25 years on the prison island of El Frontón. Three years later he was released under an amnesty declared by the leftist military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, who did carry out the Peruvian land reform.
As a precaution, he was forbidden to visit Cuzco. But he soon got into trouble again. In 1971 he was arrested and deported to Mexico, after calling for the release of all political prisoners, and then to Chile. During Pinochet’s coup, he was helped to flee to Sweden by the Swedish amabassador, Harald Edelstam. He was able to return to Peru after a few years. In the 1980 elections, the first to be held following a decade of military rule, Blanco was elected to the lower house of parliament. Later, he would occupy a senate seat. But he spent a large part of the next few years outside Peru, after his membership of parliament was suspended.
This was to be the pattern of his life, even as he grew older. He never ceased in his attempts to organise rural workers in the struggle to better their lives. And such an irritant was he that successive governments found it necessary to persecute him and even put him back behind bars.
His international fame had spread, however, and it was difficult to keep him there for long. He joined with enthusiasm in the campaign against globalisation, and was a committed ecosocialist and climate justice activist.
Born in the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, Hugo was the son of Victoria Galdos and Miguel Ángel Blanco and brought up speaking both Spanish and the indigenous language, Quechua. In an interview not long before his 70th birthday, he recalled that, “as a child, the distant echoes of the Mexican revolution of 1910 reached me (and) I later learned that it had been essentially indigenous”.
He studied agronomy at the Universidad de la Plata in Argentina, the intellectual headquarters of Latin American Trotskyism, and became a lifelong devotee. He also acquired trade union experience by working as a meat-packer, before returning to Peru. In the capital, Lima, he helped prepare a hostile reception for the 1958 visit by Richard Nixon, then the vice-president of the US. Police persecution drove him to return to his home turf in Cuzco, where he set about organising the local peasantry.
In 2002 he suffered a serious brain haemorrhage while visiting peasant communities near Cuzco. Thanks to international solidarity he was able to seek treatment in Mexico and Cuba. But even illness did not cause him to opt for retirement.
Returning to Peru, he set up the magazine Lucha Indigena. Would he write his memoirs? he was asked. “The fact is, I never have the time,” he said, “but I hope to begin soon.”
He is survived by his second wife, Ana Sandoval, from whom he had separated, and their children, Marco and Bruno; by Carmen, the daughter of his first marriage, to Vilma Valer, which ended in divorce; by Hugo, his son with Blanca La Barrera; by Maria and Oscar, his children from a relationship with Gunilla Berglund; and by 13 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
• Hugo Blanco Galdós, politician and revolutionary, born 15 November 1934; died 25 June 2023
