With Masses and Arms

Peru's Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement

Miguel La Serna

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655987
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

Miguel La Serna's gripping history of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) provides vital insight into both the history of modern Peru and the link between political violence and the culture of communications in Latin America. Smaller than the well-known Shining Path but just as remarkable, the MRTA emerged in the early 1980s at the beginning of a long and bloody civil war. Taking a close look at the daily experiences of women and men who fought on both sides of the conflict, this fast-paced narrative explores the intricacies of armed action from the ground up. While carrying out a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare ranging from vandalism to kidnapping and assassinations, the MRTA vied with state forces as both tried to present themselves as most authentically Peruvian. Appropriating colors, banners, names, images, and even historical memories, hand-in-hand with armed combat, the Tupac Amaristas aimed to control public relations because they insightfully believed that success hinged on their ability to control the media narrative. Ultimately, however, the movement lost sight of its original aims, becoming more authoritarian as the war waged on. In this sense, the history of the MRTA is the story of the euphoric draw of armed action and the devastating consequences that result when a political movement succumbs to the whims of its most militant followers.

Part 1

1

A New Generation Needs a New Name

Víctor Polay Campos quickstepped into the Banco de Credito on 28 July Avenue. La Victoria was a rough neighborhood in a rough city in a rough country in 1982. It wasn’t uncommon for petty thieves lurking outside the bank to pickpocket customers before they made it off the 24th block. Others tried less subtle tactics, relieving clients of their withdrawals at gunpoint. Polay was making a hefty withdrawal himself on this late March day, but he wasn’t worried about being robbed. He had grown up on the streets of Callao, Lima’s twin city, and was by now, in his twenties, fairly streetwise. He was also armed with a semiautomatic rifle. Today, it was Polay who would be doing the robbing.

Polay’s partner in crime was a San Marcos University student named Jorge Telledo Feria. Once inside, the two young men dashed over to the Civil Guardsman on duty and attempted to wrestle his gun from him. The guard was far more seasoned than the rookie thieves and fended them off as they attempted to pry the gun from his hands. Several bullets ricocheted off the floor; three struck the guard and another hit Telledo, who dropped dead on the spot. Only then did Polay finally win the gun. He pistol-whipped the guard, knocking him out. Weapon raised, Polay then ran over to the counter and put as much money as he could into his bags before running to the street and jumping into a getaway car. The green Fiat transporting Polay, three accomplices, and 10 million soles of stolen cash sped down Giribaldi Avenue just as the first batch of police arrived at the scene. Polay and his accomplices fired their weapons at the squad cars, buying themselves enough distance to disappear into the labyrinth of avenues, boulevards, and alleyways that made up Peru’s concrete jungle.¹

Polay and Telledo were no ordinary criminals. In fact, they didn’t consider themselves criminals at all. Unlike other bank robbers, who used the spoils of their heists to line their own pockets, Polay and Telledo carried out the armed robbery in the name of a cause much greater than themselves. Their 31 May 1982 run on the Banco de Credito in La Victoria was the first armed action of the nascent Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The uncredited action proved to be the group’s baptism by fire, procuring much-needed funding for the formal insurgency, which they would launch two years later under the MRTA banner. For Víctor Polay, the future leader and public face of the rebel organization, the bank robbery served as the culmination of years of political activism in the Peruvian left.

▪ Historian Mario Miguel Meza argues that the political origins of the MRTA are best understood within the broader context of the history of the Peruvian left.² Indeed, Víctor Polay and other MRTA founders conceived of their movement in direct relation to Andean revolutions past and present. Shining Path, the Communist party that initiated its armed struggle two years before the MRTA’s founding, offered not only competition for winning bodies, hearts, and minds but also a model of what to avoid. Instead, the MRTA built on previous revolutionary experiments under which many of its founders came of age. The left-leaning Velasco government of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the failed MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) guerrilla campaign of 1965, and years of Aprista radicalism dating back to the 1930s provided both the revolutionary tradition and the political recruits for the nascent movement. Yet, for many Tupac Amaristas, these previous experiments in revolutionary politics represented a kind of failure. Instead, the rebels turned to the nation’s founding fathers, to figures like José de San Martín and Tupac Amaru II. This grassroots revolutionary tradition, coupled with a broader political culture of revolutionary action in the Latin American Cold War, provided the backdrop under which the MRTA came into being.

For Víctor Polay Campos and many other Tupac Amaristas, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA, served as an incubator for their political maturation. Polay’s father, Víctor Polay Risco, had been a founder and activist of the populist anti-imperialist party led by the gifted orator Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.³ The Apristas had a well-earned reputation as rabble-rousers. In 1931, Haya de la Torre had lost a presidential bid against the military ruler Luís Sánchez Cerro in an election that many of his supporters considered stolen. Despite winning twenty-three congressional seats, the Aprista faithful took to the streets, their protests frequently erupting in violence.⁴ The government responded by sacking APRA party headquarters in Trujillo, killing several people, expelling the newly elected Aprista congressmen, and eventually outlawing the party. Haya de la Torre and other party leaders went into exile, but the violence continued for another two years, with the Apristas leading an uprising in Trujillo and the government responding in kind. After an Aprista militant assassinated Sánchez Cerro in 1933, the new government of Oscar Benavides continued to crack down on the party, rounding up party militants while Haya de la Torre and other leaders went into hiding or into exile.⁵ APRA existed largely as a radical clandestine party for over a decade, and its militants armed themselves and engaged in acts of sabotage and violence while simultaneously demanding a foothold in legal politics.⁶ In 1948, Apristas sailors in Polay’s home city of Callao staged an unsuccessful mutiny that left 65 government and mutineer forces and 175 civilians dead.⁷ Into this political fray, Víctor Polay Campos was born in 1951.

Polay Risco was doing time in El Frontón, the Peruvian Alcatraz, when his son was born. As Polay’s older sister, Otilia, recalled, her father spent most of her childhood bouncing back and forth “between prison and home.”⁸ Polay was two years old before he met his father. The little boy looked at the strange Asian man standing before him.

“Víctor,” his mother said, “this is your father.”

Víctor Polay Risco’s family had come to Peru along with a steady wave of Chinese “coolies” at the turn of the twentieth century. A Cantonese immigrant, Po Lay Seng didn’t speak a word of Spanish when he took up a job as a field hand in the hacienda Cajacay, in the department of Ancash. To avoid being deported, he married a Peruvian woman named Clemencia Risco, who gave birth to their son in 1904. They named the boy Víctor Polay Risco, a Hispanicization of the father’s name, and baptized him as a Christian months later.⁹ Polay Risco assimilated easily, despite being a spitting image of his Chinese father. He was a political animal, and he joined the young APRA party upon its founding in the 1930s and built a reputation as a passionate, charismatic leader. He later married fellow Aprista Otilia Campos, who hailed from Cuzco, the ancient Inca heartland.

Otilia Campos raised her four children practically as a single mother. “My mother was the anchor of the house,” Polay later wrote.¹⁰ She single-handedly ran the ferretería, a neighborhood hardware store. When she came home for lunch or after work in the evenings, she would cook for her four children and attend to all the household chores before putting the little ones to bed. Víctor would keep her up at all hours, having developed chronic asthma in Callao’s punishingly damp seaside. Many nights, she would sit by the wheezing boy’s bedside, rubbing Vicks VapoRub on his chest until he finally fell asleep.¹¹ Otilia Campos also took it upon herself to make sure the kids kept up with their studies, and it was she who taught young Víctor to read. Whenever her eldest son got out of line, she would pinch his ear and make sure he acted right. She didn’t hit her kids, opting instead to give them the cold shoulder until they reflected on what they’d done wrong.

Despite the challenges of single motherhood, Otilia Campos did her best to keep the memory of her children’s absent father alive and well in the household. When Víctor was about eight years old, a well-known painter, Macedonio La Torre, cousin of the APRA founder, crafted a lovely finger painting of Polay Risco in honor of his service to the party. Otilia Campos just knew she had to have it. This way, the kids would always be able to see their father, even when he was away. When she went to request the portrait, however, she learned that La Torre had already sold it to a wealthy Arequipan landowner. An undeterred Campos took the thirteen-hour bus ride all the way up the zigzagging Andean mountain range to the landlord’s home. She fed him a cockamamie story about Polay Risco having died fighting alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution. That painting, she said with tears in her eyes, was the only memory that remained of her late husband. The landlord couldn’t help but sympathize and insisted that Campos take the painting free of charge.¹²

There were, nevertheless, long stints when Polay Risco was home. To make up for lost time, he would take his two boys and two girls to Cine Badel, Callao’s state-of-the-art movie theater. Polay and his siblings marveled at the Cineplex’s glass walls, which gave it a kind of Hollywood flavor. Afterward, Polay Risco might treat his children to a sandwich at the theater’s cafeteria or, if they’d been really good, an ice cream or lemon merengue pie. On these days young Polay, who’d always had a sweet tooth, couldn’t have been happier.¹³

Polay Risco spent most of his days consumed by politics. He did his best to rear his children to become good little radicals. “He was the one who introduced me to words like imperialism, agrarian reform, nationalization, dictatorship, democracy, industrialization,” Polay wrote.¹⁴ Following its reinstatement as a legal political party in 1956, APRA set up headquarters in downtown Lima. Polay Risco often took his children with him to political gatherings there. Every 21 February, the eve of leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s birthday, Apristas would commemorate the occasion by letting the old man speak at the party headquarters. The young Polay would spend the entire afternoon listening to the aging politician’s long-winded and impassioned speeches. Once Haya de la Torre had finished talking, Polay would take his spot in line behind all the other Aprista youth, waiting to shake the hand of his political hero. Then, at the stroke of midnight, the children would run onto Alfonso Ugarte Avenue and set off firecrackers to celebrate the occasion.¹⁵

The Callao house became a hub of political activity, always shrouded in secrecy. “Ever since I could remember,” Polay wrote, “my parents always acted mysteriously.” They received visitors in hushed voices and with strange passwords, as if fully expecting to be arrested at any moment. Still a little guy, Polay would watch as his father stashed away political papers. The curious asthmatic would wait until no one was in the room and remove the papers from their stash, never quite able to decipher their full meaning.¹⁶ After breaking bread at the dining room table, however, the adults would always loosen up. The grown-ups would gather around to frontonearse, that is, to share stories about their time behind bars at El Frontón and other prisons. Little Víctor and his siblings would sit transfixed listening to these tales of solidarity, near-death experiences, and escape attempts. There was El Invisible, the Invisible Man, an inmate at El Sexto who, while the walls were being repainted, was said to have grabbed one of the worker’s abandoned caps, brushes, and paint cans, sprinkled paint all over his clothes, and walked right out the front door as if he had been a contract painter. Then there was the story of El Frontón inmates who attempted to swim through the ice-cold waters of the Pacific to the mainland, many of them drowning along the way. Polay and his siblings could recount the stories by heart, but they never tired of listening to them. For him, these were real-life tales of adventure, heroism, and political conviction that rivaled anything Dumas or Cervantes had ever dreamed up.

Polay did read his share of literature. From a young age, his father instilled in him a love of reading. Often the old man would come home with a bundle of books for himself and his kids to devour. Political newspapers like La Tribuna, the APRA mouthpiece, were daily sustenance, as were, for comparison, right-wing dailies like El Comercio and La Prensa.¹⁷ Whereas some families went to church or did Bible study, the Polay Camposes spent their Sunday afternoons sitting around the dining room table reading the literary and political classics. “Everyone select a poem,” Polay Risco would say after the table had been cleared. The four kids would scramble over to the bookshelf, which to them looked like the biggest library in the world, and pull down the weighty tome, Hablemos del amor, to select their favorite poems to read aloud. Polay had a soft spot for the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. When it came to novels, he also gravitated toward the Latin American classics, preferring the grittiness of Peru’s own Mario Vargas Llosa to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez.¹⁸

The elder Víctor and Otilia knew that the key to success was a good education. They spent much of their hardware store earnings to enroll their oldest son in El Colegio San Antonio, a Catholic school run by Marianist priests. Polay took well to his studies, earning the admiration and respect of his teachers. The feeling was mutual, and Polay even expressed interest in becoming a priest. “What most appealed to me was the opportunity to do missionary work in the jungle or other far away places like Africa and Asia.”¹⁹ The clerics encouraged him and invited him to serve as an altar boy in the church. When Otilia Campos learned of this newest development, she went through the roof. “I didn’t raise my son to be a priest!” she scolded Polay. The next thing he knew, his mother had pulled him out of Catholic school and enrolled him in Colegio 2 de Mayo, Callao’s largest public high school.

While attending 2 de Mayo, Polay joined the local chapter of the Boy Scouts. There, he earned a reputation as a leader with a strong moral compass and quickly ascended to the position of scout master for the Wolf Patrol. The teenager would spend his Saturdays on the campground or performing community service with the younger scouts. All that running around did a number on his lungs, and he would often spend all day Sunday laid up in bed. This didn’t bother him much since, aside from the comradery of Scout life, it got him out of having to work at the family store.²⁰ The young scouts were like a band of brothers. During the summers, they would walk the beach of Punta Hermosa collecting whatever trash or knickknack they found. When night fell, they would stand around a bonfire, the salty breeze tickling their numbed ears, and take turns sharing which vice they hoped to shed that summer before tossing their knickknacks into the flames so that the items, like their vices, would smolder into ash. Afterward, Polay would lead the younger scouts in song as they crowded around the fire.²¹

After graduating high school at fifteen, typical by Peruvian standards, Polay enrolled in his hometown college, the Universidad de Callao. The freshman left an impression on the APRA leadership, exhibiting his father’s charisma and his mother’s pluck. He joined the Comando Universitario Aprista, a selection of Aprista student leaders from universities across the capital, and was later elected by his peers as general secretary of the Mechanical Engineering Department. As his sister, Otilia Jr., recalled, Polay had earned a reputation as “Víctor Raúl’s protégé,” the heir-apparent to the aging party founder.²² The reality was that Polay had some stiff competition. One of those was Alan García Pérez, the six-foot five-inch, handsome Aprista with...