Peru: Roundup of the Left

• Share

In cities across Peru, doors burst open, troops tramped in, and leaders of the country's far left were hauled from their beds. The military junta that governs the country gave out no final totals, but the best estimate was that between 800 and 1,000 Communists and other troublemakers were rounded up last week. Some were questioned and released; most were held. According to the country's ruling junta. Peru was under immediate threat of Communist revolution in a plot financed by Moscow, masterminded from Prague and Havana, and controlled through a secret radio station near the Peru-Bolivia border.

The schedule: strikes and violence, student uprisings, attacks on army garrisons, the assassination of armed forces leaders, and a triumphal May Day parade proclaiming a "farmer-worker state."

There had certainly been a rash of leftist violence to point to. Led by a onetime agronomy student and longtime Communist named Hugo Blanco, peasants in the Convencion valley, near Cuzco, took up arms nine months ago; the government has yet to catch up with him. Communist-organized trade unionists and students have staged riots, and Red agitators work to turn relatively peaceful strikes into bloody free-for-alls. Striking miners recently burned and sacked a lead and zinc complex belonging to the U.S.-owned Cerro de Pasco Corp., causing $4,000,000 damage.

The question was how much the junta itself had helped to accent the crisis. In their steadfast enmity toward the leftist but anti-Communist APRA party of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the military men had shown a peculiar tolerance for the Communists, who were competing for the same peasant and laborer following. Several Red leaders were released from jail, known Communists were appointed to labor councils. Emboldened by this freedom, the Reds had gone about their violent errands with such a will that the junta could no longer ignore them.