We hereby present an unofficial and preliminary translation from the Spanish original.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
WE ARE THE INITIATORS
We are the initiators, this must be deeply engraved in our souls. This meeting is historic.
Comrades, we are the initiators, so we will go down in the history that the Party has been writing for a long time in pages that no one can destroy.
We are the initiators. This 1st Military School of the Party, we said, is a seal and an opening, a seal and an opening. It seals the times of peace, it opens the times of war. Comrades, our work with unarmed hands is over, our armed word begins today: to uplift the masses, to uplift the peasants under the unfading flags of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. One period is over; the preparations for the new one are completed. We seal what has been done so far; we open the future; the key is action, the goal is power. That is what we will do. History demands it, the class demands it, the people have foreseen it and want it; we must and will do it, we are the initiators.
We would like to talk about some problems, I will also speak like you with an open heart, in words of will and reason of feeling; this too has strict logic.
I. WE ENTER THE STRATEGIC OFFENSIVE OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION
Centuries have gone by of harsh exploitation, the masses have been subdued; they have been exploited, subjugated; they have been relentlessly oppressed, but throughout the ages the exploited masses have always fought, for they have no other meaning than class struggle. However, in history these masses were orphans, they had no leadership, their words, their protests, their actions, their rebellions ended in failure and crushing; but they never lost hope, the class never loses hope. The masses are the very light of the emerging world, with their hands they transform, they create tools; they are the very fibre, the inexhaustible heartbeat of history. Thus they generate the highest of thought and science.
But the laws of history, which generate themselves through the development of the class struggle, created a last class, the international proletariat. The fighting class emerged in the midst of a sinister system that appeared sweating blood and mud from every pore, capitalism; a system within which the fighting proletariat generated trade unions, strikes, resistance and revolutions. All this was embodied in Marxism, and the class, endowing itself with a party, became a matured class, with its own interests, and thus the masses of the world have at last their longed-for liberator. In the old days the masses waited for a liberator, placing their hopes in the hands of supposed redeemers, until the proletariat appeared, powerful, invincible and capable of creating a real new order. The class organised itself politically and henceforth another history began to be woven, to take shape in reality.
The proletariat in a hundred years of struggles, setbacks and victories learned to fight and seize power with arms. It took it once in an ephemeral way, it was crushed with blood and fire; nevertheless we remember the Paris Commune and those who were vilified are today heroes and their example will live on, while of their executioners no one will remember. The class with Lenin took power in Russia and made a powerful state, continued to fight and with Chairman Mao Tsetung gave us a new road, solved outstanding problems and the class started to fight under the banners of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
Around the time of World War II the revolution entered into strategic equilibrium, the saintly reactionary alliances and the previously unpunished executioners and enemies were left behind. The powerful international workers’ movement, the surging waves of the national liberation movement, the development of the communist parties, Marxism raised to the great heights of Maotsetung Thought have brought us to a new situation: we are entering the strategic offensive of the world revolution, the next fifty to one hundred years will be the sweeping away of the rule of imperialism and all the exploiters. This is history that cannot be turned back. In the hands of the working class, in the leaderships of the communist parties, in the strength of the poor peasantry, the very lifeblood of the people’s war that will grow stronger every day until the old order collapses, the world is entering a new situation: the strategic offensive of the world revolution. This is of transcendental importance.
Chairman Mao put it: “the storm is approaching, the wind is roaring in the tower”. So the vortex is approaching; the vortex is beginning, the invincible flames of revolution will grow into lead, into steel, and out of the din of battles with their unquenchable fire will come light, out of the blackness will come brightness, and there will be a new world. The old order of reaction is creaking, its old boat is taking on water, it is sinking in despair; but comrades, no one can expect them to withdraw benignly, Marx warned us: sinking they are still capable of a desperate, desperate grasp to see if they can sink us. That is impossible. Dreams of hyena blood have the reaction; agitated dreams shake their gloomy nights; their heart plots sinister hecatombs; they arm themselves to the teeth but they cannot prevail, their destiny is heavy and measured. The hour of reckoning has come.
The imperialist superpowers, USA, USSR, and other powers, are invading, penetrating, undermining, destroying, seeking to plunge everything into terror. But, as Chairman Mao says, in attacking, in assaulting, in launching offensives, they spill over and enter the mighty bowels of the people; and the people are aroused, armed and rising up in revolt, they put nooses around the necks of imperialism and the reactionaries, they grab them by the throat, they grip them; and, necessarily, they will strangle them, necessarily. The reactionary flesh it will flay, it will turn it into lint, it will sink these black scabs into the mire, it will set fire to what is left and scatter its ashes to the winds of the earth so that nothing remains but the sinister memory of what will never return because it cannot and must not return.
Comrades, such is the world today. It has fallen to us to live in an extraordinary epoch. Never before have men had such a heroic destiny, so it is written. It has fallen to the men of today, to these men who breathe, who struggle, who fight, to wipe reaction off the face of the earth, the most luminous and grandiose mission ever given to any generation. This is the situation we are in. The world revolution is going on a strategic offensive, nothing can prevail against it; countless legions of iron are rising and will rise more and more, and multiplying inexhaustibly, they will encircle and annihilate reaction. Reaction in tearing the flesh of the people, in unloading its bleeding claws what it does is simply to entangle itself, to entangle itself; it seeks to satiate itself in the blood of the people, but that blood rises like furious wings and those beaten flesh become mighty avenging whips and its muscles and its action become steel battering rams to smash the oppressors whom it will crush irretrievably.
Reaction, comrades, will by no means prevail. The revolution will triumph; the hour has struck. The struggle will be hard, arduous, bloody; long, difficult. The triumph is ours, the mass will prevail, the peasantry will rise, the class will lead; the Communist Parties will command and red banners will be raised for ever. Reaction has entered its final chapter; that is the world in which we live.
II. OUR PEOPLE BEGIN TO SEIZE POWER BY ARMS
In this great epic of world history, our people, together with the class brothers and sisters of Latin America, together with the Latin American masses, have a role to play and are playing it and will play it even more. Our people are entering to take power by arms. It is hundreds of years of struggle; the peasant movements have shaken the roots of exploitation, but it has not yet succeeded in overthrowing them. In this country the Communist Party was forged, pure steel and generated the light drinking from Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought. Comrades, in this town, today we are entering a third stage; that third stage is that of armed struggle. Revolution and counter-revolution are preparing for violence. They in their old and bloody violence, in their peace of bayonets, in their damned war that liquidates in the prisons, in the schools, in the factories, in the fields, murdering even children in their mothers’ wombs.
This sinister violence is today finding the last of its shoe. The violence of the revolution is preparing to define its struggle by force of arms. Our people of rich history is finally entering the final part, the culmination of the democratic stage of the revolution; the masses are trembling, the crescendo is rising, the storm is brewing. The reaction of this country, like the reaction of the world, is also dreaming dreams of iron and blood; it seeks to drown the revolution, to drown it in blood, to crush it. Old, black and violent dreams.
The situation is not as it was yesterday. Time has passed, bureaucratic capitalism has matured the revolution, the agrarian laws are frustrations one after another and the peasantry has understood the lesson: nothing will be given to it, nothing can be expected from a law; the land will have to be conquered with its own armed hands. The working class is more and more powerful, more mature, higher in consciousness, greater in numbers, more powerful in politics; stronger than yesterday. The masses of the people are growing in our country. The petty bourgeoisie is becoming proletarianised, it has no other destiny but to serve the revolution and place itself at the disposal of the proletariat; it has no other destiny, it can have no other path but to serve the revolution, according to the dictates of the working class, to struggle hard along the path of the Party. It is good to remember this, because from it we must win over the intelligentsia in particular, which demands moving the masses as Mariátegui taught us; only in this way will it fulfil its role and be able to serve the greatest battle that history is preparing.
Comrades, we have concluded that we are entering the third stage of contemporary Peruvian society. But if, like yesterday, when we put forward the two moments of contemporary Peruvian society as part of the process of the development of bureaucratic capitalism in the country, and some condemned us, rejected our theses, our ideas and even, with supine insolence, disparagingly branded them as childishness; What we are proposing today with a clear and precise historical vision, that our country is entering a third stage, will also be misunderstood, but it will no longer be possible to simply condemn us with the puerile label of childishness, because the times have proved us right in many things and they too will learn a lesson. However, it will not be easy for them to accept, for them to understand, they will need hard facts, concrete actions that will hammer into their hard heads, that will shatter their speculations, so that the reality of this homeland of ours also nestles in their souls.
The understanding of the third stage is key for this people of ours to move forward. What does this third stage imply? It implies that the revolution, the people with their armed hands begin to take power; and that reaction with 400 years of exploitation, which is added to the previous exploitation because there was also exploitation (comrades, we must think very well, 400 years of foreign oppression, a vile servile system that still exists, a state that although it is not solid, it has strength today), implies that reaction will try to contain us, will try to oppose the advance of the revolution. The fact is that, as materialists know, what exists refuses to die and reaction exists and therefore refuses to die; it is an unburied corpse but it denies, protests, resists and attacks with fury and desperation, it does not want us to put it in a drawer, it does not want us to bury it.
Thus, we must understand that the revolutionary struggle will be hard, violent, cruelly answered by reaction and it will send its black hosts to fight us, armed to the teeth they will attack the working class, the peasantry, the popular masses; they will extend their sinister, bloody claws, this is how it will be: they will lay siege to us, they will try to isolate us, crush us, erase us, but we are the future, we are the strength, we are history.
Comrades, revolution and counter-revolution are also in conflict in our country, we are two parts of a unity linked and in growing struggle. The reactionaries are centred, armed, defended in the cities, in the capitals; we will take root in the countryside, in the small villages, with the masses, with the poor peasantry in particular, with the strength, with the disorganised power to organise it into a powerful army. But this will not be easy: their black and sinister hosts will come against us, they will mount powerful aggressions, great offensives. We will answer, we will break them, we will divide them; their offensives we will turn into a multitude of our own small offensives and the encirclers will be encircled and the would-be annihilators will be annihilated and the would-be victors will be defeated and the beast will finally be cornered and as we have been taught, the roar of our armed voices will make them shudder with dread and they will end up dead with fear, turned into a few black ashes.
So be it comrades, so be it. However, the struggle will be hard, long, difficult, bloody; we must steel our souls, be strong, vigorous, fearless and sure of victory; let the confidence in its conquest nestle in our hearts, for we serve the people and the class. The problem is that with determination and firmness we will initiate the armed struggle, we will deploy it and its banners will populate our land, with resounding actions that will be recorded in history. Comrades, our people are entering to take power by arms; the greatest deed that our homeland has ever seen is underway. It will never be seen again, it will be great, that is what we will do; that is what we serve and will serve, the people and the class, the proletariat command it. We cannot, we must not fail.
III. THE PARTY BEGINS TO DEVELOP THROUGH ARMED STRUGGLE
Eighty-odd years of working class, fifty-two years of Party, ten years more or less it took a group of men headed by Mariátegui to found it, his name will remain forever in our ranks, in our people and in the people of the world and in the international working class. Time has passed, many of us have struggled, we continue to struggle, and we will continue to struggle until exploitation is erased; that is our destiny. We are a growing torrent against which fire, stones and mud are thrown; but our power is great, we will turn everything into our fire, the black fire we will turn into red and the red is light. That is us, that is Reconstitution. Comrades, we are reconstituted.
The Party is a Party of a new type. This party of a new type is to take power for the working class and the people in this country. The party can only develop through arms, through armed struggle. We have learned a hard lesson in 50 years, a great lesson that we will never forget: we have no power because we have no guns. As Chairman Mao wrote: he who has the most guns has the most power, and he who wants to seize power must build an army, and he who wants to keep it must have a powerful army. That is what we will do. The Party has entered into development through armed struggle, historically that is the step we are taking, we will not be able to go back.
Comrades, we can already say: development has won, the possible destruction, as it had to be, has been averted; the Party will not be destroyed, this is a conclusion that we can draw from our 2nd Plenary Session of the Central Committee and this 1st Military School. We have accomplished a task that we are only just beginning to measure. We said to ourselves: how to develop the Party, through armed struggle; simple and brief answer, that is how it is; we said to ourselves, in critical times the situation enters into serious conflict and according to the law of contradiction, certain circumstances can lead to development or destruction, of course transitory, but not for that reason it stops being destruction that could have made us muddy or make us march through a quagmire.
The Party has won as it should have. Destruction cannot take place. The Party enters firmly, resolutely, willfully, energetically in its development. Comrades, that is what comes out of these meetings. However, what contradiction is being discussed? The development of the party through armed struggle is the new; the old is what has been done up to now, even the good, even the best that we have done has begun to be the old and therefore will be added to that tradition, to that great rubbish that the parties, the organisations and the classes have been generating for decades, of that we must be very clear. There is only one new thing: to develop the party through armed struggle. That is our contradiction today. Just as internationally there is a contradiction between the strategic offensive and the strategic defensive in which reaction enters, just as in the country the contradiction is between the armed people and the armed reaction, to settle through the people’s war the inevitable triumph of the class and 400 years of oppression must be swept away, so also comrades in the party there is a contradiction, let nobody be in doubt, let it rather call for a serious reflection.
Communists today must be very clear about what is new and what is old. I repeat, what is new is the armed struggle, it is the unfading flames of the people’s war, it is the steel that must become finer, the sharp sword, the piercing lance to wound the entrails of reaction, that is what is new; that alone is what is new, the rest is the old, it is the past and from that past we must guard ourselves because the past always tries to re-establish itself in a thousand ways in the new.
Comrades, let us not forget that to guarantee and consolidate as 100, we must advance as 200, the advance today as 200 means to start the armed struggle; to start the actions is the guarantee to sow the new thoroughly, with lead, crumbling the old walls, that is the new; the rest is the old, comrades. This is how we must understand it and be very clear about it. The Party has therefore entered into development through arms, that is a fundamental situation. Having said that, we have three things:
First, we are entering the strategic offensive of the world revolution, that is our context. The rising revolutionary tide is on our side.
Second, the people are entering to take power by arms. The future will be decided by the people’s war we are launching.
Third, the Party will develop through armed struggle. In this way the party will become the powerful party that the revolution needs and how it needs it will be forged.
Comrades, the world process, the process of the country and the process of the Party are combined. Therefore, the future is assured, it is palpitating in the warlike actions that we will begin to carry out; it is tender, it must be cradled with the clash of arms, it must be developed with guerrilla warfare, it must be strengthened with people’s warfare; it must be nurtured as the germ of a nascent army in armed detachments, it must be developed as a guerrilla army and it must be shaped into a powerful army.
Comrades, these three conditions determine that the Party will lead the struggle of the armed masses and in our mind, in our heart, in our will, the people’s power is invincible, we carry it with us. We have no rearguard at the beginning or we will have a small, weak, fragile and variable rearguard. Comrades, let us not forget the people’s power, the state of the working class; the state of the workers and peasants marches with us, we carry it on the tips of our guns, it nests in our minds, it throbs in our hands and it will always be with us, burning in our hearts. Let us never forget it, it is the first thing that must be in our minds. Comrades, it will be born fragile, weak because it will be new but its destiny will be to develop through change, through the variation of fragility, like a tender plant. The roots we will put down from the beginning that will be the future of a vigorous state. All this, comrades, begins to be born from the most modest and simple actions that tomorrow we must initiate.
These are three things combined: world history, the history of our country and the history of our Party, three convergences, three realities, three conjunctions and one single final conclusion, one single unshakeable truth, one single future. The revolution will nest in our homeland, for that we are responsible.
IV. WE BEGIN TO DEVELOP THE MILITARISATION OF THE PARTY THROUGH ACTIONS AND IMPLEMENT THE PLAN OF INITIATION.
It is a derivation of the three previous questions. It is a logical, necessary, irrefutable and irreversible, forceful conclusion. From the three questions mentioned above, the Party in the 2nd Plenary Session of the Central Committee has defined “To develop the militarisation of the Party through actions”; it sanctions that through warlike actions the Party will become the powerful and recognised vanguard of the working class of Peru, the recognised centre of the Peruvian revolution. The Second Plenary Session has sanctioned a “plan for the beginning of the armed struggle” which solves a problem not solved until today: the beginning of the armed struggle; this comrades, is not to make us proud, it is to understand our immense responsibility, just for that. Conceit must never be anywhere near us; modesty and simplicity must accompany us; and the more we do, the more modest and simpler we are because we are faithful servants of the class and the people. That is how we must learn to be. Many things will change even more profoundly in us. We have, comrades, through the work of world history, through the work of Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought, through the work of our people who are entering to define their history by arms, through the work of fifty years of Party struggle, of countless communists and as a derivation of what our founder himself set in motion, we have solved the problem of the beginning of the armed struggle. We have solved the first fundamental military problem, how to start the armed struggle. We know what to do, how to arm ourselves and, most importantly, how to raise the peasantry in order to wrest a guerrilla from the powerful land that is the peasantry through arduous struggle; we know how to confront the siege and also how to break it.
Comrades, the problem of the beginning of the armed struggle in Peru has been solved, let there be no doubt about it. We have nothing to doubt. The problem is solved. Take it for what it is, a derivation of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought; take it for what it is, a consequence of our people taking power by force of arms; take it for what it is, a derivation of fifty years of the Party. Then we will have a sense of history, then we will understand and then we will know where we must go and what port we must surely reach.
V. WE ARM OURSELVES THEORETICALLY AND PRACTICALLY TO BEGIN THE ARMED STRUGGLE
We armed ourselves theoretically and practically with the Military Line and with general political mobilisation, forming detachments and developing actions, we started the armed struggle. This is what we must record most indelibly.
This 1st Military School is historic. We asked ourselves, what is this school? If the 2nd Session of the Central Committee is “Timbre de Gloria”, what is this school? Let us say it again: “Seal and Opening” because it seals and opens. It seals our unarmed life, it opens our people’s war. Comrades, that is what this school is. Here we had to implement the agreements of the 2nd Plenary Session of the Central Committee; we have successfully fulfilled them and solved problems that the Central Committee should sanction very soon, at the same time arrange the readjustment of the Party and start the actions.
Thus, the party, through its central organisations, its leaders and cadres, arms itself with its military line, in theory and practice. The final meeting itself, comrades, is a demonstration of the distribution of forces: a demonstration of the encirclement and annihilation of pessimism and opposition; what opposition there could be among us and in us has been annihilated and burnt, optimism has been raised and enthusiasm has overflowed; the victories to come have been unfolded. This is how it must be understood. We have seen fighters marching: we have seen fighters advancing, leaders at the head, breaking through; we have seen the ranks following to maintain and support the action; we have seen at the end the defining action, passionate, burning with faith, to conclude by taking the summit. What we have done today is an example of how to act militarily; that is why we say that we are arming ourselves theoretically and practically, and by arming ourselves, the cadres and leaders, the fundamental effective, we have obviously entered into the general political mobilisation. Let us remember Chairman Mao: the key is to move the cadres; this has been achieved. So the mobilisation has begun and what has been done here will have a more powerful ripple effect tomorrow, because the masses of the Party are longing to hear that we must take action and they want to know how to do it. Comrades, we go to the rank and file as bearers of good news; we must implement the starting plan and we must do it tomorrow, this is what the beating hearts of the militants and the masses working together with us are burning to hear, they dream of realising.
Comrades, the general political mobilisation of the Party is underway, by forming armed detachments and developing military actions we start the armed struggle. This is what this meeting is all about, that is why this meeting is a seal and an opening.
VI. WE ARE THE INITIATORS
We are the initiators. We begin by saying we are the initiators, we end by saying, we are the initiators, initiators of what, of the people’s war, of the armed struggle that is in our hands, shines in our minds, beats in our hearts, stirs uncontainable in our wills. That is what we are. “A handful of men, of communists, obeying the mandate of the Party, of the proletariat and of the people, on that 19th of April, history will tell, standing up they expressed their declaration of revolutionary faith, with hearts burning with unquenchable passion, firm and resolute will, and with clear and audacious minds they assumed their historic obligation to be THE INITIATORS; and what they decided on April 19 they translated into autumn in boycotts and harvests, they continued in actions against reactionary power, aiming at local power, they continued with invasions and with the rising peasant masses they started guerrillas, and the guerrillas generated the powerful army that we are today and the state that is sustained by it. Our country is free…”; so you will say comrades, so you will say. This is embodied in our apparently simple but historically significant party decision.
Comrades, do these three final questions pose contradictions for us? Yes, they also present us with contradictions. Here, in the Party, in our agreement to “Develop the Militarisation of the Party through actions” and to implement the Plan of Beginning, the essence of the new, the new of the world that cannot be stopped because it arises today from armed hands and more tomorrow, the new of our country, the armed settlement, is concentrated, and the step of the Party to develop itself through arms, through armed struggle, is concentrated. Thus, in the question of developing and implementing the initial plan, the new is concentrated and confronted with the old. The old will try to oppose it, but it is already defeated, it is a great defeat of rightism. Destruction is already conjured up; development has triumphed, let us shape it through thundering, let us write it in lead, let it be written forever on pages of steel on the backs of mountains, but never again can it be erased or written in the opposite direction. That is the contradiction. It all comes back to the fifth problem at the last minute. The contradiction goes into the problem of weapons, war, armed struggle, initiating it. If until today we have acted as unarmed people, the problem is that we are going to act with armed hands; from times of peace to times of war, and times of war have other demands, other peremptory demands.
Comrades, contradictions crowd in but we manage them. We have learned to handle history, laws, contradictions. It is in our hands to resolve everything by translating it into acts of war; nothing will stop us. We will irreversibly move into wartime, contradiction will unfold, the new will triumph, it leads us to the end.
We are the initiators, what contradiction is facing us? We and the other communists of the rank and file who are us, present or not, who pulsate in us, are looking forward to what we decide here. We all have a problem, a contradiction: the great rupture. The time has come comrades, the time has come. It is the time of the great rupture. We shall break all that binds us to the old and rotten order, to destroy it utterly and completely, for if we have any interest in that outmoded world we cannot destroy it. Individual men can be weak, each one of us must think well; one as an individual, as a person can be fragile and weak; but the revolution is all-powerful and the armed revolution even more so because it is sustained by the masses, which is the strength of the earth, because it is led by the Party, which is the light of the universe.
Comrades, we are entering the great rupture. We have said many times that we are entering a rupture and that many ties must be broken because they bind us to the old rotten order and if we do not do so we will not be able to tear it down. Comrades, the time has come, there is nothing to discuss, the debate has been exhausted. It is time to act, it is time for the break and we will not do it in slow and belated meditation, nor in corridors or in silent rooms, we will do it in the heat of warlike actions, it will be the way to do it, a proper and correct way, the only way to do it. There in actions, as we have studied, the conscious capacity of men is intensified, the will is more tense, the passion more powerful, the energy devilish. Comrades, there we will find the energy, the strength, the capacity sufficient for the great breakthrough. That is where we have entered. The trumpets begin to sound, the rumour of the masses grows and will grow more, it will deafen us, it will draw us into a powerful vortex, with one note: we will be the protagonists of history, conscious, organised, armed and thus there will be the great rupture and we will be the makers of the definitive dawn. That is what we have entered comrades.
I want to conclude: this School, this 1st Military School of the Party is a seal and an opening, it seals what has been done until today, it opens tomorrow. What we have done so far is positive, it has borne good fruits. By their works you will know them, it is said; the works are done, in front of us, there is nothing to prove; what we have done so far has been good. The opening, what we have to do, will be even greater and ultimately, it will be the only great thing we have to do. It will come out of the guns of the gun barrels, it will come out of the direct action of the Party on the masses. It will come out of people’s war.
Comrades, this School is simply historical, the dimension it has, we could not understand it, we could not weigh it properly if we do not look decades ahead. This is the School of Initiators, that is the name given to it by the Central Committee, it is in one word ILA 80. What it means: Initiate the Armed Struggle on 80, that’s what it means. It is a commitment, it is a challenge; we are summoned, we will surpass it; I don’t say we will fulfil it, but we will surpass it because that is the demand and the historical necessity and nobody can say otherwise.
Comrades, the School of Initiators, ILA 80, today is this: to start the armed struggle in 80. Decades later, in the future, it will be like this: ILA 80 will be translated like this: the armed struggle started in 80. That is what we have done here. That word is very beautiful, it has a double meaning and if we see more it has another meaning: it is the concreteness of what has been done so far, it embodies all the past. What was guiding us comrades? To start the armed struggle, isn’t that what the 9th Plenum says? Comrades, it is therefore the past that is concretised, in the present that is opening and it is the future that will have to be fulfilled irremediably. All this is ILA 80. Concretisation of what was agreed, ILA 80 is that; the concretisation of the past agreement to start the armed struggle, it is in the present to start the armed struggle today, in this year and it will be in the future, the armed struggle started in 1980.
Comrades, everything that we have done in these difficult days, in difficult moments, but in conclusion, fruitful, good, healthy, vital days, everything is concretised in the “School of Initiators: ILA 80”.
The Central Committee, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, congratulates those present, everyone, because through their action they have contributed to the realisation of this reality. It congratulates the Party because through its action it has made this reality a reality; it congratulates the masses, our people, because their action of centuries has become a reality here. It congratulates the working class of the world, the international proletariat, the peoples of the world because its action has borne fruit here. It pays homage, as it will always have to do, to the unfading banners of Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought, because all that is so great and will always live on has been realised here. Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought has taken root among us, the international working class and the peoples of the world have taken root among us, the Party, our people, our class has taken root here, the spirit of the revolution has taken root here. It has come at last: all our struggle has been validated. At last, comrades, it has been realised: Start the armed struggle today. Everything that has been done, including the mistakes that have served as experience, is validated here, that is the essence of this School.
The Central Committee, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee feel and express, through the speaker, immense joy because we have fulfilled a simple and great task: that the armed struggle, initiating the armed struggle, ILA 80 nests here and defines, concluding the past, specifies the present and opens the future. Comrades, we have fulfilled, therefore the future opens, the promise, the hope opens; let us remember the words of an old sage: “What life promises you, you do to life”.
Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought, the international proletariat and the peoples of the world, the working class and the people of the country, the Party with its rank and file, cadres and leaders, all this great joint action of centuries has been realised here. The promise opens, the future unfolds: ILA 80.
Our duty is to fulfil it. What has been given to us as the future we must fulfil it to life, to the people, to the proletariat, to Marxism-Leninism-Maotsetung Thought.
Comrades, the effort invested is content, it rejoices in the work accomplished, it is pleased with what has been accomplished, it does not seek reward.
The future is in the barrel of the gun! The armed revolution has begun!
Glory to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought!
Long live the Communist Party of Peru!
Let us begin the armed struggle!
(From the 1st MILITARY SCHOOL; 19 April 1980)
TOWARDS GUERRILLA WARFARE !
The first part of this Session gives us fundamental conclusions:
I. The Initial Plan, its application and the completion of the first actions are a brilliant and resounding success of transcendence and great repercussions which have kindled in our country the ever-living flames of the people’s war.
II. Summing up experiences in the General Balance of the first actions, the military line of the Party has been further developed and advanced in its consolidation, smashing the right-wing militarist positions that are concretised in militarist positions that outline a line aiming to develop as a bourgeois militarist line.
III. The Party strengthened in the forge of the first actions is on a combat footing ready to march towards the beginning of the guerrilla war.
The first stresses the brilliant and resounding success that the Party has achieved, it has great historical repercussions.
The second one points out that in the balance of the first actions the military line of the Party has developed further, and has advanced in its consolidation by fighting against militarist positions that seek to develop as a bourgeois military line. In this way we have achieved greater development and advanced in consolidation, but the military line, like every line, only develops and consolidates itself in struggle.
The third part establishes and emphasises that the Party is ready to march towards the beginning of the guerrilla war.
We have finished the first part which is fundamental and the basis of this Session of the Enlarged Central Committee. On this solid basis we can outline the national and international context and put forward the plan for launching the guerrilla war. We must be very conscious of the brilliant and resounding success of the implementation of the Plan for the Initiation of Armed Struggle, a plan that has historical significance and has shaken the country by putting the Party at the centre of the class struggle, at the centre of the political struggle.
The constant struggle of communist militants as an expression of the class struggle of the proletariat, of the masses of our people, has historically been expressed by defining camps; we have entered the highest form of struggle, armed struggle to destroy the old order and build the new society.
From now on, the people’s war dwells among us and dwells in the country, and its ever-living flames will fan and inflame our people; they will be invincible flames, shaking and destroying the rotten prevailing society, flames from whose heart will come the most powerful bonfire of the future.
It has fallen to us the historic mission of initiating the armed struggle in our homeland and developing it as part of and as a contribution to the struggle of Latin America, of the international proletariat and the peoples of the world and of the world revolution which we serve by the imperative of proletarian internationalism.
Long it must be but fruitful; bloody it must be but brilliant; hard it must be but vigorous and omnipotent. It has been said that the world can be transformed with guns, and we are already doing it. From the mouths of the guns everything will come out, we are already seeing it and we will see it even more as the people’s war develops.
The communists who militate in this Party, in this country, who have broken the spell of more than 50 years, cannot but have their souls throbbing today as we make this great balance-sheet which checks and weighs what has been accomplished, counting, measuring and weighing the future. We have nothing to be proud of except that we have done our duty well and we have nothing to boast of, for the glory belongs to the class, to the people and to the Party. Nevertheless, we must be brimming with optimism, certain that the milestones of the new order are beginning to be laid. The future is beginning to be written, we will write new history with stone flowers in bronze and for ever and ever; we will tame the hills, we will write new history with sword points, with firelight, sweeping away iniquity, bringing the future into being.
For every Communist Party there comes a moment when, assuming its condition as the vanguard of the proletariat in arms, it tears up the centuries; it launches its resounding war cry and, storming the skies, the shadows and the night, the old and rotten reactionary walls begin to give way, they begin to crackle and creak like fragile leaves before tender new flames, before young but crackling bonfires. The people’s war begins to sweep away the old order and inevitably destroy it, and out of the old the new will be born, and in the end, like a limpid phoenix, glorious, communism will be born forever.
We must be optimistic and overflow with enthusiasm, all the more so foreseeing that we serve to perpetuate a work for ever and ever. We men are pieces of time and palpitations, but our work will remain for centuries to come, stamped on generations and generations. Men inevitably march to their end but humanity and the working class and what it will create will never end. We will populate the earth with light and joy.
With us, with our armed struggle, the real freedom, the only real freedom, begins to be born. We are trumpets of the future, of the inextinguishable fire that crackles in the stormy present.
LONG LIVE THE IRRESISTIBLE MARCH TOWARDS GUERRILLA WARFARE!
August 24, 1980
PCP-EXTENDED CENTRAL COMMITTEE