[Marxism] Re: Andre Gunder Frank

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hugo Blanco's defense: A remembrance of André Gunder Frank

Although I am unfamiliar with all the details because I was not directly
involved in this effort, I recall that André Gunder Frank played an
important role in the mid-1960s in helping to build the international
defense effort to save the life of Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian peasant
organizer in the La Convención valley and a leader of a small
revolutionary party (Trotskyist) in that country. When Blanco helped to
organize peasant militias to defend the peasant movement against
landlords and the military, he was framed up on murder charges by the
Peruvian government. Blanco was held in solitary confinement for three
years, then tried in 1967 by a military court along with 28 other
peasant leaders. They faced the death sentence.

Blanco’s international defense was spearheaded by the Fourth
International but reached far beyond it to build a broad campaign
involving supporters of democratic rights with many different political
beliefs and affiliations. As Peter Camejo later described it in his
introduction to Blanco’s book, Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in
Peru, "Sugar workers in the state of Bihar in India and 7,000 trade
unionists in French Canada joined with Parisian school-teachers and
London engineers in protesting the Peruvian prosecutor’s demand for the
death sentence. Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
the International League for Human Rights, Amnesty International, ten
British MPs, Bertrand Russell, four hundred scholars in the United
States, political prisoners in Mexico, and countless others joined in
the international campaign for amnesty."

In Canada a committee to defend Blanco and his comrades was formed.
André Gunder Frank was instrumental in organizing support for the
committee’s work among democratic and progressive-minded academics and
intellectuals. At the time, he was teaching in Toronto (and I think in
Montreal as well), and he worked closely with the Trotskyists of the
League for Socialist Action who had initiated the defence campaign,
speaking to meetings and circulating letters and petitions. Gunder Frank’s
support was very important because his work on the "development of
underdevelopment" (he had just recently published his seminal work
Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America) was of high repute
among those in the field.

A victory for the campaign in Canada was winning the support of Amnesty
International, which was initially disinclined to join the campaign
because its statutes prohibited it from defending political prisoners
who had "engaged in violence" in support or defence of their views.
Gunder Frank made a special appeal to Amnesty, explaining why oppressed
peoples often had no choice but to engage in violence in resisting the
violence of their oppressors. Amnesty’s change of heart was an important
precedent for later campaigns of a similar nature in defence of
revolutionary prisoners of conscience.

Hugo Blanco, in his book, wrote: "That campaign, initiated by the
Trotskyist comrades, and carried on by revolutionaries of all tendencies
and by all those who considered the sentence unjust, was responsible for
saving my life.... That campaign was an indication of the power of
international solidarity."

Blanco was spared the death sentence, although he was sentenced to 25
years imprisonment. Released a few years later, he went to Chile from
where he was forced into exile in Sweden after Pinochet’s coup. In the
late 1970s, Blanco was able to return to Peru and for a time was an
elected member of the Constituent Assembly and later the parliament,
where he led a revolutionary socialist contingent of MPs.

-- Richard Fidler


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