Legendary campesino Hugo Blanco merges old-style Marxism with earth-first land reform philosophy

[marmar]

from NOW Toronto:



The convert
Legendary campesino Hugo Blanco merges old-style Marxism with earth-first land reform philosophy
By WAYNE ROBERTS

The western hemisphere has a new name. On October 12, indigenous peoples from many countries met in Bolivia to celebrate the United Nations declaration on their rights, and once again rechristened (so to speak) our continents Abya Yala.

In the Kuna language, this means "land in its full maturity." Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer of the late 1400s, lost his naming rights to descendants of settlers who arrived 10,000 years earlier.

The rising sense of power among the hemisphere's 50 million indigenous people is transforming politics in what used to be called South America. But few people have been changed as profoundly by this new politics of identity as Hugo Blanco, the legendary Peruvian Trotskyist revolutionary.

It was Blanco, back in the 60s, who invented the now famous chant of peasants and campesinos the world over: Land or death.

During a lecture tour of Canada last month, he showed how deftly he has wedded old-style Marxist revolutionism to his relatively recent encounter with his own indigenous heritage.

At a meeting at a Ryerson lecture theatre in September, Blanco sports the typical floppy sheepskin hat worn by the Quechua people of the frigid mountains of southern Peru. I only learn afterward that the young-looking 73-year-old wears the hat at all times on doctor's orders, for fear that his skull, which has suffered too many police beatings, can't withstand an accidental bump.

Even with his disarming appearance, Blanco's opening lines surprise me. They're nothing like what I remember from the fiery speeches that almost got him executed when he was tried for his role in a 1962 armed peasant revolt.

The reason native politics are so charged today, 500 years after Europeans invaded, he begins through a translator, is that mines and oil and gas wells are poisoning Pachamama, Mother Earth.

...(snip)...

When Blanco chanted "Land or death," Cournoyer tells me, the activist had "an incipient understanding" that it was different from the Hispanic tradition of "Fatherland or death," a popular cry in Cuba. It reflected a deep-seated and intuitive psychological and spiritual understanding that land, identity, meaning and life were one continuum.

"It is not the earth that belongs to the people but the people who belong to the earth," Blanco clarifies.

From the leader of militant land reform during the 1960s comes a land reform philosophy for the 21st century. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-10-18/news_story5.php

[Trillo]

1. Why do discussions of this sort always end up referring to indigenous

peoples? I find it turns me off. I was born somewhere, but I'm not considered indigenous to where I was born? :wtf:

[Igel]

2. They picked Kuna?

An obscure language from an apparently isolated language family?

A language once noted for being centered around Bogota, but where it was determined it had almost certainly spread in not too distant times from the isthmus (the language group's speakers presumably being invited in as liberators by the people that had previously been indigenous to the area around what's now Bogota)?