Hugo Blanco, who has died aged 88, was Latin America’s best known Trotskyist leader and an indefatigable fighter for land and justice in his native Peru and elsewhere. In the early 1960s, building on existing organisations, he and a handful of others created a peasant federation that challenged the landowners by persuading indentured labourers to go on strike. The son of a mestizo (mixed-race) lawyer father and a small-scale landowning mother, he had won the confidence of the Native Peruvian peasants by working, as they did, on a coffee plantation.
As tensions rose in the Convención valley, around Quillabamba, the police and army were sent in, and violent clashes took place. Blanco was accused of the murder of a policeman and forced to flee deeper into the mountains. “It was not really an armed movement in the classic style,” he said, many years later. “There was no guerrilla foco [nucleus, as in the guerrilla wars based on the Cuban experience] and no political party.” Instead, there was simply a peasant movement, “seeking justice against the feudal property of the landowners”.
