Hugo Blanco’s Revolutionary Vision Lives On
Imprisoned, exiled, and threatened with death, Peruvian activist Hugo Blanco never once wavered in his commitment to peasant liberation. Latin America’s unbreakable revolutionary will be sorely missed.
The Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco Galdós in 1979. (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
On June 25, Hugo Blanco Galdós, one of the most revered figures of the Peruvian left, passed away at the age of eighty-eight. Blanco left a deep, lasting mark on Peruvian society, most notably for his role in a historic peasant uprising against the landowners of the Andean highlands, which led to the enactment of Peru’s 1969 Agrarian Reform Law.
An uncompromising radical, Blanco spent much of his life in exile, was repeatedly imprisoned, and narrowly escaped a death sentence. He dedicated his life to the cause of land rights and indigenous struggles, raising his voice in unwavering protest against dictatorships, imperialism, and the international mining companies that preyed on his homeland of Peru.
The Struggle for Land in Peru
Blanco emerged from a decidedly Peruvian background. In Peru, like other parts of Latin America, the expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth century often preserved and perpetuated precapitalist social formations like the latifundio. By the new century, the colonial-era plantation system had been adapted to advance capitalist accumulation while deepening forms of exploitation denounced by socialist writer José Carlos Mariátegui: the violent separation of the indigenous from their means of material — and spiritual — reproduction allowed rent-seeking capitalists to expropriate their land and exploit their traditional forms of communal labor power.
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