On June 19, remember the “Day of Heroism”!

Rising from the crushing poverty of the long-suffering Peruvian masses, the Communist Party of Peru has since 1980 supported the strategy of People’s War. Following decades of failure of the bankrupt parliamentary strategy to empower and uplift the oppressed and exploited in Peru, the Communist Party of Peru blazed new trails, and thus evoked a particularly brutal response from the Peruvian state and murderous Garcia regime.

The general experience of the Communist Party of Peru up to this day shows that the state will resort to any amount of repression and fabrication to protect the ruling class and private property; the particular experience of the massacre of nearly 300 prisoners on June 19, 1986, ordered by President Alan Garcia, while he was attending a conference of the Socialist International (the body of international social-democracy) in Lima, shows that social democracy is willing to pursue the total physical extermination of those with communist sympathies in order to protect the overall rule and rights of capital.

The many hundreds of political prisoners in Peru in 1986 were, notably, the ones who actually made it to prison. It is well known that for decades the Peruvian military and other death squads pursued a policy of extermination of supporters, perceived supporters, or suspected supporters of revolution, primarily campesinos (“peasants”), including women and children, and in many cases entire villages, given the sympathy and support built up by the Communist Party.

The heroic prisoners, discontented to rot in the enemy’s jails where massacres had taken place before, attempted to liberate themselves and negotiate for their comrades. The prison on the island of El Frontón, having been liberated by the prisoners, was assaulted by the Peruvian Navy, Naval Infantry, the Peruvian Army, and Republican Guard SWAT team.

After intense fighting, the prisoners surrendered, but were executed one-by-one, shot in the neck. No one was ever punished. The bodies of the martyrs were transferred by the military to anonymous graves outside of Lima.

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