For more than half a year, a struggle has been raging in Peru between self-employed artisanal miners and the mining company Poderosa, which is 51 percent owned by sections of the Peruvian big bourgeoisie, with the remaining 49 percent in the hands of shareholders of imperialist finance capital. Since February, a state of emergency has therefore been declared by the old Peruvian state in the northern Peruvian region of La Libertad and the old armed forces, army and police have been deployed in joint action.
This state of emergency is a reaction to sabotage actions by the self-employed miners, who used in part dynamite to blow up 16 electricity towers in the region and eliminated a high-ranking official from Poderosa in a targeted killing. In addition, there are ambush and attack actions in which the independent miners, as on the night of April 4th, first blew up two high-voltage towers that supplied two mine entrances with electricity and then stormed two galleries of Poderosa and extracted gold. It should be emphasized that the latter actions took place after the declaration of a state of emergency and the deployment of the army. The current Peruvian Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén explained in an interview that the area is too extensive and it is not possible for the army to personally guard every electricity pylon, even though they would like to do so.
On the revolutionary website vnd-peru.blogspot.com, the situation is described and summarized among other things in an English article that the actions of the artisanal miners correspond to the three forms of struggle of the People's War; sabotage, selective annihilation and guerrilla combat and that the peasant masses, artisanal miners and other sectors of the classes that form the united front of the revolution in Peru, armed, apply what the Communist Party of Peru has taught them in more than 43 years of People's War.
The article goes on to say, with reference to what Chairman Gonzalo taught the revolutionaries, that the struggle of the independent, self-employed and artisanal miners is of the utmost importance because their struggle is directly directed against the old Peruvian state, which derives the highest percentage of foreign currency income from mining. It is a struggle that is directly directed against imperialism and its agents of the great comprador bourgeoisie who hand over the lands of the communities, the peasants and the so-called public property to the big corporations of imperialist and bureaucratic capital with dispossession and deprivation. Furthermore, it explains that the struggle waged by the self-employed artisanal miners - who come from the peasantry and the poor of the cities - to carry out their informal work is directly linked to the question of the struggle and use of the land and semi-feudalism.
And so it is, this struggle of the artisanal miners is a prime example of fundamental questions and problems of bureaucratic capitalism and semi-feudalism and their relationship to imperialism. It expresses in a concentrated way the problem of the defense of communal lands, water use and resources and materials of the country and brings important questions to light. Who does mining serve and who benefits from it? By whom is it carried out and protected? On what economic basis does the subsistence economy of the masses exist and on what basis does the mining of the imperialists and their agents exist? The article gives a revealing answer to these important questions by discussing the plans of Yankee imperialism, which are being developed in collaboration with the genocidal, homeland-selling and fascist government of the old bureaucratcapitalist-big landowner state under the leadership of Dina Boluarte.
The Boluarte government puts the province of Pataz in the administrative region of La Libertad under military control of the joint genocidal leadership of the armed forces by declaring a state of emergency in order to advance the plan of US imperialism against "organized crime and illegal mining". They do this because they need to create public opinion without which they cannot develop their plans. The goal of this plan is to annihilate the People's War in Peru and the pretext today is "organized crime" and "illegal mining", which in the past was "narcoterrorism".
These plans, which are described in the article as part of the warfare of the "Low Intensity Conflict", are directed against the People's War in Peru. And economically they are directed against the subsistence activities of the masses in Peru. Whereby the subsistence economy and its necessity is itself an expression of semi-feudalism. These subsistence activities and the appropriation of the land by the popular masses contradict that the lands and its resources are plundered even more by imperialism and its agents through the development of bureaucratic capitalism. Because this is what the struggle of the independent and artisanal miners, the small producers, is doing, they are fighting to use the land themselves in order to survive and not to leave it to imperialist and bureaucratic capital.
