From the International Minister, December 1 2005 Dear MIM: Was the video of Gonzalo's Speech From a Cage circulated by rcp=u$a fraudulent? I notice that the text in the video does not correspond to the official text that you provide here: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/countries/peru/cage.html Was the video of Gonzalo'st Speech From a Cage circulated by rcp=u$a fraud? I'm just wondering whether Gonzalo did or didn't support RIM in that speech In the video, it does *appear* that he does say "life to the MRI" in Spanish and in his alleged voice. I think cominterns are wrong and support your line. I am just wondering for the sake of accuracy. --A comrade Comrade: As we noted in a few places, there were a number of document forgeries large and small in connection to the PCP in the last l0 or 15 years. There is no official PCP website, but MIM has done its best to put forward what people accepted as official documents at the time before Gonzalo's arrest. It is still MIM's intention to make available documents over which there is no serious dispute. At the time, MIM was always the first organization to make official PCP documents available to the Internet. Unfortunately, the document forgeries confuse people now trying to study these events, but on the whole we need to admit that Gonzalo supported the RIM and specifically saw it as RCP=u$a dominated in a destructively hegemonic way. Since then, individual Peruvians and organizations have taken it upon themselves to remove that association of the PCP and RIM. There is a serious question whether any Peruvian revolutionary outside prison still supports RIM as an organization as opposed to a one-time press release that said some good things. Another serious question arises, because the initial publication of Gonzalo's cage speech did come from official PCP channels which had yet to develop a peace accords traitor faction. So there could also be a difference between the official PCP line and what Gonzalo appeared to have said in a prison. Please understand that in that circumstance, which MIM would in no way try to mediate even if it could be directly on hand in prison, and should it have happened, MIM would have published the official line on what Gonzalo said. In other words, the PCP has the right to edit what Gonzalo said and the RCP=U$A does not. Because the RCP=U$A has a Trotskyist line on Cominterns, RCP=U$A disagrees and believes it has the authority to edit the documents. That's not to mention that fraud in the Peruvian media is a regular occurrence and that the Fujimori regime has been caught doing it many times--something that MIM is not able to sort through in a general way, but something Luis Arce Borja does with greater ease. So comrade Gonzalo could possibly make a mistake and others who escaped his arrest might piece together a role of the RIM in the police plot that Gonzalo could not have known about. For that additional reason, you have to respect the party, not just what the media reports about someone in prison. In any case, as you rightly suspect, the attitude toward the RIM did become a bone of contention in the following years. How and with what timing is what needs to be pieced together. As we know, the criticism by omission of the RIM's name from the cage speech was immediate and yet, years later Peruvians backing peace accords and making favorable references to Castroites and Trotskyists (something Gonzalo would never do) were found hailing the RIM. How did this sequence of events occur and what is the logical explanation? MIM tries to lay it out in a way that anyone can check and understand. We do not believe RCP=U$A internally has any capability to see what really happened. At the time of his arrest, Comrade Gonzalo was unfolding a struggle against the RCP=U$A in particular. He regarded himself as leading a "red fraction" within the RIM and his Central Committee published a document of criticisms of the RCP=U$A, including as MIM had pointed out, that the RCP=U$A was not Maoist. In the weeks just before the arrest of Gonzalo, followers of Gonzalo in charge of publicity abroad and in Peru took zealous action in the campaign against the RCP=U$A. We even had reports of fist-fights with the RCP=U$A and RCP=u$a impersonation of PCP cadres-- which was especially suspicious given the arrest of Gonzalo with the help of infiltrators. (As an aside, this is another example of something where the RCP=U$A persynality cult model is so destructive to Maoism, including international security. There are probably about two or three people in the whole RCP=U$A with the capability to understand what B.A. is really doing and one of them probably has no access to what he is doing. They talk about accountability as window-dressing, but when you set up such a gap where people who belong in no party at all are supposedly holding you in check, while you do things in guises, you in effect have no de facto accountability and the bond between theory and practice is broken.) However, when Gonzalo went to prison, a handful of individuals suddenly scoffed at their own previous campaign against the RCP=U$A and went on to develop the line for peace accords. It was a situation very similar to the one in China in 1976 when as soon as Mao died, Hua Guofeng dropped the campaign against Deng Xiaoping. It was also a situation looking very much like a coordinated police attack on the revolutionary organizations-- both inside and outside Peru. It were as if they were just waiting for their moment to throw overboard their line previously constructed by Gonzalo. A key and observable fact at this time is that RCP=U$A ceased distributing Luis Arce Borja's periodical despite previous Comintern-like centralism. By itself, this would tend to make Luis Arce Borja suspect that Rcp=u$a was in coordination with the police. The fact that the pro-peace accords faction dropped the campaign against the RCP=U$A and scoffed at MIM when we raised the question is also indicatively suspicious. If it were not an act of a previously arranged police plot, it was a hellish horse trade indistinguishable from a police plot. This is just to report the parts MIM witnessed first- hand. Comrade Luis Arce Borja naturally had the deepest involvement. Likewise, as soon as Gonzalo went to prison, some revisionist Peruvian leaders dropped the campaign against the RCP=u$A and soon followed ideas about the principal task being to "put up a poster" to "save the life of comrade Gonzalo" --the kind of thing you would think would happen if your party were composed entirely of Liberal lawyers helping international refugees. In that context where Gonzalo was unable to bring the campaign against the RCP=U$A to its logical conclusion, some dropped the campaign while others developed it further. Lately there appear those Peruvians who seem to take up the position of Gonzalo in 1992 and resume the campaign against RCP=u$a, as if we were still in 1992. In retrospect, it was not wise to think that with the loss of Gonzalo and given RCP=U$A bureaucratic dominance of RIM, that a "red fraction" was going to take over in RIM. Wherever RIM did not kow-tow to B.A., RCP=U$A simply split the RIM parties. It's to the point now where the accumulated history is becoming increasingly public. Despite these aggressive RCP=U$A activities, there is never an answer to the question of what RIM thinks it has that Stalin and Mao did not have that enables them to carry out what Stalin and Mao thought unwise. Stalin and Mao had considerable money and professional resources to reach across the globe. The RIM has nothing approaching the resources Stalin and Mao had at their disposal; yet, RIM still thinks it can do Wang Ming writ large. If anything, Wang Ming was on firmer ground, because at least the Soviet Union had state power and the resources to hire a huge professional staff! There is a long history in revolutionary movements of cutting pictures and associations with traitors. Benedict Arnold became persona non grata in the united $tates. Many Peruvians and other Third World revolutionaries now regard the RIM as hopelessly CIA-infested. Many of the small "forgeries" or editings can be taken in that light--as RIM's loss of popularity today. At the time the document came out, the RCP=U$A did not contest its accuracy. It was accepted and stays on our website with other documents of many years standing. Thank you for your alertness. It is a quality much-needed in our present movement. International Minister MIM