by mim3@mim.org, July 19 2003
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It's been two weeks since the arrest of Adolfo Olaechea on July 4th, so what MIM regarded as a bizarre story is increasingly looking like no accident. The Foreign Ministry of Peru has noted the arrest of Adolfo Olaechea on its web page and has not said anything to back off from it. In fact, La Republica on July 18th says that President Toledo expressed satisfaction with the arrest of Adolfo Olaechea in Spain.
Now we read a publication called Dawn that calls Adolfo Olaechea "a major fundraiser" for the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), often referred to in the bourgeois press as the "Shining Path."(1) To appreciate the irony of such an accusation, we need to know the history. As Luis Arce Borja has pointed out, for more than a decade the PCP charged that Alberto Fujimori and his security-intelligence henchman V. Montesinos were drug-traffickers. In return, the U.$. government and Fujimori said that the "Shining Path" funded itself to the tune of millions through the drug trade. Those of us new to Maoism reading about it at the time found in the pages of Time and Newsweek that PCP leader Comrade Gonzalo was a multi-millionaire and that his one-time associates exiled to Europe were also. This story continued right into the late 1990s, with the picture the bourgeoisie painted of the small remnants of the "Shining Path" hanging on to dear life in a small region by being in charge of the drug trade. One Peruvian General E.P. Alfredo Rodríguez at the time had this to say: "'Shining Path lives off its cut [from the narcos]; that's why they don't want to leave the area. Where does Shining Path hide? Wherever there is coca. They travel together. It is their main source of financing.... Shining Path handles 40-50% of all the drug trafficking activity in the area, for its share and for providing security.'"(2) Now things have changed. The charges against Fujimori and Montesinos stuck. Montesinos is in prison and Fujimori is hiding in Japan. According to Caretas, EP Alfredo Rodríguez was a Montesinos appointee who faced questions from humyn rights organizations. Yet, while the LaRouchites quoted him above from his typical days as a Fujimori/Montesinos henchman, it appears that telephone-related records actually incriminate Gen. Alfredo Rodríguez in drug-trafficking according to Caretas itself.(3) What a surprise and what a surprise that the LaRouchites and U.S. Government never corrected themselves. The U.S. Government's Drug Enforcement Agency as of 2002 still sings the same old song as if the U.$. puppets were not caught with their pants down. Uncle $am still says it is the "Shining Path" that is the drug traffickers, not the best allies of u.$. imperialism: "Testifying on global narco-terrorist organizations and the illegal drug profits they use to support their activities, [the DEA's--ed.] Hutchinson listed a number of other extremely violent groups operating in the Western Hemisphere and around the world, including The Shining Path in Peru."(3) In 2000, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives put it this way: "If you look at the Shining Path, they always look to indigenous forms of funding and have always been involved in the drug trade."(4) If "Shining Path" has such money, one is wondering why "Shining Path" needs money from Peruvian refugees abroad. For that matter, since when does a mafia type organization need to persist in a certain ideology over 20 years? It would seem rather inconvenient. While desperately pointing to drug-trafficking and now refugees in England, there is one thing certain, that the slanderers beyond contradicting themselves about Sendero Luminoso's funding will never face the social conditions that capitalism has produced in Peru.
Notes:
Low blows & scapegoats: |