As we go to press, MIM has foiled a police plot conducted in the leadership of the "MPP-USA," which stands for Popular Movement of Peru, U.S.A. branch. In May, the misleaders of the "MPP-USA" made the public mistake on the INTERNET of calling for the overthrow of Luis Arce Borja, the editor of El Diario International and a genuine leader in the People's War in Peru, most known for interviewing comrade Gonzalo at length in a famous PCP document that MIM has been distributing for some years now.
A year ago, MIM sent a message to the PCP (Peruvian Communist Party or "Sendero Luminoso") through possibly defective channels to tell it that at least one of the leaders of the "MPP-USA" was a cop and that another one or two people had serious problems of honesty. MIM stopped reprinting New Flag articles in Maoist Sojourner and adopted a policy of total silence on the New Flag. We waited for a PCP reply in the meantime. Many honest people criticized MIM for adopting silence on the New Flag in the year from May, 1995 to May, 1996.
MIM does not know how the PCP handled what MIM is trying to tell it, but a centrist Peruvian sojourner did get MIM's message without taking it seriously. Finally, on May 1st, 1996, various centrist and wavering elements working with the infiltrator leader of the "MPP-USA" received some information that started them wondering. Previously, they had all been working together on the "Marxism List" to set up a pole of support for the People's War in Peru--all in fact following the MPP-USA leaders in denouncing MIM.
On that day, a person in Malmoe, Sweden noticed that someone working for the revisionist Co-RIM (Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement) was distributing leaflets against Luis Arce Borja. This started a chain of events which caused the "MPP-USA" leaders going by the name of "Luis Quispe" to attack various wavering, centrist and honest proletarian elements in the movement to support the People's War in Peru.
On May 3, "Luis Quispe" started a provocation by asking if someone in his own camp was a "a plant of the intelligence services"? The suddenness of this change of opinion shows in that weeks earlier, Quispe was trying to defend the same person in the camp to MIM. On May 10th, a bogus Maoist in Detroit spoke for the New Flag against Luis Arce Borja, and said to Luis Arce Borja that he should just learn to live with the idea that no one will support his Worldwide Mobilization Call (WMC) to support the People's War in Peru (see reprint of the WMC in MIM Notes 116).
Yet, on May 11th, a New Flag supporter rose to call for self-criticism from "Luis Quispe." Another New Flag supporter started referring to the New Flag as "lumpen"-led. At that time, some information about the financial support for the New Flag leader from pro-Cuban revisionists arose.
As of May 12, the centrist leader of the camp opposing New Flag leaders admitted he had only convinced two people of the error of their ways. At that time, he made a point of saying he was unwilling to "cry wolf" and call the MPP-USA leaders cops.
However, on May 15th, rhetoric heated up and lines started to harden. Another Maoist sympathizer lined up with Quispe, but so did a die-hard Trotskyist fool who criticizes all alliances. (He is the type who should note his collaboration with the bourgeoisie for having a bank account.) Quispe started becoming bolder, calling for the overthrow of Luis Arce Borja. Later he called Luis Arce Borja a "traitor" and said the "proof" was that Luis Arce Borja never distributed PCP documents from 1994 to 1996.
A little over a week later, MIM pointed out that Luis Arce Borja's job was never mainly to circulate PCP documents, and that was true in the years before 1994 as well. Quispe was simply trying to fool the newer supporters of the People's War who didn't know that Luis Arce Borja is a journalist first and foremost.
On May 22, we have a response from Quispe about MIM's stand, and from then on the battle-lines became increasingly clear. On the one hand is someone who called for the split of MPPs (ordered by Quispe not to support the WMC) and the overthrow of Luis Arce Borja for no new reasons of any political importance. On the other hand, we had the camp that recognized that Quispe was someone who had infiltrated the movement after the arrest of Gonzalo, at a bad moment for the PCP. Quispe had gained credentials by doing translating work and editing of the New Flag. Now he was using them to gather information on a wide variety of organizations in imperialist North America, including Committees of Correspondence, CP-USA, SWP, PLP, WWP, RCP and MIM--while claiming to be buddy-buddy with all of them, unlike anything the real PCP would do.
It came to light that Quispe fabricated the positions of MIM for his own purposes, and created documents out of thin air for several people not in MIM, including CP-USA. For this kind of reason, MIM said it was important for the supporters of the People's War abroad to break with people like Quispe, whether they claimed to have PCP authorization or not. The PCP is not able to see everything that goes on abroad and so it's real supporters can't just sit back and watch its supposed representatives do things they hide from the PCP back home. People in the camp to support the People's War in Peru started to realize that despite our fundamental political differences, having cops in our midst could only cloud everything we were arguing over and that we had to unite to throw cops out, and then thrash out our differences and maybe even split over real (as opposed to cop-instigated) issues. For this purpose, the centrist leader spoke of MIM as part of "revolutionary unity." To unite with people even in revisionist organizations, MIM distinguished between "cops wearing revisionist masks" and revisionists.
There are many, many small things we should learn to overlook in each other for the purposes of unity in this movement and others. When it comes to fabricating positions, fabricating documents, double-dealing for the purposes of setting groups trying to support the People's War against each other while claiming to be for both by word-of- mouth and for gathering intelligence--at that point we have to say, such a person is a fraud, not a representative of the PCP. Then we must find a way to let the PCP know the damage caused but also the tempering experience gained from such struggle.
As we go to press, MIM is happy to report that new converts have been won to the cause of smashing the police plot and only one person in the last week was remaining willing to put in a paragraph supporting Quispe. Some went so far as to say we should all ignore Quispe and continue talking about things like the national bourgeoisie, the labor aristocracy and theory issues generally, because "no one could possibly take him seriously."
There remains much work to be done to crush the police plot in the "MPP-USA" however. This "MPP- USA" gained political prestige by working with MIM circles and among other supporters of the Peoples War in Peru and has done extensive work to infiltrate these circles, starting in 1993 by use of sugar-coated bullets. In fact, in 1994, Quispe named MIM a member of the "red fraction of RIM," which is the highest honor the PCP can bestow on MIM from the PCP's own political view. Fortunately, MIM never quite believed this character 100 percent, and discovered him as caught up in a host of un-Maoist activities, including denouncing MIM as "counterrevolutionary" when he needed to depending on what audience he was speaking to.
MIM's Party Congress approaches this summer. MIM is already looking for greetings, ideological challenges and suggestions for its program for the middle-classes--semi-proletarians and petty- bourgeoisie.
Now MIM would also like to hear from our comrades everywhere supporting the WMC and MIM's line. From our point of view, the main task of the WMC is to clear away some debris blocking the movement to support the People's War and also to be heard by the PCP-CC and then to follow the PCP-CC. Already the call has resulted in uncovering a major police plot lasting at least three years which was confusing the world's movement to support the People's War in Peru. More details will be forthcoming in Maoist Sojourner.
If the only thing the WMC does is to mobilize the masses to carry through in clearing out the police plot and raise our voices in support of the PCP so that it knows it does have supporters abroad, despite the confusion cops have sown, then the WMC will have justified its existence as far as MIM is concerned. If we succeed in globally mobilizing people with the proletarian line of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism on questions of classes and international organization, the WMC may have a very bright future indeed.
(To reach the "Marxism List" with Netscape or some such browser, do an INTERNET search for "Marxism List." To reach it by gopher, go to jefferson.village.virginia.edu under public discussions lists under "spoons.")