And Then There Were Three: The Fracture of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation, 1973–78

The Peruvian Peasant Confederation, Peru’s largest and most important national peasant organization, split into three competing factions in 1973. The three-way split of the peasant organization owed to ideological divides, struggles for political power, and competing visions of agrarian reform. Each of the three resultant factions claimed to be the true Peruvian Peasant Confederation, and over the following five years, these factions devoted as much energy to fighting one another as they did to working on behalf of Peru’s peasantry. By the end of 1978, after a failed effort to unite the three rival organizations, the faction of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation led by the political party Vanguardia Revolucionaria triumphed and the other two groups quietly ceased their operations. Although many scholars have acknowledged the turbulent history of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation in the 1970s, the organization and its travails remain surprisingly understudied. This paper will show how the Peruvian Peasant Confederation’s split reflected larger ideological disputes within Peru’s Left as well as the bitter political disputes triggered by state-sponsored agrarian reform. The paper reveals the staunch opposition that Saturnino Paredes – the Peruvian Peasant Confederation’s legal advisor and founder of the Maoist Peruvian Communist Party-Bandera Roja – encountered when he switched his political allegiances from China to Enver Hoxha’s Albania. The essay also offers new insights into the Peruvian Communist Party-Shining Path, as Shining Path militants briefly allied with one faction of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation before ultimately deeming peasant union activity to be counter-revolutionary.