What neither Polay nor López Chau understand

In an article published in Cambio (February 16, 1989), presidential candidate Alfonso López Chau defines Víctor Polay as a “social fighter” and “political fighter.” What neither Polay nor López Chau understand is that going into armed struggle against a full democracy in 1980 is not comparable to rebelling against dictatorships (Sánchez Cerro, Benavides, Odría) and calling for elections, as Haya did. But the problem is not only that López Chau sympathized with Polay in 1989. The problem is that he still thinks like a leftist from the 80s. Just look at his response to criticism from X. “In the 80s, while terrorism sought to destroy democracy, we fought its causes from the institutions,” López Chau tweeted. What are those causes? You would have to ask the candidate. Or does it justify the appearance of terrorism as a consequence of the social, economic and ethnic differences in Peru? Because that is the discourse of the left: arguing that terrorism was a response to structural poverty and historical racism (“the most feared skin”). Theories already disproved (read Tanaka about the CVR) and that ‘forget’ that Abimael despised the indigenous and superimposed his ‘scientific’ ideology on Andean religiosity. Neither Sendero nor the MRTA sought an ethnic claim or a return to an Inkarri myth. But the left insists on racial and economic arguments to avoid the ideological factor and its own responsibility in the terrorist obsession. Because the subversives were not “wrong companions” who took “different paths” as López Chau implies in his article about Polay. The terrorists were consistent communists who, unlike their comrades, dared to put Marxist theory into praxis.