At the close of this edition, Rosalino Flores, a 22-year-old young man from Cusco, was hospitalized for a little over two months after receiving 36 shots on January 11, while he was mobilizing against the government of Dina Boluarte and Congress.
With his death, the number of people killed directly by the bullets (or pellets) of the repression unleashed since last December 7 rises to 49.
By Victor Montes
The democracy of the rich
All this repression has the sole purpose of maintaining the government agreed upon by Dina Boluarte and Congress in power.
That is why they use and abuse the weapons that the Constitution and the laws offer them: declaration of a state of emergency, suspension of guarantees, curfew, taking the military to the streets, etc.
And it is that even the most “full” democracy continues to be, in this system, an apparatus of violence of the ruling class to maintain its control over the people. And it is that same democracy that contemplates the way to drown those who fight in blood.
extrajudicial executions
However, it is a fact verified by international and national organizations that the current repression has been supporting, in addition to abuses, the systematic use of lethal weapons against the mobilized people. Facts that constitute extrajudicial executions carried out by the armed and police forces. This is shown by the remains of Galil and AK-M rifle bullets, as well as lead shot, found in the 49 direct victims of the repression. The majority, executed during the massacres in Andahuaylas (8), Ayacucho (10) and Juliaca (18).
It is obvious, as some international organizations have denounced, the cruelty of the repression against the population of the southern highlands, peasants and in the absolute majority of cases, Quechua or Aymara. Cruelty that reveals, therefore, a highly discriminatory, racist and classist content, which adds to the well-known “terruqueo” with which they try to justify the murderous actions of the armed forces and police.
Defend democracy or overcome it?
Faced with this reality, two positions are opposed in the field of those who fight.
For the reformist organizations that call themselves left, the repression is proof that the democratic regime has been replaced by a dictatorship. and therefore, the great task would be to “recover democracy”.
That this affirmation comes from those sectors of the movement that have laid down the dead and have faced the bullets of the police and the armed forces, such as the people of Puno, Ayacucho and Andahuaylas, is perfectly understandable, since it expresses a legitimate feeling.
However, what the organizations of the reformist left say, who have renounced directly confronting the repression of the government, hides a deception for the poor people, because the only democracy that exists today in the country, is the democracy of big business.
That is to say, the democracy that guarantees the domination of the big mining companies, oil companies, banks and factories. For that so-called left, “democracy” would be a regime with full rights, without repression… A regime that does not exist and has not existed anywhere where class domination exists.
“Forget” those “progressives”, democrats and “leftists” that since the “return to democracy”, the governments of Toledo, García, Humala, PPK – Vizcarra, Merino and Sagasti murdered 173 people through repression.
With this policy, reformism reproduces its sad old role of sowing confusion between the working class and the people, sharpening its revolutionary edge.
For us, on the other hand, as long as it is democracy itself that has fired at the people, we can only overcome it by countering its violence with the power of the mobilized and organized bases in territorial assemblies, organs of power, of worker and popular democracy, where the armed people respond to the violence of the State of the rich.
BOX
Freedom to the prisoners of the rebellion! Down with states of emergency!
Together with the bullets, the Boluarte regime and the Congress have been persecuting and imprisoning a part of the vanguard that came out to confront his murderous government. From these pages we demand the immediate freedom of the imprisoned fighters, the cessation of the open processes and the end of the states of emergency in Madre de Dios, Cusco, Puno, Apurímac, Arequipa, Moquegua and Tacna.
BOX
The dead of democracy
| Government | People killed by repression |
| Boluarte – Congress | 49* |
| Apple tree | 12 |
| Merino | 2 |
| Vizcarra | 5 |
| PPK | 5 |
| humala | 52 |
| García | 80 |
| Toledo | 17 |