Merlin Press, 2019, 154 pag., ISBN 9780850367485, € 20.50
Hugo Blanc is Peru’s best-known revolutionary. A leader of the indigenous
people of the Andes, he was born in 1934 in Cusco, the former Inca capital.
He is a lifelong environmental campaigner in defence of the natural riches
of the Andean region and beyond. In the 1960s he led a successful armed
peasant uprising demanding land rights. He was placed on death row and
released only after a huge international campaign supported by Jean Paul
Sartre. In exile in Chile he was lucky to escape death after the 1973 coup.
More recently Hugo Blanco was a Presidential candidate and was elected as a
Senator in Peru. He was exiled to Mexico, where he was influenced by the
Zapatistas. Still politically active today, he publishes the newspaper
Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Struggle). This engaging political biography
will survey the life of this unassuming but compelling activist – a
guerrilla fighter praised by Che Guevara, one- time member of the Fourth
International – from the 1960s to the present. It is a story of ideas and
activism: surveying Hugo Blanco’s views on defence of the environment,
social and political movements, indigenous peoples, left governments and
political strategy. Hugo Blanco is one of the most significant activists
and ecosocialist thinkers in the world today.