By Jakob Stein

This past Wednesday former two-time president of the old decaying Peruvian state Alan Garcia died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound as authorities waited outside of his Lima home to arrest him on bribery charges.

Garcia had been a member of the right-wing counterrevolutionary party, American Revolutionary Popular Alliance (APRA) and the architect of the prison genocides that liquidated the shining trenches of combat at El Fronton, Callao, and Lurigancho, on June 19, 1986. Chairman Gonzalo explained the significance of this massacre in his 1988 interview with the newspaper El Diario, “It has emerged as a symbol because there is a specific date, while the general genocide lasted for two years and involved many scattered events. The 19th was a single event, an example whose enormous impact shook Peru and the world.”

The corporativist fascist Garcia regime presided over the use of systemic rape as a weapon, implementation of systemic racism against Peru’s indigenous peasant masses, and increased repression against the revolutionaries of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP).

The bribery charges against Garcia stem from an international bribery scandal that has implicated several other ex-presidents of Peru such as Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo, and Ollanta Humala, as well as the one-time presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former president and arch class enemy Alberto Fujimori.

The scandal is centered on the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht and has extended to high-level politicians not only in Peru but Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil as well. These high-ranking politicians are accused of accepting bribes, often in the tens of millions, in exchange for awarding highly lucrative public works contracts to the construction company.

The news of Garcia’s suicide comes as communists prepare to commemorate the 33rd anniversary of the Day of Heroism, to honor those prisoners who fought valiantly to their deaths in 1986. Garcia has committed his final act of robbery, this time robbing the masses of their ability to exact justice.

The Garcia administration and his APRA party were, at the time of the prison revolts, hosting a congress of the so-called “Socialist International” in Lima, and committed the cowardly genocide of PCP political prisoners as a way to suppress the revolutionary movement and save face in front of their revisionist, social-democratic counterparts. This goes to show once again why center-left social democrats and revisionist electoral cretins are, in the final instance, only fascists with a different flag and rhetoric.

Garcia emerged unscathed from the empty denunciations of the cowardly act by his Peruvian counterparts, and he was re-elected to the Peruvian presidency in 2006.

It is telling that Garcia felt no remorse or guilt for the massacre of political prisoners nor the countless people killed during his government’s counter-insurgency efforts but that he felt compelled to commit suicide in response to being exposed as a corrupt politician and facing the possibility of being sent to the same prisons he presided over throughout his government tenure.

In stark contrast to the cowardly actions of Garcia, Chairman Gonzalo, leader of the international communist movement and greatest living communist, has been imprisoned in solitary confinement over the past 27 years for the crime of being a revolutionary leader. He has transformed the naval base at Callao into the most shining trench of combat in the international struggle for revolution. As the 33rd anniversary of the Day of Heroism approaches on June 19, may the masses of Peru dance on the grave of Alan Garcia and celebrate the great heroes of the PCP, and all those communists who carry on their legacy, fighting people’s war until communism!