Day of Heroism - Three documents

Struggle Sessions

Document 1:
Nothing and nobody can defeat us

Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Nothing and nobody can defeat us!
With deep affection for the love of truth and freedom I have nothing in my hands that remains of the Shining Trench of Combat, except this ashtray work of the prisoners of war who today lay down their bodies, cowardly murdered, and abject that the world, history and the masses, will judge these war criminals. Everyone in the world will see those criminals as they sit on the bench of the accused and are sentenced as war criminals, that today must be trembling. Nothing and nobody can defeat us. The river increases its natural cause; the overflow is a law.
There is a logic for reactionaries: generate disturbances and fail until their final ruin. The people also have their law: Fight, fail, to fight again we can fail again. We will fight again until we get the final victory that calls us. The blood shed are banners that summon all the people to achieve what we so much have yearned for, power.
Being condemned to win is a beautiful condemnation. We were born to win.
This is already a great reality.
They can crush us into a thousand pieces, but they cannot break our Communist morale.
We are willing to die.

Our class morale is at stake. We have to defend it, and we will do it with blood, pain and tears.
There can’t be any other way. This is the only way to break them into a thousand pieces and we won’t do it without going through a great storm.
In their despair the reactionaries are more unbridled, more of a reason why we have to do it. We must show the world the reactionary nature of the ruling class they defend no longer exists simply as such but strictly to change the world in the image and likeness of the working class, through its organized vanguard, the Communist Party.
Only war can deeply affect and move man in the core of his soul. From the songs to the cries, from the cries to the songs, there is no other way. Free and voluntarily we have chosen this hard, prolonged, and bloody road of the victorious and invincible People’s War that the Party and our people carry out. So then it is natural for the reactionaries to act like this.
We were clearly told, the more vile, the deeper they go, they make their own grave. That’s how the reactionary is, that’s how he will be.
As a combatant of this heroic Shining Trench of Combat that has tenaciously resisted the bombings of the reactionary genocidal armed forces, [I have seen how they] disgrace our national heroes. They are brave to kill and cowards to die. They know how to kill but they don’t know how to die.
They will see, they will go on knowing: the people will never forget the blood shed from its best children.
Dear people of the whole world, your Communist children of war will not let you down, especially at this precise moment. We raise high the red flags of Communism.
We have a bright perspective.
What can we do then if our final destiny is to triumph. The last word is that we are winning.
We fight unclouded for our cause of Communism.
We will speak of other matters another day.
I reaffirm my commitment to our revolution, to world revolution with the blood of our people and of our combatants, with the blood of our Communist comrades that runs in streams, overflows and overthrows the old and generates the new one.
I will never see their faces, their smiles again, but they live within my heart. I will be the bearer of their ideals. They are mine and belong to our people. I will follow your examples: to fight for our people, to serve the people wholeheartedly, without any personal motive, with total personal disinterest.
Long live Chairman Gonzalo, the guarantor of victory!
Long live the Communist Party of Peru!
Glory to the fallen guerrillas!
Signed,
a Combatant
June 19, 1986
[Note- this letter is from a combatant, a member of the People’s Guerrilla Army, written on June 19, 1986, the Day of Heroism, in the middle of the heroic resistance of the rebellion against the genocide, when the sinister reactionary armed forces, commanded by the genocidal Alan Garcia, assaulted the Shining Trench of Combat of “El Fronton.” He delivered it before he died. We publish it as it was written for history to record it.]
Peru, 1986
Communist Party of Peru – Central Committee

Document 2:
Night of Saint Bartholomew

By Comrade Angela Ramos, 1896-1988
(An unbreakable and persistent combatant of the people) [Ramos had visited the shining trenches of combat many times and was following the developing story of the prison resistance]
Night of the black night
Soft lilac light of the dawn
breaking the curfew
the morning is already clear
and they fall from the sky
as a tragic flock
the crows of the vendetta
on the desolate island.
The thunder of shrapnel
puts prisoners in custody
The hour of death has arrived!
Oh, of the announced death!
the rock made of sand flies
the fish under water escape
come the amphibious boats
and close the green waters
holding on to the palms
the prisoners swear and clamor:
To death, face it!
Nobody on your knees falls!
the exorbitant basins
the foam in the mouth bleeds
and even the stone made human
moans inside your guts
Flush on the rock
heralds of revenge
birds of death
They vomit their black lava.
Human heads fly
Oh, of the severed trunk
the rocks fall apart
over the sea bloody
they blow them with dynamite,
they burn with spears,
they harass them like beasts
Everybody dies! Nobody escapes!
Where are they? mothers mourn
asking the airs
The crows took them!
the jackals answer them.
And in the Blue Pavilion
– Isolated earth cachito –
there are dreams of Poets
that in revolution they dreamed.
And with hymns they will return!
the flags unfolded
– new dreams, new yearnings –
of those who, when they die, advance.
Miraflores, June 18th, 1986

Document 3:

To Give your life to the Party and the revolution

The inexhaustible bosom of the people nourished them with frugal food and made them walk; class struggle shaped their minds; and the Party, as the primary and highest social form, raised their political conscience, arming it with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Guiding Thought, empowered their combativeness by organizing them in the People’s Guerrilla Army and, smelting them with the masses of the poor peasantry, steeled their bodies and souls in the inextinguishable forge of the People’s War. Having become prisoners of war, they never knelt down and, persisted in fighting, mobilizing and producing amid fiery struggles. They converted the sordid dungeons of the decrepit and rotten Peruvian State into shining trenches of combat.
The smashing, well-aimed and implacable blows dealt by the People’s War and its unstoppable advance stirred the reactionaries’ hyena entrails, reverberating everything like continual lashings and peremptory demands in the turgid and disturbed nightmares of the APRA government, which is today already fascist and corporativist, even more so in the unbridled ambitions of the apprentice demagogue “führer” who leads them; thus, the reactionaries, the administration and the now genocidal García Pérez dreamt bloodthirsty and dark plans for a devastating and decisive blow that would lead to the crushing of the People’s War. The prisoners of war’s rebellion is the public unmasking and condemnation before the world of these sinister plans for massive killing, in defense of the revolution and their own lives. The monstrous and infamous genocide carried out by the armed forces and repressive apparatuses through governmental orders and given carte blanche, full of blind hatred against the people and perverse homicidal fury, was shattered by the ferocious, unbending iron resistance of the comrades, combatants and children of the masses who raised ideology, courage and heroism daringly displayed in an ardent, warlike challenge. But if the reactionary beast drank blood until satiated in order to impose the peace of the cemeteries, those lives, wretchedly and cunningly cut short, were transformed into imperishable ones, forming the monumental trilogy of shining trenches of combat in El Frontón, Lurigancho and Callao, historical landmarks that will proclaim more and more the greatness of the Day of Heroism.
The would-be devastating and decisive blow wound up falling on the heads of those who engendered it and sank the fascist and corporativist APRA government and the one who acts as president, in violation of his state’s regulations, resulting in a serious political crisis and the enormous loss of prestige from which they cannot yet escape. The rebellion of the prisoners of war at the cost of their own lives for the Party and the revolution is a great moral, political, and military triumph. Even more, they notably served the success of completing the great leap with a golden seal and of laying the groundwork for the new plan of developing base areas, whose first campaign has been the greatest setback for the Peruvian state to date and which has had the widest repercussion of the People’s War both inside and outside the country. In this way, the prisoners of war, like the great masses of history, go on winning battles beyond the grave, because they live and fight within us, conquering new victories. We feel their vigorous and indelible presence shining and palpitating, teaching us today, tomorrow and forever how to sacrifice our lives on behalf of the Party and the revolution.
Glory to the Day of Heroism!
Peru, June 1987

CHAIRMAN GONZALO