Hugo Blanco: A Revolutionary for Life

Hugo Blanco 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. Contents: Timeline; Introduction; ‘Hugo Blanco has set an example’; Early life 1934-1958; Land or Death 1958-1963; Capture and Cat Lives 1963-1970; Freedom and Exile 1970-1973; Political Life 1973-1992; With the Zapatistas 1992-2002; Indigenous Struggles 2002- ; Change the System not the Climate; Acronyms. Glossary. 10 black and white photographs, 234x156 mm; 160 pp,