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Yellows Against Reds: Campesino Anticommunism in 1960s Ayacucho, Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Jaymie Patricia Heilman
Jaymie Patricia Heilman*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Abstract

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Peasant activists affiliated with the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) seized the Pomacocha hacienda in Ayacucho in 1961. The invasion triggered over a decade of serious conflict between those peasants who supported local CCP activists and those who opposed them. The campesinos who challenged Pomacocha's CCP activists did so using the rhetoric of anticommunism, and they were in turn derided as “yellows,” or conservatives. Peasant anticommunism stemmed from conflicts over money, religion, participation, and especially political rivalries, as the staunchest anticommunist peasants in the community belonged to the rival APRA party. The Pomacocha case shows that landowning elites, the church, government officials, and the military had no monopoly on the Cold War rhetoric of anticommunism; peasants likewise mobilized counterrevolutionary discourses to further their own interests. Ultimately, anticommunism allowed campesinos to pierce through the political neglect that characterized indigenous peasants' relationships with the twentieth-century Peruvian state.

Resumen

Resumen

Activistas campesinos vinculados a la Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) tomaron la hacienda ayacuchana Pomacocha en 1961, lo cuál desató un grave conflicto entre los comuneros apoyando a los activistas locales de la CCP y quienes estaban en contra de ellos. Los campesinos opuestos a los activistas de la CCP utilizaban la retórica anticomunista, a lo que sus vecinos respondieron acusándolos de ser “amarillos” (conservadores). El anticomunismo de los campesinos provenía de conflictos económicos, disputas sobre religión y la participación política, y las rivalidades políticas, debido al hecho que los campesinos anticomunistas más acérrimos eran miembros del partido Aprista. El caso pomacochano demuestra que además de las élites, la iglesia, el gobierno, y el ejército, los campesinos también vocalizaban discursos contrarrevolucionarios para avanzar sus propios intereses y para contrarrestar el abandono político que caracterizaba sus relaciones políticas con el estado peruano durante el siglo XX.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , 2015 , pp. 154 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

I thank Alicia Carrasco for research assistance and Gladys McCormick and the anonymous LARR reviewers for their tremendously helpful suggestions. Research for this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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