Hector Bejar’s long road

by Andrés Alsina

Héctor Béjar’s road has been a long one. What is more important is that he has found, rightly or wrongly, a way of being honest with himself and of gently twisting the arm of reality. He was born in 1935 and from his adolescence was a member of the Communist party, where he became general press secretary and, in that capacity, director of its official publication, the newspaper Unidad. He was finally expelled from the party. Between February 1966 and December 1970, he was imprisoned for having formed, in his search for a revolutionary alternative, a guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army,. He was freed under a general amnesty granted by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. He enthusiastically joined Alvarado’s de facto regime (1968-75) and its policy of nationalization of resources, agrarian reform and unaligned development, with the participation of sectors that had previously been outsiders.

He did so through social and political work among the indigenous peasants within the framework of the organization Sinamos (the acronym means “without masters” in Spanish), until the coup d’état (1975-78) by the Prime Minister Francisco Morales Bermúdez (“who is still alive,” he remembers, implacable), when he went underground for over a year.

In 1977 he took up his activities again, with the publication of the social sciences journal Socialismo y Participación, which is now a quarterly review and has reached issue No. 89. Through this journal, the Latin American left has been enlightened, for example, about the existence of José Carlos Mariátegui (1895-1930), editor of Amauta and author of Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana” (Seven essays interpreting the Peruvian reality), and his differences, back in the 1920s, with the Third International. This article was published in a memorable issue No. 11, prepared together with Pancho Aricó, an Argentine scholar (now dead) who was then working for the Mexican publishing company Pasado y Presente. A precious copy of the issue was left by the columnist in those abandoned libraries that mark the life of that whole era. “That issue of the magazine caused a small scandal,” he remembers without delighting in the memory.

In spite of everything, the journal maintains socialism in its title. “You know we discussed whether we should change the title. And there was pressure from friends. But no, we considered that we needed to reaffirm the title. We said to ourselves that it was absurd; we never believed...the position of this journal was that real socialism was inapplicable in a country like Peru, in countries like those of Latin America. Thus we didn’t identify with that model. Then why should we shed tears because it has been defeated or cry out triumphantly because the model has fallen. It is not our problem. Peru has a different problem. Nor did we feel it was appropriate opportunistically to abandon socialist precepts, as many people did. We didn’t have to do that. Socialism continues to be a possibility. We think socialist ideas are still a possibility in Peru and, even more than that, a need.“ He laughs, though not really knowing why.

Months after launching the journal, as if all his life he had accumulated energy for a course from which he would never again deviate, he founded the Center for Development and Participation Studies with a group of people with similar ideas. “For a mere 24 years”, Cedep has worked to provide technical assistance to indigenous peasant communities in Peru, in high mountain areas, among coastal farmers, and in “an on going work of political analysis, formulation of proposals and public policy, and in particular of following up the government’s social policies.”

He continues the work undertaken by Sinamos (1971-75), now with scant resources that in no way compare to the amounts available to that organization under the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1909, de facto President between 1968 and 1975, when he was overthrown by his Prime Minister Francisco Morales Bermúdez).

“Is Cedep a raison d’être for old militants, or the trickle that bores through stone? “

“This work we do with Cedep does provide a reason for being, insofar as we want to maintain socialist values and we formulate proposals on what public policy should be in Peru. But it is also the trickle that wears away the stone, because we work for this, and we do it with the grass roots, with whom it can be done. The development we are working for is not neutral; it should be part of a new plan for a country with a choice that exists today. In this respect, we define ourselves as being clearly contrary to the neo-liberal model that Peru tried to apply”.

That model was made explicit from 1990. However, if we look at it in perspective, the first adjustment model, through an agreement with the IMF, was applied in 1977, precisely when Cedep was formed, Francisco Morales Bermúdez was in the final stage of his government, and Javier Silva was the Minister of Finance, just as he is today, in the new transition government under Valentín Paniagua. The opponents also hang on.