Peruvian political figure, leader of the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP, Campesino Confederation of Peru), leader of Trotsky’s Fourth International, and a writer.
He was a worker in a factory because he did not want to work for landowners, and a subtenant farmer on a coffee plantation.
While he was in Argentina working as a laborer the coup against Perón took place, and Blanco participated in the resistance to the coup.
Returning to Peru he joined the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) in Lima and participated in the famous protest to the then Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon, in 1958.
From 1961 to 1963 he led the Quechua peasant uprising in the Cuzco region of Peru. He was the first who managed to build a bridge between the Spanish speaking intellectuals and the Quechua speaking workers.
Captured by the military, he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on the island of El Frontón. Nearly all his Trotskyist comrades where already in prison when he was captured.
During his imprisonment he wrote Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru. During this time he exchanged letters with José María Arguedas which were written in Quechua. In 1968 he was chosen by the Swedish section of Amnesty International as prisoner of the Year.
In 1971 Blanco was deported to Chile. During Augusto Pinochet’s coup on 11 September 1973, he took refuge at the Swedish embassy, from where he was smuggled out of the country under dramatic circumstances under the leadership of Ambassador Harald Edelstam in 1976 following an international solidarity campaign that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Bertrand Russell. In 1976, he became a political refugee in Sweden, where he supported himself among another jobs as a language teacher at Sando school and as a warehouse worker in a Press Office.
After spending several years of exile in Sweden, Mexico and Chile he returned to Peru in 1978, was a founder of the Workers Revolutionary Party and was elected to parliament on a left-wing slate. In 1980 he was a presidential candidate in Peru, a Leftist Revolutionary Alliance formed to support him. He came in fourth out of sixteen candidates.
He served in the Peruvian Senate as a representative of the Partido Unificado Mariateguista until 1992 because of Alberto Fujimori’s “self-coup” and declaration of a state of emergency, after he received information that both the Peruvian Intelligence Police and by Shining Path had sentenced him to death. Together with two of his children and his wife, he fled to Mexico where he was granted asylum.
Hugo Blanco is currently Director of a Cusco-based newspaper called Lucha Indígena (Indigenous Struggle), and a member of the editorial board of Sin Permiso.
He is the father of six children, including Carmen Blanco Valer, (born 1959), who grew up in Sweden, who is a chairman of the Group Solidarity Sweden-Latin America. His granddaughter, by way of his daughter Carmen, is Sissela Nordling Blanco, Spokesperson of the Swedish Feminist Initiative party and candidate for the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament) in the 2014 general election.
In 2002 Hugo Blanco suffered a brain haemorrhage during a visit in a peasant community in the Cusco region. Despite all difficulties he managed to be treated in Mexico City, where he remained in Hospital until 2003. Friends and colleagues from all around the world helped him with the hospital bills.
Link to Wikipedia biography