[From “Thoughts On the Passing of Chairman Gonzalo”]

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, known to the world as Chairman Gonzalo, died on September 11, 2021 after what many call an assassination. Considering that he was kept in isolation for 29 years (longer than I’ve been alive) and undoubtedly exposed to every sort of psychological and physical torture for the entirety of that period, I’m sympathetic to this characterization of his death. When a political prisoner dies, the fault is always on the State that incarcerated him[…]
The bourgeois press (open and hidden) wasted no time in screaming from the rafters this news. “TERRORIST MURDERER DIES!”[…]Publications such as Jacobin scribbled all sorts of slanderous and scurrilous trash, highlighting the stated (by Gonzalo himself) excesses such as those of Lucanamarca and the dynamiting of the corpse of the open anti-Party agitator and informant Maria Elena Moyano. These admitted excesses are used by bad faith “Left” actors to paint the entire PCP as a band of murderers, sociopaths and unrepentant torturers. Strangely, there was no screaming about the revolutionary “excesses” when Fidel Castro died[…]
Gonzalo’s death comes during the honeymoon period of social democrat Pedro Castillo, who spent his youth as a rondero (peasant militiaman) in service of the Peruvian state working against the PCP[…]Castillo was an enemy of the PCP in the 1980s, and he is an enemy of the PCP now. Castillo will happily allow Gonzalo’s body to be burned and spread in the Pacific[…]Castillo has joined the “terrorist” chorus, and if he were such a friend of the people he would release Gonzalo’s body and allow for a public funeral[…]
As the faded red flag was torn down from the Kremlin, as Deng Xiaoping turned China into imperialist cloud-cuckooland, in Peru, some comrades waited out many a cold Andean night to deliver people’s justice to many a traitor, fascist military officer, evangelical missionary smuggling in Yankee propaganda