Trotskyist leader Hugo Blanco was deported from here last week only nine months after being allowed back into the country after several years in exile. The reason given by the Ministry of the Interior was his "proven involve[i.e. shanty town] on the outskirts of the hottest periods of class struggle Bermudez replaced General Velasco wrene miami New: junta. Early June saw a pitched battle along the main highway out of the capital, Lima, between inhabitants of a neighbouring shanty town and 750 heavily armed riot police. The people of the district of Vitarte had streamed out with rocks in hand to defend a strike picket at a nearby nylon factory.
injury, arrests and beatings, illustrates well the openly anti-working class posture increasingly adopted during the last couple of years by the self-styled revolutionary government of Peru.
PRETEXT intensification of the class struggle in ment in recent events in a Young Town Blanco's deportation follows one of since last August, when General Morales Alvarado as head of the ruling military The incident, with its toll of serious The underlying cause of the recent ing the thoroughly pro-capitalist content of such official slogans as 'neither capitalism nor communism' and "social democzacy plus full participation, the regime has implemented a package of economic measures - coupling a 44 per cent devaluation with massive price increases - designed to restore the rate ot pront of the private and state owned factories and mines by thrusting millions of Peruvians into extreme poverty and giving a free rein to the biggest and most competitive concerns.
The response was an immediate strike by the unions representing Lima's 10.000 minibus drivers followed next day by an explosion of less organised forms of protest on a scale not seen since the ponce swike or rebruay 1975 - attacks on supermarkets and similar targets in two districts, out breaks of stone-throwing by secondary school students in at least two other places, and a prison riot.
Probably thankful for the pretext. the military suspended constitutional guarantees for a month, imposed radio over to a non-stop stream of martal music and official communi Morales came in on a ticket which included correcting Velasco's tendency towards the arbitrary use of power (arrests, deportations, closure of opposit-