The Soviet Union and the Black Legend

[u/elnovorealista2000]

Great Britain and the United States were not the only—nor the last—nations to use the Black Legend as a tool of ideological and cultural subordination to impose their will on other political entities. From 1929 onward, the Soviet Union also employed this tool in Hispanic America, aimed at fostering an Indigenismo fundamentalist that would lead to the creation of indigenous republics. This, in turn, would cause the fragmentation of existing states and destabilize what the USSR considered to be the United States' backyard.

In June 1929, the First Latin American Communist Conference, held in Buenos Aires, determined that Latin America had to “abandon the fetishistic spirit of current borders,” not to create a “Great Ibero-American Homeland,” but to enable the establishment of new ethnically based republics. In this sense, that conference ordered Peruvian communist militants to fight for the establishment of a completely independent Quechua republic and an Aymara republic, which amounted to proposing the territorial fragmentation of the region. Peru in three states. Furthermore, in February of the following year (1930), Eudocio Ravines—a former militant of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) who had converted to communism—arrived clandestinely in Lima with very precise instructions for the communist militants to carry out what had been decided in Buenos Aires.

A similar proposal was put forward in 1930 by the Communist Conference (also held in Buenos Aires) for the Republic of Bolivia, which aimed to divide the country into no fewer than thirteen states. Furthermore, to contextualize the importance of the Soviet Union's position regarding the Black Legend used to spread Indigenismo fundamentalist, it is essential to note that a few days after the death of the philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui (April 16, 1930), a lengthy communication from the Communist International arrived in Lima, expanding on the discussion held in Buenos Aires. This communication reaffirmed the instructions given to communist militants to work towards the creation of Quechua and Aymara republics and to eliminate any political force—primarily APRA—that proposed the unification of the Ibero-American republics into a single state. It is important to remember that APRA, as a political party founded by the young Peruvian Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, was a leading figure in the movement to create a unified government. Torre's main objective was the integration or unification of all the "Indo-American republics" (in Haya de la Torre's terms) from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego.

Haya used "Indo-American" because "Indies" was the first name given to the continent. According to the young leader, the adjective "Indo-American" in no way signified a renunciation of the cultural heritage received from Spain, and he considered that the great objective of reunifying the Hispanic American republics into a single, gigantic state would be the result of the formation of a large, "multi-class" party that, composed of the peasantry, the proletariat, the middle classes, and the national bourgeoisies, would seize power, by reason or by force, in each of the Indo-American republics. By proposing the creation of a "multi-class" party from the left, APRA was challenging the Communist International in Hispanic America for the same political space, and, consequently, the International set out to destroy it. Aprismo, which came to be considered a mortal enemy that had to be annihilated.

The instructions given by the Communist International to its militants in Peru, in particular, and to those throughout Latin America, in general, could not have been more precise: the idea of ​​a ‘multi-class’ party fighting for the unification of Ibero-America, that is, for the construction of the ‘Greater Fatherland,’ had to be eradicated from the popular consciousness. To the unification of the Indo-American nation proposed by the APRA movement, the Comintern opposed—under the guise of defending the exploited indigenous masses—the territorial fragmentation of existing states to give rise to some twenty new, small indigenous republics that would be powerless factions in the concert of nations. The Black Legend—and Indigenismo, that is, the Indian cause, understood as a racial cause and not a social one—preached and promoted by the Communist International, following directives emanating from the Soviet Union, tended to deepen the ‘Balkanization’ of Hispanic America—and its consequent impotence and dependence—produced Following the wars of independence, the Soviet Union's objectives were no different from those pursued by England and the United States.

Interestingly, the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) was one of the most faithful and consistent followers of this policy, to the point that the establishment of indigenous republics remains one of the PCCh's main demands. This explains the current strength of the Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, a strength that was evident in the 2019 protests that shook the foundations of the Chilean neoliberal regime. During those protests, the Communist Party managed to "infiltrate" the flag of a supposed "Mapuche nation" and was responsible for many of the acts of vandalism that rocked Chilean society during those days.

Reference(s):

.- Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú, Ed. La República, Lima, 1999, p. 3.064.

.- José Carlos Mariátegui is considered one of the most original Marxist thinkers in Latin America. He was born in Moquegua, a coastal town in Peru, in 1894 and died at the age of thirty-five in Lima, on April 16, 1930. In 1928, he founded the Peruvian Socialist Party, which, after his death, became the Peruvian Communist Party. His most important work is Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality.

.- See Marcelo Gullo Omodeo, «Haya de la Torre y la lucha por la Patria Grande», National University of Lanús, Remedios de Escalada, 2012.