Former congressman César Combina denounces Pedro Castillo’s party, Perú Libre, as “a criminal organisation”.

The real leader of Perú Libre, Vladimir Cerrón Rojas, an avowed Marxist-Leninist, is behind the appointment of new ministers linked to Sendero Luminoso terrorism in the country.

“It is his government of revenge. He is a born ‘hater’. His father, who was a member of Sendero Luminoso, was killed by the armed forces. That is where his resentment comes from and he is not going to stop until he turns Peru into a nest of leftist criminals with blood on their hands”, sources from the anti-communist opposition told this newspaper.

The fact that Cerrón got away with the appointment of, among others, Guido Bellido, who is linked to terrorism, is viewed with great concern in the country. For Peruvians, Cerrón is the “Stalin” of Perú Libre, pro-Fujimori sources told this newspaper.

Former congressman César Augusto Combina Salvatierra knows the leader and owner of Castillo’s party very well. This Peruvian politician was affiliated to the Partido Popular Cristiano and was part of the Movimiento Regional Combina Junín, a region controlled by Cerrón.

Combina claims that Cerrón’s influence is a real catastrophe: “He has been implicated in all the corruption processes in the country”. The former congressman does not hesitate to say that the Peru Libre party “is a criminal organisation” and hopes that “the Public Prosecutor’s Office will act”.

For former Interior Minister Carlos Basombrío, “Vladimir Cerrón achieved his goal of radicalising the government”. He believes that “the appointment of Bellido is a provocation and attributes it to Cerrón’s power over Castillo”, he said in an interview with the media outlet Perú 21.

“Eighty-five per cent of the population does not want Cerrón to have any influence in their government and Cerrón has shown that today he is the one who defines who is going to be the premier and achieves his objectives of radicalising a government from day one. I don’t know what the [congress] benches are going to do, but a very complicated scenario is opening up, imagine the discomfort that the members of the Armed Forces and the Police must feel at having to swear obedience to a person who has appointed as premier someone who sympathises with the murderers of his comrades in arms“, warned Basombrío.

Marxist guerrillas

Another appointment, that of the new foreign minister, Héctor Béjar, has also set alarm bells ringing among opponents. Journalists, lawyers and politicians who fought to prove electoral fraud in the last Peruvian elections are now reporting on the past of terror on the CVs of the new ministers.

“Béjar as foreign minister is terrible. He has been a Havana man for decades, ever since he was a guerrilla fighter”, the Peruvian-Spanish lawyer and journalist told Libertad Digital.

Béjar is a profound admirer of Fidel Castro and was a Marxist guerrilla who founded the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish), for “the liberation of the peoples of Latin America”, in the 1960s, and was even imprisoned for sedition. The 85-year-old minister and former guerrilla member holds a degree in Law and Political Science from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), as well as a doctorate in Sociology.

“With Béjar, Cuba will handle Peruvian international relations directly. This octogenarian communist was a close friend of the late Manuel ‘Barbarroja’ Piñeiro, legendary head of Cuban intelligence who was married to Martha Hanecker, a Marxist theorist in the 1970s”, reports the lawyer Mariategui.

Equally worrying is the appointment of Anahí Durand as the new minister. “It is also terrible. She is the ex-wife of the Chilean terrorist Alfredo Astorga Valdez of the MRTA”, the lawyer points out.

As the NGO Waynakuna Peru points out, the recent past of the leftist sociologist Anahí Durand Guevara has some documented episodes that “show closeness and affinity with the terrorist group Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA)“.

The new minister recently went so far as to defend machetes, using the usual leftist rhetoric, describing them as a tool of the Peruvian highlanders. She did so when the Peruvian right and thousands of demonstrators, protesting against electoral fraud, claimed they were being threatened with machetes. The leftists were marking houses and pavements with the machetes to “mark and terrorise dissidents”, as Peru’s former vice-president, Francisco Tudela, told Libertad Digital.

El machete es una herramienta de trabajo muy utilizada en la sierra norte. Mi abuelo se trajo su machete de Chota a Lima donde lo usaba para partir las sandias. Ya cansa tanta histeria de la gentita limeña. #ChotaMandaCutervo pic.twitter.com/tJuwAmEiEb

— Anahi Durand (@AnahiDurandG) June 18, 2021

The organisation’s report underlines that this former head of Verónika Mendoza’s (JP) Government Plan advocated for the leader and founder of the terrorist group MRTA, Víctor Polay Campos, in a public letter-pronouncement addressed to Alan García’s government on 27 September 2008. Aldo Mariategui concludes that Peru is on its way to becoming the next Cuba thanks to the “caviar left, haters and lukewarm people”.