Латиноамериканский исторический альманах (Jun 2024)
Comintern and an attempt to organize the Popular Front in Peru 1934-1936
Abstract
The VII World Congress of the Comintern 1935 led to a sharp change in the tactics and strategy of the international communist movement and to a transition from radical “class against class” tactics to the formation of broad united anti-fascist fronts. In the period 1935-1939, the policy of “popu-lar fronts,” which consisted of building political alliances be-tween left-wing parties and organizations to fight the right, was implemented in many countries. In Latin America, where this tactic was implemented even before the VII Congress of the Comintern, “popular fronts” became widespread, some-times playing a significant role in the history of their coun-tries. Historiography covers in detail the history of the estab-lishing of alliances in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, etc. How-ever, the history of the organization of the “popular front” in Peru is less covered, although this story is interesting in that it largely reflects the problems that faced the sections of the Comintern. An attempt to form a "popular front" in Peru in 1934-1935, primarily based on the creation of an alliance be-tween the Communist Party of Peru (the CPP) and the Ameri-can Popular Revolutionary Alliance (the APRA) to participate in the 1936 elections, failed. There were several reasons for this: from the personal hostility of the APRA leader V.R. Haya de la Torre to the leader of the CPP E. Ravines before the policy that the CPP implemented according to the directives of the Comintern during the period of “class against class” tactics in 1930-1933.
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