RED-LEAD FICTION

ILYICH RAMIREZ SANCHEZ, monickered by a capitalist- and Zionist-controlled media as "Carlos the Jackal", first gnawed into my consciousness when, as a first year high school student, I read in front of my classmates the news for that day: "...members of the PFLP (People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine) led by a certain Carlos hostaged Sheik Zaki Yamani and other prominent officials during an OPEC Ministerial meeting at their headquarters in Vienna, Austria on September 16, 1975".

That was a class act.

Three years later, in 1978, I and several others held "hostage" our teachers and our school prompting the Recollect fathers to expel us all from ever enrolling again from their exclusive and expensive school. It wasn't a class act and it became clear that I was beginning to be a disgrace to my family.

By the early eighties, I was now following the footsteps of my idol – Ramirez Sanchez or Carlos; and have become active in democratic student demonstrations calling for reforms in the government and an end to militarization of far-flung villages and mountain hamlets.

I was in this habit of being targeted by the authorities for the simple reason that I am that someone who threw my rocks accurately at my target and that they were not successful in their manhunt for me either. It's also a habit for me to run rings around my pursuers and it was getting to be quite real exciting -- and quite dangerous.

In all that time, I was hiding behind bushes and hovels I hear only a fleeting glimpse of him through the news of airline hijackings and bombings in places like Paris, Tel Aviv, London, Frankfurt, etc., etc.; and mystified me the more when I read novels by such authors as Frederick Forsythe, John LeCarre, Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy and others.

His name has been linked and associated through every other group like the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigade, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle, the Red Cell, etc. as the capitalist and Zionist press see it fit to destroy the man's reputation and to jack up his bounty all the more. He never had a chance to settle down and live an ordinary life due to threats to his life spawned on by this unfair media blitz unleashed against him giving him no venue to answer their accusations.

In the 1990s, Alberto Fujimori, a descendant of a Japanese immigrant, became president of Peru. He usurped the powers of the legally-elected parliament by giving him total and sole control of the whole country and emasculated the regime's military by enforcing anti-people policies and mechanisms. It was a time of desperation and it was a time to take another option -- armed struggle! I grabbed a Kalashnikov available and tucked myself away in the hills.

My parents thought otherwise. My father pulled some strings to make me leave Peru unhindered while my mother took care of my stay across the Pacific, in the Philippine Islands, where she has a complete roster of relatives. For six-and-a-half years I lived a bourgeois lifestyle playing futbol, partying, chasing skirts, completely safe, unaware and far away. Bitten by the mountaineering fad in the Philippines, my cousin and I joined a mountaineering club and, together, we climbed several mountains there with a group or by just ourselves.

It was in this paradise-like interlude that I got to know of another form of a popular people's struggle being fought here just like the one's I just got out of. It was also there that I was able to hear tidbits of news of my beloved Peru as my former comrades-in-arms either got unjustly arrested, being made to disappear, or being ruthlessly killed for no apparent reason except to voice one's opinion.

I saw in prime time news Sendero Luminoso's inspiration, the poet Abimael Guzman, unjustly tried in court inside a steel cage! Then the wanton massacre of 25 Tupac Amaru Democratic Party members inside the Japanese embassy in Lima, who were still negotiating for truce with Peruvian police negotiators, being blatantly gunned down in front of the international press resulting also to the death of an embassy guest caused by this fascist regime's totalitarian war against people's democratic groups.

It was there in the Philippines in 1994 that I heard the news of my beloved revolutionary hero and freedom-fighter being kidnapped from Sudan by French military agents and brought to France in violation of existing international laws. It was unlawful for France, in the first place, to conduct an illegal action in Sudan in defiance of that country's internal law which is existing, functional and quite legitimate.

It was quite unlawful for France due to the absence of an extradition agreement between them and Sudan. For fifteen years until now he was not granted a fair trial for alleged crimes which he himself has no knowledge of except that it was convenient for capitalist regimes to associate his name to that of "terroristic" groups so as to get back the embarrassment they suffered long ago at Vienna in 1975.

Ramirez Sanchez is now in total isolation confinement in a maximum-security prison in Clairvaux, France as prisoner number 868286X awaiting countless manufactured accusations that seems to have no end. He is 60 years old on October 12, 2009. A mere old man that could do little except to spend the rest of his years with his only daughter.

I returned to Peru by way of a Philippine passport in the waning years of the Fujimori regime and immersed myself well back to my hometown and to my family. As of now, I am taking care of my family's business and, not far away, is my Kalashnikov, my Colt 1911 and a Sig Sauer (plus two frag grenades); accessible in just one move. Just like what Carlos used to do under the imagination of those authors in their dime novels.

Adios!

Happy Birthday Ilyich...

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