Hugo Blanco

Hugo Blanco is Peru's best-known revolutionary. A leader of the indigenous people of the Andes, he was born in 1934 in Cusco, the former Inca capital. In the 1960s he led a successful armed peasant uprising demanding land rights. He was placed on death row and released only after a huge international campaign supported by Jean Paul Sartre. In exile in Chile he was lucky to escape death after the 1973 coup.

Still politically active today, he publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Struggle). This engaging political biography surveys the life of this unassuming but compelling activist, from the 1960s to the present. It is a story of ideas and activism: surveying Hugo Blanco's views on defence of the environment, social and political movements, indigenous peoples, left governments, and political strategy. Hugo Blanco is one of the most significant activists and ecosocialist thinkers in the world today.