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The celebrated phrase of communist playwright Bertolt Brecht is repeated often, that there are those who fight for a day, two days, many days, and they are good and very good people; but that only those who fight their whole lives “are indispensable”. Less common is finding such people. Like victorious swords, they are few. On February 17, one of them passed away.

Luis Varese Scotto was born in Lima in 1949. He was the son of Italian migrants who arrived in Peru seeking a better life after the tragedies that ravaged Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Thanks to his sharp intelligence, he pursued studies in Literature and Anthropology at the Catholic University of Peru and San Marcos University. He would later study international humanitarian law, refugee issues, gender, and development.

But it was not only his intelligence that was sharp – so too was his vision. From a young age, Varese could have had a very different life from the hard path of the revolutionary. Indeed, he became a professional football goalkeeper for the renowned Peruvian team Sporting Cristal and was coached and trained by the legendary Didí, a glory of Brazilian football. One could say that destiny had other plans for Varese, but the truth is that destiny had nothing to do with it. It was his decision to risk everything for a different world.

The turbulent political life of Peru (a country with one of the richest leftist and revolutionary traditions in South America) led him to quickly connect with other young people, and not-so-young people, who sought to transform the ignominious social differences that have historically characterized Peruvian society caught between extreme opulence and equally extreme poverty. This is how he joined the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Peru, of which he became one of its most committed and radical representatives.

Internationalism and Nicaragua

However, Varese’s generation had embraced the commitment to fight for the people anywhere in the world, whenever the situation required it. This political principle, called internationalism, led him and a heroic generation to fight in sister lands regardless of whether death was a likely outcome.

But Varese, in addition to being an internationalist, was a skilled revolutionary soldier. After arriving in Nicaragua, he joined the ranks of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a political movement that brought together various political sectors with the mission of overthrowing the bloodthirsty and hereditary dictatorship of the Somoza family (1936-1979). This dictatorship, in service of the darkest interests of US imperialism, had subjected Nicaragua to one of the most terrible collective sufferings that any Latin American people has had to endure.

Varese quickly demonstrated leadership qualities on the battlefield and, according to accounts, fearlessness, which led him to be declared a captain of the FSLN by the highest authorities of the revolution – an honor that was recognized in Nicaragua every time he visited the country after the victory against the Somoza dictatorship. The dictatorship would be defeated on all fronts, including militarily, in 1979, thanks also to the courage of internationalists like Varese who made the Nicaraguan Revolution their homeland as well.

Some have said that the Sandinista Revolution was a revolution of poets, among whom Ernesto Cardenal stands out. Luis Varese quickly formed a friendship with Cardenal that would last until the latter’s death. In fact, Varese himself spent many years writing poetry and would never abandon it, publishing his verses in several books and, as he personally told me, with some more still unpublished (for now).

During the years of armed struggle against Somoza, he wrote verses charged with the pressing reality: “I touch your imprecise edges with affection, / I smell you as mine and as the comrade’s beside me. / Hail! hollow of earth. / Trench.” But his verses were also marked by love, which he held up almost like a religion, the most humanist of all: “I do not fear dying far away / the Earth is where I live / Our America is my cradle and my hammock… It saddens me, yes / to lose the last kiss / and the inexhaustible texture of your skin on my chest.”

The return to Peru

And while his ties to Nicaragua would never be broken (he easily could have stayed in Central America), Varese decided to return to Peru to continue the revolutionary struggle, remembering the example of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who, after achieving glory in Cuba, returned to South America to continue the fight. Because, as Varese, Guevara, and so many other Latin American revolutionaries remind us, there is no total victory until all are victorious.

This is how he came to participate in the founding of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which set itself the mission of putting an end to the insulting state of inequality that plagued Peruvian society. However, deep strategic and tactical differences emerged between Varese and several other members of the MRTA, which led him to separate himself from the movement.

The separation from the MRTA, however, did not buy any forgiveness from a Peruvian state that had sworn to destroy or persecute any revolutionary. Varese was persecuted and captured in 1986 while exercising his right to vote, becoming a political prisoner.

Exile, UNHCR, and Ecuador

Thanks to various efforts, he managed to leave Peru and began working as an official for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in different countries. He worked for UNHCR for more than 20 years in service of the displaced who had to flee their homes for various reasons, including political ones, something that Varese undoubtedly lived in his own flesh every day of exile, which made him a highly empathetic and efficient UN official.

His travels in several countries across the world, but especially in Latin America, reaffirmed an internationalist commitment he never abandoned. Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, among others, were part of a route of missions through which he cultivated, cemented, and reaffirmed friendships and relationships of solidarity with people from the left and progressivism (which had its peak in the region during the early 21st century). His home became a place of encounter, debate, friendship, and solidarity for those who needed it, complemented – almost as a supreme moral value – by his wife and children as well.

However, after a long international journey, he would find in Ecuador a place where he decided to pause the march for a moment. He became linked to the progressive government of Rafael Correa, which he successfully advised on an ambitious plan to improve security in the South American country, achieving, among other things, a record reduction in violence and insecurity. Quito, the capital, came to be considered the safest capital in South America. Varese bore enormous responsibility for these and other milestones, although a great many people in Ecuador still do not recognize this – even as the country now finds itself, years after a successful security strategy, in the most serious security crisis in its history.

Journalist and friend

During his final years, Varese dedicated himself to publishing journalistic articles and high-level political analysis, through which he did not hesitate to denounce the intensification of imperialist actions around the world and to express without ambiguity his solidarity with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Palestine, and other processes confronting imperialism. He also always publicly denounced the acts of political persecution that in recent years have become the order of the day through lawfare.

But beyond all that has been said, there is a human dimension of Varese that cannot be properly expressed in this article or in biographical sketches, and that is his warmth. Rarely does one meet someone who holds frankness and humanism as values that do not overshadow each other, but together create the embrace of affection. Those who knew Varese, the poet, the captain, the goalkeeper, the journalist, the official, in short and dialectically, the revolutionary, know that alongside his memory rises a halo of strength and warmth that accompanies him.

I suppose that this, that which rises alongside memory and against forgetting, is what they create in us, the few, the indispensable ones.

The post Luis Varese: son of the Patria Grande and Peruvian revolutionary appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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