On Viento Sur’s behalf, we hope to pay him the tribute he deserves soon, but in another article recently published on our website, one of his closest friends and fellow fighters, Roberto Montoya, has reminded us of his first steps and his active participation in the process of building successive revolutionary organisations in his native Argentina and in Peru and his subsequent exile in Madrid after the triumph of the military dictatorship in his country.

Daniel Bensaïd in his memoirs, Une lente impatience (2004) [English translation: An Impatient Life: A Memoir Verso, 2014] gave testimony of how he met Ché Pereyra when he travelled to Argentina in 1973: there, he said, he found that “this former young metal worker was a legend (…). His unchanging joy, his courtesy, his humour, his chivalrous elegance, contributed not a little to winning our support for the orientation of armed struggle ”. And indeed, part of that legend, especially his harsh Peruvian experience, has later been reflected in films, books, such as Avisa los compañeros, pronto [Warn the compañeros quickly], and other works.

Some members of the editorial staff and Board of this magazine met him later, together with his partner Juanita, when he arrived in Madrid in 1978 and immediately joined the activities of the Liga Comunista Revolcionaria (Revolutionary Communist League/ LCR), willing to assume any type of task, such as the one that he took on arranging the logistics for our 5^th Congress, held in Madrid a few months later. Since then, he has participated in the activities of this organisation, always with his own political opinions and, more than once, freely expressing his differences with the decisions that were made, as for example, regarding the unification process with the Movimiento Comunista [Communist Movement/MC] as recounted in his Memoirs. [1]

Besides his Memoirs, Daniel authored other works, amongst them: Del Moncada a Chiapas. Historia de la lucha armada en América Latina (1994 y 1996), Argentina rebelde (2003), Mercenarios (2007), Che, Revolucionario sin fronteras (2017) and with Roberto Montoya, El caso Pinochet y la impunidad en América Latina (2000). He also wrote a long list of articles in different magazines and media. Among them, by the way, a harsh criticism under his pseudonym Luis Alonso in 1984 of Historia de Mayta [published in English as The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta], by Mario Vargas Llosa, an anti-Trotskyist pamphlet that, according to him, gave Kremlin propaganda little to envy. Probably one of his last published articles was one that appeared in special number 150 of Viento Sur. In it, one can see his concern for taking stock of the different experiences he had gone through in the Spanish State and attempting to contribute some ideas to a “party-movement” project in which the political and the organisational were always closely intertwined.

We also know that he was writing some notes in which he tried to draw lessons from the experience of armed struggle in Latin America during the 1960s,1970s and later.

The description that Daniel Bensaïd gave of Ché Pereyra when he met him in Madrid after a long time sums up his mood very well: “As dynamic and joyful as ever, he has gone through the depressing post-Franco years without giving up, attentive to the slightest regrowth of hope, faithful to his commitments, to his colleagues and to his dead.” Daniel “el Gallego” [the Galician] was, in short, a great friend of his friends from very different generations, always kind and respectful of other opinions, far from sectarian, and open to what might seem heterodox at first glance, but seeeing that it could be impregnated with a subversive, revolutionary and prefiguring potential of a communism worthy of the name.

As the poet Miquel Martí i Pol wrote in his Lletra a Dolors, it will be difficult for us to imagine that he will be absent forever, but there are so many memories that he gave to us and those memories demand that we always remain faithful to his legacy.

February 10, 2023

Jaime Pastor