Without finishing his agronomic studies in Argentina's Universidad de la Plata he became a worker in a factory because he did not want to work for the landowners.

[5] Returning to Peru he joined the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) in Lima and participated in the famous protest to the then Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon, in 1958.

Following those demonstrations, Blanco caught the attention of the police, and decided to move from his home region to the Convencion Valley.

[6] Beginning in 1958, with the help of students from the Cuzco University, Blanco’s Quechua federation mobilized the allegados against the hacendados and arrendires.

[8] It was reported at this time that, while he was arresting a hacienda owner in Pucyura who was accused of raping a little girl, he shot a police officer in self-defense.

[12] In 1963, unionists took the city of Quillabamba, who were carrying out an order, that was issued in Cuzco by the Federation, to go on strike, so that some imprisoned union leaders, among them, Hugo Blanco would be freed.

During Augusto Pinochet's coup on 11 September 1973, he took refuge at the Swedish embassy,[16] from where he was smuggled out of the country under dramatic circumstances under the leadership of Ambassador Harald Edelstam in 1976[17][18] following an international solidarity campaign that included Jean-Paul Sartre,[2][19] Simone de Beauvoir,[19] and Bertrand Russell.

[19][20] In 1976, he became a political refugee in Sweden,[21] where he supported himself among another jobs as a language teacher at Sando school and as a warehouse worker in a Press Office.

Blanco spoke to approximately 10,000 people in the U.S.A.[19][22][23] After spending several years of exile in Sweden, Mexico and Chile he returned to Peru in 1978, was a founder of the Workers Revolutionary Party and was elected to parliament on a left-wing slate.

[29] Hugo Blanco was Director of a Cusco-based newspaper called Lucha Indígena (Indigenous Struggle), and a member of the editorial board of Sin Permiso.

In 1991 Blanco published an article about the struggle of inhabitants of the town of Ilo and surrounding villages against pollution from the Southern Peru Copper corporation.

[46] In 2002 Hugo Blanco suffered a brain hemorrhage during a visit in a peasant community in the Cusco region.