The Communist Party of Peru, otherwise known as Shining Path, launched its “popular revolutionary war” in 1980, giving rise to a bloody internal conflict with the Peruvian army that left 30,000 dead, 4,000 disappeared and some 200,000 displaced. This painful episode of Peru’s history is the subject of this impressive collection of works by 14 scholars—the majority of them Peruvians—skillfully edited by Steve Stern.
Shining Path is a clandestine, hermetic and highly sectarian organization, as well as one of the most bloodthirsty groups of its kind. Yet it expanded its reach throughout the country and came to represent a serious threat to the Peruvian state.
This volume addresses several decisive issues about the Shining Path including the nature of its organization, its emergence and expansion, and the consequences of its actions.
As Carlos Iván Degregori pointed out early on, Shining Path was not based on Andean utopianism, but on an extreme version of rationalism based on a blind faith in “science,” of which Abimael Guzmán, the group’s leader, was the main exponent. The organization seemed able to channel intense feelings of frustration toward the larger goal of revolution, and it did so with utmost conviction of the insignificance of the “other.”
This is revealed dramatically in Ponciano del Pino’s chapter, which documents the extreme moral limits to which the Shining Path subjected both its followers and victims. “When Sendero captured a civil patrolman or anyone who committed ‘faults’,” he writes, “the leaders implicated the population in the violence by demanding participation in an ‘initiation rite’ of public execution.” A traumatized informant explains: “When they gave me the knife I did not know where to start. I went up to him and said forgive me, and I gave him a stab in the chest and I screamed out of fear and I think that the scream helped me to do it. I ended up smeared with blood and not understanding what I had done…I wanted to go crazy and escape that very moment.”
The chapters by Marisol de la Cadena and Florencia E. Mallon offer insights into the cultural and political context in which Shining Path emerged. Mallon identifies various “omens” during the 1970s that marked the character of this Maoist organization, such as the decision to place macropolitical change above the resolution of local problems, an unwillingness to negotiate, “a superficial style of political work,” and a disdain for cultural and ethnic issues. Yet de la Cadena’s article suggests that these traits were just as common in the rest of the Peruvian left. By far the most distinctive omen was the Shining Path’s imperviousness to Andean peasant culture.
Another key question the book tackles is the Shining Path’s surprising staying power. The book does not present any comprehensive look at the Shining Path from the inside, but Degregori confirms the key role played by Ayacucho’s high school and university students. The significance and growing authority of the “instructed” generations was intimately linked to the uprooting of traditional structures of authority in the Andean highlands.
Another factor that accounts for Shining Path’s advance is the weakness of the obstacles it encountered. Chapters by Jo-Marie Burt, José Luis Rénique and Iván Hinojosa demonstrate how the political ambiguity of the legal left and the organizations linked to it facilitated Shining Path’s expansion. Hinojosa explains that this ambiguity also led many left-wing activists to join Shining Path, particularly after the formal split within the United Left coalition in 1989. The Shining Path was defeated in the rural highlands, but in both Ayacucho (Orin Starn) and Puno (Rénique) this defeat was a result of coordinated action between peasants and the armed forces after 1990, in which the left was completely absent. In Lima, as Burt demonstrates, the Shining Path was only brought under control after the capture of Guzmán.
The other obstacle facing the Maoists was the state and the army. State corruption and the distance between state and society worked in Shining Path’s favor, as did the army’s “dirty war” campaign against the peasantry. As Enrique Obando notes, rivalries within the different branches of the armed forces also facilitated Shining Path’s advance.
The book overlooks one key factor: the gradual abandonment, from the early 1980s onward, of the “logic of confrontation” that characterized both the left and the popular sectors. Social movements no longer sought out the root causes of problems or those responsible, but rather focused on mustering local resources to resolve immediate day-to-day problems. This new scenario is marked by the decline of the labor movement and left-wing militancy, and a growth of self-employment, survival organizations and NGOs. The new pragmatism that pervades this new scenario is akin to—but not necessarily the same as—that of Alberto Fujimori, as Patricia Oliart suggests.
Above and beyond the Shining Path, the book demonstrates what Stern calls the “clearing effect” that this period had on the multitude of political groups active in Peruvian society in the 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, polarization and the destruction of “third paths” is the Shining Path’s greatest legacy. How and when the construction of new paths will occur still remains to be seen.
