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LRB, Vol. 41 No. 13 · 4 July 2019
Even Hotter, Even Louder
by Tony Wood
The Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes by Orin
Starn and Miguel La Serna
Norton, 404 pp, £19.99, May, ISBN 978 0 393 29280 0
On 26 December 1980, residents of Lima woke to a gruesome, incongruous
sight: dead dogs had been strung up from lampposts in the city centre,
some bearing pieces of cloth scrawled with the words: ‘Deng Xiaoping,
Son of a Bitch.’ It was the work of the Partido Comunista del
Perú-Sendero Luminoso. Sendero (or Shining Path, as it’s referred to in
English) was an ultra-orthodox Maoist group which had a few months
earlier launched an armed insurrection against the Peruvian state. The
combination of ideological rigidity and violence was to become Sendero’s
hallmark, but at this early stage not many people in Peru took them
seriously: they were few in number, politically isolated even from the
rest of the far left, and thought to be geographically confined to the
highland region of Ayacucho. Yet the insurrection soon spread beyond its
base in the Andes, engulfing large parts of the country, from remote
mountain hamlets to Lima’s shanty towns, the pueblos jóvenes.
Sendero’s goal was nothing less than the destruction of the Peruvian
state, which was, it said, dominated by a coalition of landowners and
bureaucrats, from which the country’s workers and peasants could only be
liberated by a ‘People’s War’ on the Chinese model. The movement was
incubated in the 1960s at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in
Ayacucho, under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy
professor. Born in 1934, Guzmán was the illegitimate son of an
accountant on a hacienda. He became a member of the Communist Party in
the 1950s while studying philosophy and law in Arequipa, Peru’s second
largest city, before joining the faculty at Ayacucho in 1962. Originally
a loyal Stalinist, Guzmán took the Chinese side during the Sino-Soviet
split and became a Maoist, travelling twice to China – once in 1965, and
again in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution – and returning
invigorated by the ideological fervour he witnessed there. By all
accounts Guzmán was quiet and reserved, though he was also an effective
pedagogue and a steely political operator, quickly able to extend the
influence of the Maoist faction in Ayacucho, especially in the
university. He and his fellow thinkers were prominently involved in
student protests against the military dictatorship of Juan Velasco
Alvarado in June 1969. Dozens were killed in clashes with security
forces, sparking further protests that led the government to call a
state of emergency; Guzmán and other leaders were briefly imprisoned.
The following year, he led a splinter group away from the main Maoist
party, naming it the Peruvian Communist Party-Shining Path of José
Carlos Mariátegui, after Peru’s most prominent Marxist.
It wasn’t until a decade later that Sendero began its armed struggle.
Its first action was to send a detachment of fighters into the village
of Chuschi to seize and burn ballot boxes on 17 May 1980 – the day
before every other political party in Peru took part in elections that
would seal the country’s transition to democracy after 12 years of
military dictatorship. As far as Sendero was concerned, the elections
were a sham that would do no more than repackage the same system of
exploitation; a communiqué from September 1979 argued that
‘personalities change … but electoral opportunism persists, and the
people gain nothing from it.’ Against the usual empty promises, Sendero
offered a dramatic, total remedy: in the words of a party document from
April 1978, ‘a mass war to destroy the old state of landowners and
grands bourgeois and build a new democracy’.
Sendero’s rhetoric, shaped above all by Guzmán, deployed a distinctive
combination of dry dogma and apocalyptic imagery. A document produced by
its conference in December 1979 asserted that ‘our party forged with the
strongest light and the purest steel had a decisive moment and generated
the National Construction Plan … the communists rose up and the earth
shook and as the earth shook the comrades advanced.’ At the 1988 Party
Congress, held clandestinely in Lima, Guzmán said that ‘the soul of the
party begins to burn even hotter, even louder, illuminating the skies
and melting the earth … Legions of iron will converge in a red sea,
armed, rolling across the earth, shaking and upending it.’ The verb
barrer, ‘to sweep away’, appears frequently in Sendero’s statements,
reflecting an almost millenarian commitment to smashing the existing
political and social system.
In the early stages of the insurgency, though, Sendero presented itself
not just as the destroyer of the old but also as the creator of a new,
more egalitarian social order in the countryside. At the time, most of
the poor, predominantly Quechua-speaking population of Peru’s southern
provinces was barely scraping a living from the land – farming tubers
and quinoa on the forbidding slopes of the Andes, herding llamas for
their wool – and had enjoyed none of the promised benefits of economic
growth. Literacy and health indicators were dismal compared to much of
the rest of Peru, which tended to view the highlands as an atavistic
drag on the country’s development. In many communities, meanwhile,
material inequalities were reinforced by traditional hierarchies. This
was one reason Sendero’s message resonated with many campesinos, or
peasant farmers: its arrival in an area often meant the removal or even
execution of the local authorities, the varayoq (literally
‘staff-holders’), a male-dominated chain of ceremonial posts that often
reflected economic imbalances. Sendero detachments – in which women
played leading roles, unlike in most villages or indeed on the rest of
the Peruvian left – would install a new ‘popular committee’ to run
village affairs, and would often administer summary justice to cattle
thieves, drunks, wife beaters and corrupt officials. But while some
villages may have welcomed the outsiders, many others resented their
intrusion, and saw the violent levelling they brought as a threat to
their way of life – to which the guerrillas responded by unleashing
ferocious collective punishments. Sendero fighters became known as tuta
puriqkuna, ‘those who walk at night’, adding to their fearful mystique.
In a neat piece of symmetry, the 1980 elections were won by Fernando
Belaúnde, who had been deposed by the military in 1968. During his
previous spell in office in the mid-1960s the Peruvian army had put down
a short-lived leftist guerrilla movement in the south. But this time he
began his five-year term by putting police ‘countersubversive units’,
known as sinchis, in charge of dealing with the insurgency. Beatings,
rapes, torture, summary executions and disappearances multiplied. The
brutality with which Peru’s security services treated the highland
population was in itself enough to provide Sendero with a stream of
recruits and sympathisers. In September 1982, the funeral of the
senderista Edith Lagos, killed in a clash with security forces, drew a
crowd of ten thousand onto the streets of Ayacucho, chanting such
slogans as ‘The people will never forget spilled blood!’ Starting in
1983, responsibility for the counterinsurgency was transferred to the
marines and the army; a large swathe of Peru was effectively under
military rule, and the abuses suffered by the local population increased
further. One Peruvian commentator at the time likened the troops sent to
the Ayacucho region to ‘an occupying colonial army’; for the high
command, the Andes might as well have been Algeria. (Not coincidentally,
the Peruvian army had received training from the French.)
But the war wasn’t fought only in the Andes. From early on, Sendero had
established a presence in the poor neighbourhoods of Lima, and as its
influence increased it began to direct its fire against community
organisations, NGOs and the rest of the Peruvian left. Not only did
Sendero not want allies; it targeted other leftists for intimidation or
assassination. Its detachments were often armed with little more than
rocks, machetes or sticks of dynamite they had stolen from foreign
mining concessions. More than once they loaded donkeys with explosives
and sent them into crowded marketplaces (these were known as
burrobombas; other homemade devices included the queso ruso, ‘Russian
cheese’, a crude bomb with a timer). All told, according to the final
report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, issued in 2003,
Sendero was responsible for 46 per cent of casualties in the war, making
it an unusually lethal guerrilla army – and an exception to the
worldwide norm. In most cases, government forces are responsible for the
lion’s share of deaths in civil conflicts.
Over the course of the 1980s, Peru descended into a manifold crisis. As
well as suffering the debt spikes and hyperinflation that afflicted the
whole of Latin America, it was beset by political and institutional
dysfunctions of its own. The war against Sendero seemed to point to a
more epochal breakdown. Its fighters regularly cut the power lines to
Lima, plunging the capital into darkness; sometimes, they set a nearby
hillside ablaze with the shape of a hammer and sickle. The government of
Alan García, elected in 1985, responded by ramping up the repression.
Two weeks after his inauguration, government troops marched into the
village of Accomarca, herded the 62 inhabitants into a church, shot them
and burned the bodies. In June 1986, Sendero prisoners simultaneously
took over the jails of El Frontón, Lurigancho and Santa Bárbara; the
government dealt with the protest by bombing the prisons, leaving more
than two hundred senderistas dead in the rubble.
The war rumbled on through the rest of García’s presidency, with neither
Sendero nor the government able to strike a decisive military blow. By
this time, other armed actors had entered the fray: as well as another
leftist guerrilla group, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru,
there was a galaxy of local peasant militias, organised on a
village-by-village basis to defend against Sendero without relying on
the equally predatory army. The 1990 presidential election, which pitted
Mario Vargas Llosa against the agronomist Alberto Fujimori, unfolded
against this uncertain backdrop. Having campaigned against the
novelist’s platform of harsh neoliberal measures, once in office
Fujimori turned around and implemented more or less the same programme –
the ‘Fujishock’. And he took an even harsher approach to the
counterinsurgency than García had: as well as arming village militias
with Winchester rifles to take on Sendero, he set up secret tribunals,
presided over by hooded judges, to pass summary judgment on captured
‘terrorists’, while his security chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, unleashed
death squads against suspected Sendero sympathisers.
By this time, whatever support Sendero had enjoyed was eroding, its
dogmatism and ruthless use of violence increasingly becoming political
liabilities. Emblematic in this respect was its assassination in
February 1992 of María Elena Moyano, the radical leftist vice mayor of
Villa El Salvador, a vast shanty town to the south of Lima. After
gunning her down at a neighbourhood communal meal, her assassins tied a
bomb to her body and blew her to pieces. A few months later, a series of
Sendero car bombs in Lima, Callao and Villa El Salvador killed dozens
and injured scores more. Then, in September 1992, after a lengthy
surveillance operation, the Peruvian authorities scored a major coup by
capturing Guzmán, who turned out to have been directing the war not from
the Andes but from a pleasant middle-class neighbourhood in Lima. When
he was paraded before journalists in a striped prisoner’s uniform
(Fujimori had ordered it to be made especially for him), it confirmed
Sendero’s political defeat. Militarily, remnants of the movement fought
on in remote valleys, where they continue to operate to this day. But
although Sendero has continued to carry out occasional attacks – notably
a car bomb that went off outside the US embassy, killing nine people,
just before George W. Bush’s visit to Peru in 2002 – it is no longer the
threatening force it once was. Since 2000, when Fujimori was hounded
from office, taking with him Montesinos and the architecture of
repression they had built between them, the country has regarded the
conflict as being at an end.
*
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that between 1980 and
2000 the conflict caused nearly seventy thousand casualties – twice as
many as previously estimated, the majority of them in poor, rural areas.
How and why was an apparently fringe movement able to pose such a
serious and sustained challenge to the Peruvian state? The question has
perplexed Latin America experts almost since the insurgency began.
‘Senderologists’ face the problem of explaining where the movement came
from in the first place, and why it took such a different path from the
rest of the Peruvian and Latin American left. Not only did Sendero take
up arms when the country’s other leftists had settled on the electoral
route; it also went against prevailing trends in the region as a whole,
since – Central America aside – this was a moment when much of the Latin
American left had turned away from guerrilla warfare. Sendero went
against the tide in its Maoism, too: Mao had died in 1976, and China had
begun its ‘reform and opening up’ two years later (hence the animus
against Deng Xiaoping). Yet Sendero’s very status as a historical and
political anomaly – seemingly out of place, out of time – only deepens
the enigma. Given how extraneous to Peruvian realities the insurgency
seemed to be, how was it able to gain a foothold, and to last as long as
it did?
There has been no shortage of commentary on the Shining Path in the
English-speaking world. Since the 1980s reporters, political scientists
and anthropologists have produced a string of books, and more recently
historians have joined in. There has also been a scattering of personal
testimonies, including memoirs by former senderistas. (One of the most
successful of these, Lurgio Gavilán’s When Rains Became Floods,
describes his time as a teenage volunteer in Sendero’s forces, his
capture by the Peruvian army and unexpected survival, and his return two
decades later to some of the combat sites near Ayacucho. It was
translated into English in 2015.) But what has so far been lacking is an
overall narrative synthesis of the conflict. The Shining Path by Orin
Starn and Miguel La Serna is intended to fill that gap. Starn, an
anthropologist, is known above all for his book Nightwatch (1999), which
provided a detailed portrait of the rondas campesinas, the peasant
militias which at the turn of the 1990s became the bulwark of the
Peruvian government’s attempt to beat back Sendero. La Serna, a
historian, previously wrote The Corner of the Living (2012), a
close-quarters description of the origins and unfolding of the war as
seen from different villages in the Ayacucho region. Both writers have
studied the local dynamics of the conflict, examining its emergence
from, and eventual destruction of, traditional village hierarchies, and
the way years of violence, fear and flight to the cities remade or
shattered Andean communities.
The Shining Path draws on an enormous archive: as well as the nine
volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, Starn
and La Serna make use of the commission’s formidable collection of
eyewitness testimonies and oral interviews, as well as a slew of
previously inaccessible government and police files, including
documentation from the Peruvian counterterrorist agency, Dincote. They
also conducted more than two hundred interviews across several
continents, some of them with leading participants in the events,
including high-ranking senderistas such as Elena Iparraguirre, Guzmán’s
second-in-command and later his second wife (a.k.a. Comrade Miriam –
apparently her choice of alias was inspired by Charlton Heston’s sister
in The Ten Commandments).
The result of all this legwork should have been an authoritative account
of the Sendero insurgency, but Starn and La Serna’s narrative is often
clumsy and is strewn with errors. They show little interest in reasons
or context, focusing instead on the personalities at the centre of the
drama – telenovela-style – and dwelling with particular relish on Guzmán
and the two women who ran the organisation alongside him: his first
wife, Augusta La Torre (Comrade Norah), who killed herself in 1988, and
his second, Comrade Miriam. On the rare occasions Starn and La Serna do
venture some kind of analysis or argument, it tends to devolve into
tired Cold War clichés, as when they announce that ‘the main cause of
the escalating carnage was the importation of Marxism in its most
rigidly orthodox form.’ (For comparison, it’s hard to imagine any
serious person blaming the ongoing conflagration in the Middle East on
‘Islam’.)
Starn and La Serna insist on how outlandishly alien to the Andean world
Sendero was, but then admit that ‘a new guerrilla insurgency might find
some takers in the neglected backcountry even now.’ Yet rather than
explain why that might be, what larger factors and forces are still in
play, they sidestep the question. Most disappointing of all, their book
doesn’t address the central mystery: if Sendero was so foreign to rural
Peruvian society, how was it able to take root at all? One of the most
astute observers of Sendero, the late anthropologist Carlos Iván
Degregori, described it as ‘a sort of dwarf star … in which matter gets
so compressed it acquires a great specific weight disproportionate to
its size’. But despite its smallness and political marginality, Sendero
was not extraterrestrially detached from Peruvian society, as has often
been assumed. Some of Guzmán’s closest comrades were drawn from the
Ayacuchan middle or even upper classes, notably Augusta La Torre, who
was from a well-connected landowning family, and Osmán Morote, whose
father was the rector of the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga
(who had hired Guzmán in the first place). But while it was for the most
part led by educated, middle-class Peruvians, Sendero drew most of its
footsoldiers from among poor, predominantly indigenous highlanders and
their city-dwelling sons and daughters. Here it helped that, unlike most
radicals from Lima, many of Sendero’s leading cadres spoke Quechua, and
were able to convey the core message of class war directly to the local
peasants. (One Quechua communiqué read: ‘The guerrillas and peasants
will take the city and all its authorities and the rich will disappear.
There will no longer be contempt for the high-country peasants.’)
Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American
journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread
‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’.
In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance –
physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were
assets early on, allowing it to develop an unusual cohesion and
consistency of outlook. These features would eventually be subordinated
to a grotesque cult of personality, in which Guzmán – ‘President
Gonzalo’ – was hailed as the ‘Fourth Sword of Marxism’ (after Marx,
Lenin and Mao). But in the meantime they had made Sendero a formidably
disciplined political and military force. This is especially striking
given that, unlike many other guerrilla insurgencies, Sendero had no
practical support at all from outside the country; according to Starn
and La Serna, most of its shoestring budget came from tuition fees from
a small private school in Lima (they reject the idea that Sendero made
fortunes from the drug trade in the Huallaga Valley). There is another
respect in which its isolation made a difference. Much of the global
left experienced perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen
Square as deep ideological shocks, prompting a re-evaluation of strategy
as well as basic principles. Sendero by contrast saw these events as
confirmation of its worldview: it had already identified both the USSR
and China as ‘revisionist’ powers hostile to the true revolutionary
cause, and now destined for the same scrapheap of history as the
capitalist world.
The insurgency took place at a moment of great tension in the Peruvian
countryside, when it had become clear that the Velasco dictatorship’s
radical land reform of 1969 had fallen far short of its goal of
transforming rural society. Many Andean communities tried to overturn
centuries of deprivation by laying claim to land, even as the whole
agricultural sector was sinking. Thousands migrated to the cities, while
others remained, caught between their communities’ traditional patterns
of inequality and hopes for a radical rupture. The economic and social
foundations of Peru had, in short, been profoundly shaken even before
the Sendero insurgency began, and they would be rocked still further by
what followed: a debt and inflation crisis, a devastating guerrilla war
and counterinsurgency, and then the neoliberal shock therapy of the
1990s. From the 1970s onwards Peru had all the problems that afflicted
other Latin American countries – with the difference that it experienced
all of them simultaneously. Sendero was both a symptom and a cause of
this, interwoven with everything modern Peru has become.
In Lima’s Miraflores district, at the top of one of the red sandstone
cliffs that edge the Pacific, stands a museum dedicated to what it calls
‘the period of violence from 1980 to 2000’. An elegant, minimalist
concrete structure, built thanks to a large donation from the German
government, the Lugar de Memoria, Tolerancia y Inclusión Social (LUM)
opened its doors in 2015. It has been subject to repeated attacks from
members of the security establishment and from supporters of former
president Fujimori, who have accused it of ‘glorifying terrorism’. For
these people, the mere existence of the LUM is a standing insult, as if
acts of memory were in themselves treason or sabotage.
The controversies around the LUM are part of a wider, ongoing dispute
over what the conflict meant. The armed forces and a large slice of the
Peruvian political class have consistently sought to frame it as a
‘struggle against terrorism’. This has the bonus of delegitimising not
only past but also present opposition to the government; it is telling
that the word terruco (terrorist), has now become part of everyday
political discourse in Peru, an all-purpose slur that can be applied to
environmental protesters, journalists, museum curators and rival
congressmen. (There is even a verb: terruquear – to call someone a
terrorist.) The continual resort to the authoritarian lexicon developed
during the war emphasises how vividly present the conflict still is, and
the degree to which it continues to shape Peru’s political system.
Perhaps even more damaging than the denialism or name-calling, though,
is the lack of justice or accountability it abets. Many senderistas were
retried by regular courts after Fujimori was removed from office, and
are still serving lengthy jail sentences. But comprehensive though the
commission’s report may have been, it resulted in very few indictments
of military personnel. Many of the bodies of those killed or
‘disappeared’ by the military have yet to be found, and little of the
compensation promised to victims’ families by the state has been issued.
Twenty years after the conflict ended, and forty since it began, a full
reckoning – let alone a reconciliation – remains elusive.
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