Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru's Northern Highlands, 1980-1997 (review)

2007; Society for Military History; Volume: 71; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jmh.2007.0218

1543-7795

Brian Loveman,

Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics

Reviewed by: Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997 Brian Loveman Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997. By Lewis Taylor . Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2006. ISBN 1-84631-016-4. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibiliography. Index. Pp. xi, 232. $32.50. Based on extensive field work, personal contacts, and interviews from the late 1970s to the 1990s, this account of Sendero Luminoso's (Shining Path's) bloody attack on Peruvian state institutions via a Maoist-inspired guerrilla war (1980–97, and beyond) focuses on Peru's northern highlands. After surveying the ideological and socio-cultural foundations of the Shining Path movement, and the eclectic blend of the analysis of Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui with Mao Zedong's guerrilla doctrines that framed Sendero's strategies, Lewis Taylor takes the reader to the landscape and socio-economic history of the Cajabamba-Huamachuco region. His objective is to compare and contrast the evolution of Sendero Luminoso in the north with the experience in the Ayacucho region (where Sendero was founded) and other zones in Peru. He introduces this part of the study by asking: "How, then, did Sendero set about the task of building up its network of cadres in Cajabamba-Huamachuco and launch its 'protracted people's war'?" In answering this question, Taylor's main original contribution is micro-history, with names, dates, farms, roads, heinous crimes, and injustices all documented through the eyes and language of local people. He provides valuable, detailed case material from the northern highlands that shed light on the weakness of the Peruvian state, the role of police, administrative, and judicial corruption, and the progressive impoverishment of the rural population, [End Page 980] among other variables treated, as factors that fanned the flames of peasant discontent and provided opportunities to be exploited by Senderistas. Likewise, the slow response, ineptitude, and lack of resources of the national police, and the relatively late commitment of the armed forces to serious and professional counter-insurgency operations gave the Senderistas "space" and time in which to build up an organization that terrorized the local middle class, assassinated hundreds of local and regional bureaucrats, teachers, health workers, and elected officials—and thereby virtually dismantled the Peruvian state's presence in much of the hinterland. Sendero was largely successful in carrying out its campaign of "batiendo el campo" (churning up the countryside) and eliminating the presence of the Peruvian state from rural districts (p. 103). The ways in which local conditions combined with national political events in the northern highlands to permit Sendero's short-term success and its eventual suppression, "through inflicting telling damage on the PCP-SL (Senderista) apparatus and diminishing its offensive potential" ( p. 140), come through forcefully with a close reading of the extracts of many interviews interspersed throughout the book. Taylor is clear that Sendero's own fossilized version of Maoism, its authoritarian and often brutal relations with rural people who might otherwise have been its supporters, and its messianic utopianism subverted by opportunism and pragmatism of mid-level cadres undermined its long-term prospects. Added to this, the personality cult surrounding its leader, "Presidente Gonzalo" (Abimael Guzmán) severely weakened the movement after his capture and incarceration in 1992. Surprisingly, the relationship between the drug economy and Sendero receives only passing mention. Also somewhat puzzling (at least to me) is that the role of U.S. military and police assistance in the counter-insurgency campaign—in the broadest sense—and U.S. efforts to condition economic and military assistance to Peruvian participation in the war on drugs do not figure in Taylor's account. Indeed, "United States" does not appear as an entry in the book's index despite Sendero's repeated denunciation of U.S. support for the autogolpe of Alberto Fujmori, charges that the CIA directed the dirty war against Sendero waged by Peruvian security and intelligence forces, and claims that the U.S. had built up its own military presence in Peru under cover of the war on drugs (Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru!, Fact Sheet #2, February 1998). By way of conclusion, Taylor seeks to offer some theoretical...