A Dwarf Star

...One of its most important documents defines communism as "The society of 'great harmony,' the radical and definitive new society toward which 15 billion years of matter in movement-the part of eternal matter of which we know-is necessarily and irrepressibly heading....A single, irreplaceable new society, without exploited or exploiters, without oppressed or oppressors, without classes, without state, without parties, without democracy, without arms, without wars...

...Fernando Belasinde Terry, the winner of the 1980 presidential elections, represented "fascist continuism...

...They must put everything in order according to MarxismLeninism-Maoism, overcoming or destroying whatever resists its ineluctable laws...

...3. See Norberto Bobbio, Elfuturo de la democracia, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1986...

...Denying those realities, Sendero proposed another scenario...

...In the 1980s, the "generated organisms," transformed from "transmission belts" into belts of subjection and control, would become the "thousand eyes and thousand ears" of the party, the most frankly terrorist face of its "undercover power.''" And in the isolated countryside where Sendero was strong, these groups would become the basis of the "new state in formation," displacing or totally absorbing autonomous grassroots organizations...

...In order to serve them-that is what we want...

...It rejected the primacy of politics in favor of the primacy of violence...

...The old hierarchical order is translated here into the relationship of teacher (urban, mestizo) to student (campesino, Indian...

...Faced with the impossibility of stopping time or blocking out the sun with one finger, Sendero chose to become the sun...

...5. Mistis are the mestizos that live in middle-sized and small towns of the Andes...

...Traditional authority, based not only on the monopoly of the means of production but also on the monopoly of knowledge and its deceptive manipulation, crumbles when the dominated break up both monopolies...

...Another leader said about the University of San Crist6bal: "The university is waking us up, we are learning something new, something objective, which [the powerful] do Army-organized civil defense in Ayacucho: cannonfodder for the war against Sendero I , .. VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991) 2 not like...

...As it turns out, according to that science Peruvian society is "semi-feudal...

...It also involved, in a very important way, an ideological mutation...

...Sendero's stance varied between absolute indifference and frontal opposition...

...But its leadership has always been made up of "mistis"--small-town mestizos-rooted in the Andean seigniorial system.' If they incorporated some form of messianic or religious content, it was not due to Indian traditions, but on account of what we could call an "excess of reason...

...But for the top leaders of Sendero, Pascal's phrase--"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing"--should be inverted to say "Reason has its passions of which the heart knows nothing...

...Given the degree of passion that Shining Path developed and unleashed, it seems strange to define it as a hyper-rationalist movement, at least among the leadership...

...considers to have "a middle level of development," the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds currently studying at the secondary level or higher rose from 17% in 1960 to 52% in 1980...

...Sendero's leaders take on the role of traditional authoritarian teachers who believe they possess the truth and, therefore, ought to have absolute power over their students...

...One participant told me: "They said, look, it's philosophy resonated in the mountains of Ayacucho, but 1981.By 1985 Ayacucho will be a liberated zone...

...While GuzmAn spent long months in jail, a fierce internal struggle shook the Maoist PCP...

...The founders of Sendero form part of a long tradition of provincial elites who rose up against a system that concentrates everything in the capital, and who embraced indigenismo as a reaction against the hispanismo of the Lima upper classes...

...The leadership of the People's Defense Front was arrested, and the Front would never recover its former power...

...war is its principal task...

...That is not the case with Sendero, whose official documents ignore the ethnic dimension or reject out of hand Andean cultural re-evaluation as "folklore" or bourgeois manipulation...

...In the ten years since then, Sendero has emerged as the most important armed movement in contemporary Peruvian history, and surely the most unique to appear in Latin America in decades...

...This drive for education even ran counter to state policy...

...Author's interview...

...This great need for order and progress in a context that If there is a need for a guide from outside, there is no is still traditional, points to one of the roots of Sendero reason to be surprised at the appearance of a caudillo- Luminoso's quasi-religious scientism, according to which teacher like the one who heads Sendero...

...The Left suddenly became a mass political force for the first time in Peru's history...

...I began teaching at the university in Ayacucho that year, and had the opportunity to observe the development of Sendero first-hand...

...This contrasts with Sendero's attitude regarding national strikes called by the labor movement...

...The hidden arquebuses could begin their task...

...Nevertheless, its vision, one that sought to be absolutely scientific, became exceedingly emotional, offering its members a strong religious identity...

...Founded in 1677, it had been closed since 1885...

...Sendero takes up people's long-standing desire for progress and focuses it through the lens of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism...

...they were simply passive spectators of the vanguard's activities...

...7. El Diario, Jan...

...But in addition, as children of the deceived, they are looking for truth...

...These are not called by any union or regional front but by the party or its "generated organisms...

...The degree of violence is as great as it is, among other reasons, because Sendero has to make reality fit an idea-not only must they stop time, but turn it back, until the page is once again blank, and on it they can then write the script the party has worked out...

...Ayacuchans, however, did not have their backs turned to the modern world...

...But at the same time, it carries to an extreme the authoritarianism of the old provincial misti elites-against the grain of the principal trend in the country, which is aimed, rather, at breaking misti power...

...HY DO SUCH CONCEPTIONS CAPTURE THE imagination of certain circles of provincial youth...

...The possibility of assassinating 12those people would not have come up: They did not exist...

...Its leaders are intellectual warriors in the service of a most exact science that regulates the universe like a limitless cosmic ballet...

...They operated as factions within those mass grassroots organizations which Sendero had ever greater difficulty attempting to lead in a democratic fashion-such as the People's Defense Front, the national teachers union, and other urban unions...

...He has written two books on Sendero Luminoso...

...They are the last children of the Enlightenment who, 200 years later and isolated in the Andes, ended up converting science into religion...

...A Dwarf Star 1. Between 1967 and 1981, the out-migration from Ayacucho fluctuated between the second and third highest among Peru's departments that are losing population, with a net annual average migration rate between eight and fourteen per thousand inhabitants...

...8, 1988...

...The Peru that, at least from Ayacucho, could still be seen as a semifeudal nation similar to China of the 1930s, had its days numbered...

...They burned tires on the central highway, and disrupted the rally of the General Workers Confederation in the Plaza de Mayo, shouting slogans and setting off dynamite caps...

...But even if education has democratizing effects visible on the social level, the same does not necessarily occur on the political or cultural plane...

...On the one hand, in June of that year, the free education movement suffered harsh repression...

...However, shortly after the crackdown, the government did restore free education...

...Over the following months, while the press reported the theft of dynamite from a few mines, isolated bombs began to go off here and there...

...7 The point is that if, ''except for power, all is illusion," as a favorite Sendero slogan maintains, then the party, conceived as the central instrument for winning that power, is the only reality...

...Wouldn't you like to be a military chief...

...This is not to imply that there is no point of contact between Peru's reality and Sendero's vision of it...

...This mobility...

...the party and its truth, could move from the base to the The "Andean Maoism" of Sendero Luminoso is a peak of the social pyramid...

...1, 1988...

...The Spaniards, having arrived on the scene, sent an invitation to the Inca emperor, who, curious to meet them, set out for the encounter...

...It was then that the Red Faction decided to become the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path...

...But in Peru, unlike China of the 1930s and despite the growing weakness of the state and of civil society amid the current crisis, those spaces where Sendero would like to be a solitary demiurge are relatively well-populated with campesino organizations, unions, left parties, the progressive church, non-governmental development organizations, and the like...

...Opposed to that deception, which goes back to the very moment of the conquest, would be the "objective" truth, to which one would gain access through education...

...Generated organisms" were defined by Sendero as "separate movements, organizations generated by the proletariat on different workfronts...

...It also helped set up a municipal federation of community organizations and a People's Defense Front, which took the lead in the massive movement in defense of free education...

...While the rest of the Left was concerned with openly influencing labor unions and creating campesino federations or regional fronts, Sendero concentrated its attention on what it called "generated organisms": nuclei that were generally small but ideologically rigid and organically dependent on the party...

...There they met up with No other group in the Marxist tradition has placed such a simplified and accessible version of a theory that de- emphasis on the intellectual status of its leader...

...But what are people seeking in education...

...Nor is there anything surprising ful because it is true...

...10federation and among the faculty...

...But in 1969, the faction suffered a double defeat, which deeply affected its development...

...On the national level, it was a time of great activism...

...Ten years earlier, in 1959, San Crist6bal de Huamanga University in Ayacucho re-opened its doors, the only school of higher education in the region...

...No one attached much importance to the first skirmishes, because in 1980 Shining Path was a small regional organization that had not played any role in the great social movements that shook the country between 1976 and 1979 and forced the military government to withdraw to the barracks...

...Sendero was able to pull this off because it was basically outside the movement, disconnected from the classes that participate in production, from their daily lives and their pragmatic demands...

...It was the children of the deceived-young people Gonzalo): The caudillo-teacher is education incarnate of Andean origin from the provinces-who at that time and, therefore, truth incarnate, virtue incarnate...

...and the Cultural Revolution, which had fed the imagination of a good part of the Peruvian Left and continues to inspire Sendero, had come to an end...

...It also points to one of the roots about the rise in popularity of the most hard-line Marxist- of the personality cult and the hallowing of "Gonzalo Leninist tendencies in the nation's universities during the Thought" (Guzmin's guerrilla alias is Presidente 1970s...

...the party decides everything...

...The conquest was justified...

...Those were the years of the general strikes of 1977 and 1978-in which Sendero took no part-which led to a democratic opening in 1980...

...it doesn't suit them at all because they want us to remain deceived...

...Several questions remain open...

...In that sense, Sendero was moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the Peruvian Left, which during the 1970s left the universities to participate in the great social movements of the second half of the decade...

...Sendero's behavior could also be compared with that of the traditional teacher in his relationship with a student who is good, but somewhat awkward or rebellious, and has to be shown that, as the Spanish proverb puts it, La letra entra con sangre (a more explicitly pedagogical version of "Spare the rod, spoil the child...

...Several testimonies gathered in Ayacucho in 1969, immediately after the movement on behalf of free education, were highly revealing.'" A campesino leader, asked about the situation of people from his region, answered, "They need to be instructed, they need someone to give them orientation, they need courses...to see if in that way they can move forward, get out of slavery, out of deception...

...Both tendencies are present throughout our history, but in the twentieth century the latter predominates...

...A fundamental characteristic of Sendero's activity is disregard for grassroots organizations: campesino communities, labor unions, neighborhood associations...

...They traditionally made up part of the local elites who oppressed the indigenous campesinos...

...Sendero's decision to pursue armed struggle was not only the product of a strategic and tactical evaluation...

...Sendero, converted by then into a party, began a quiet race against time...

...In Sendero's view, this was no confusion...

...They are of course looking for practical tools: learning to read and write and do basic arithmetic...

...As the century advanced, the energy with which Andean peoples launched into the conquest of education was exceptional...

...nobody noticed that despite its size, it had the power to affect decisively the Peruvian political scene of the 1980s...

...9. Ibid...

...Since the 1920s, but especially since mid-century, such elites in many parts of the country have adopted Marxism, most often combining it with a reevaluation of Andean reality that links them to indigenismo...

...The committee chair was a young philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmin Reynoso, today the supreme leader of Sendero Luminoso...

...On the international level, Mao Zedong had died in 1976...

...Sendero's participation was limited to very minor actions...

...On Sen- fined itself as the only "scientific truth," and was legiti- dero's posters Guzmin occupies the center, dressed in a mized through references to the Marxist classics-the suit, wearing glasses, book in hand, surrounded by masses authorities...

...Sendero launched its adventure at a crucial moment in the history of both the Peruvian Left and the international communist movement-in a situation of clear disadvantage to itself on both fronts...

...To take away from the mistis their monopoly on Spanish, on reading and writing, is equivalent to Prometheus's feat of taking fire from the gods...

...According to United Nations figures on access to education in Latin America, Peru moved from fourteenth place in 1960 to fourth place in 1980...

...2. "Bases de discusidn: El PCP llama alas masas a luchar por el poder: El pensamiento Gonzalo y los trabajadores," El Diario (Lima), special supplement, Aug...

...During the first half of the 1970s, the professors and students at the university in Ayacucho, who made up the backbone of the new party, devoted themselves to systematizing a coherent and all-encompassing discourse following the strictest of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy...

...hybrid, woven from Maoist authoritarianism and the most The revolution is perceived as a means for social authoritarian aspects of Peruvian political tradition...

...Often in Peru, in order to explain something one has to go NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASfar back into history...

...Nonetheless, on the next day, the headline in El Diario, the semi-official party mouthpiece, read, "Historic Day for the Peruvian Proletariat...

...Be dares to go beyond the designs of the party and travel its something?...In 1985 the revolution is going to triumph, own road to liberation, refusing to be a blank page and, and those of us who have been in the party longest will be instead, entering into history with all its complexity-and the bosses...

...Gods of a belligerently monotheistic religion, they don't let anyone else onto their Olympus: They must be the only force that brings order to the rural world...

...The tiny regional committee of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP) operating in Ayacucho took off soon after, when a group of professors signed up...

...Abimael Guzmin, "Presidente Gonzalo rompe el silencio: Entrevista en la clandestinidad," El Diario, July 24, 1988...

...Several top leaders of the Red Faction, among them Guzmin himself, were arrested along with the Front leadership...

...they migrated by the thousands and flocked to schools to escape their misery and oppression.' Their desire for education was so great that, unlike other Andean departments, the principal social movement in Ayacucho between 1960 and 1980 was not for land, but in defense of free education, which was cut back by the military government in 1969...

...The workers themselves had no capacity for initiative...

...I 1. CEPAL, Statistical Yearbook for Latin America: 1984 (New York: United Nations, 1985...

...If that were the case, they would not have been able to build a base of support...

...In this case, back to the very beginning, to the ambush that took place in November 1532, in Cajamarca...

...and, when the line has been worked out and is "correct," "The cadres decide everything...

...Otherwise they will continue to be poor and exploited...

...violence is the essence of revolution...

...In January 1988, for the first time, Sendero decided to back the ninth strike, which turned out to be quite unremarkable...

...Soon Guzmin, together with his most faithful followers, formed a clandestine "Red Faction" within the PCP, which was to be the forerunner of Shining Path...

...The priest then shouted, "Christians, the word of God in the dirt...

...4. See "Bases de discusi6n...

...Sendero's attitude resembles that of certain indigenista intellectuals of the past who expressed the authoritarian, tortuous, violent love of the superior for the inferior, whom they sought to redeem or "protect" from the evils of the modern world...

...The moralizing "the ideology of the proletariat...is scientific, exact, allnature of Sendero and its punishment of adulterers and powerful" or, as its official documents say, "all-powerdrinkers also fit the bill...

...from the middle of the 1960s on, relative state investment in education decreased...

...In the 70-odd countries that the U.N...

...They are the equivalent of those who are called "ladinos" in southern Mexico and Guatemala...

...With Mao Zedong dead and the Gang of Four defeated, Sendero proclaimed itself the beacon of world revolution, its leader the "fourth sword of Marxism," after Marx, Lenin, and Mao...

...3 ambiguity...

...6. PartidoComunistadel Perd-Sendero Luminoso, "Desarrollar la guerra popular sirviendo a la revoluci6n mundial," mimeo, 1986...

...It rejected the leading role of the masses in favor of the leading role of the party...

...The incident was lost in the avalanche of election news...

...Millions of people took part in the July 1977 and May 1978 strikes, the most important mobilizations in contemporary Peruvian history...

...According to Sendero, Peru was still semi-feudal, and the change of government meant nothing...

...By the beginning of 1970, Guzmin had been expelled from the party, reduced to his Ayacucho stronghold, and weakened even there...

...Sendero was born in the Andean department of Ayacucho, one of the nation's poorest and most archaic, where until mid-century bankrupt landowners persisted in the serf-like exploitation of their Indians...

...In January 1964, the PCP split into a pro-Soviet faction and another that was Maoist...

...Between 1977 and 1988 nine general strikes took place in Peru...

...What it lost in influence among the masses, it gained in ideological rigidity and organic cohesiveness, until it became a sort of dwarf star-the kind in which matter gets so compressed it acquires a great specific weight, disproportionate to its size...

...by 1990 as Sendero moved into the rest of the nation, it has been Peru will be an independent country...

...To resist the powerful currents sweeping the Left nationally and internationally, Sendero turned to a fundamentalism that maximized and lionized violence...

...The Inca raised the book to his ear, heard no word, and disappointed, threw the Bible to the ground...

...They were adorned with signs that read, "Deng Xiao Ping, Son of a Bitch...

...The Red Faction aligned itself with the latter, and in a few years it gained influence in the student NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Anthropologist Carlos Ivdn Degregori is a researcher at the Lima-basedInstituto de Estudios Peruanos...

...He entered the plaza of Cajamarca surrounded by his warriors, but found only a priest who handed him the Bible and said, "This is the word of God...

...Why did such a group emerge...

...Rebellion, in turn, fluctuated between rejection of the "West"-Andean culture withdrawing into itself-and appropriation of the conquerors' instruments of domination...

...Abimael Guzmdn himself stated that, "...the masses have to be taught through overwhelming acts so that ideas can be pounded into them...the masses in the nation need the leadership of a Communist Party...

...They took ballot boxes and voting lists, and burned them in the town plaza...

...This ambiguous relationship is deeply rooted in the Andean seigniorial tradition...

...Being educated equals "getting out of deception...

...PartidoComunista del Perdi-Sendero Luminoso, "Documentos fundamentales del Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista del Peri (Congreso marxista-leninista-maoista, pensamiento Gonzalo)," El Diario, Jan...

...No one paid much attention until the end of that year, when the situation acquired a folkloric if sinister dimension: Early risers in Lima began to find dead dogs hung from traffic lights and lamp posts...

...Except for the party, everything is an illusion: Society, for example, only acquires reality when the party touches it...

...In Peru it jumped from 19% to 761...

...6 Sendero's epic, then, is a cosmic one...

...Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Las migraciones internas en el Perti, (Lima, 1987...

...that their collaborators, or rather their guides, orient them toward achieving progress-to my view, by avoiding the vices Peru's Shining Path that campesinos have: drinking, coca, cigarettes...

...These are all replaced by "generated organisms,"' that is, by the party that "decides everything," as before everything was decided by the misti lords and officials...

...Among the instruments of domination Andean people seek to appropriate, one stands out: education...

...The testimonies are taken from Aracelio Castillo, "El movimiento popular de junio de 1969 (Huanta y Huamanga, Ayacucho)," (Ph.D...

...Wouldn't you like to obliged to exercise growing violence against a people that be a minister...

...we hope with more revolutionary theory and practice, with more armed actions, with more people's war, with more power, to reach the very heart of the class and the people and really win them over...

...The language itself displays an impressive degree of violence against the "masses," who the same paragraph says are to be loved and served...

...The mestizos, who make up the backbone of the party, are a group that has always considered Indians to be inferior, even when they identified with them sentimentally, called for their liberation from servitude, and sought their support to confront Lima's Westernized Creole elite...

...the Gang of Four headed by his widow had been defeated...

...To sustain this alternative scenario required not only an act of supreme political will and enormous organizing ability, but also an ideological rigidity unprecedented in Peruvian political history...

...For that reason nobody detected it in 1980...

...they were the proletariat...

...The other defeat came within the party...

...According to the first leader quoted above, the campesino needs "to be instructed," needs "someone"-implicitly from the outside-to "give him orientation...

...It stands out even more when compared to other vital statistics like infant mortality or life expectancy, in which only Bolivia and Haiti are worse off...

...Obviously it was not a "historic day" because of the magnitude of the strike, lut because the party had decided to back it, producing a kind of proletarian Pentecost that marked "a new direction for the working class, nourished for the first time by a more elevated experience of struggle...

...It adhered strictly to Stalin's dictums: "The line decides everything...

...Thus emerged a society based on deception, a deception made possible, in part, by the monopoly that the rulers exercised over knowledge of the Spanish language...

...How did Sendero manage to carry forth its scenario mercilessly throughout the 1980s...

...Was it because they had been reduced to a small political-intellectual nucleus in a region of ruined lords and rebellious serfs, a region closed off and abandoned by capitalist development yet achingly desirous of progress...

...Mass education can come about, therefore, without substantially breaking up the authoritarianism of traditional society...

...2 Of course it was not the great proletarian masses that made up these movements, but Sendero itself, perhaps the party that had done the least work with labor of all the leftist parties of the 1970s...

...Sendero lashes out not only at the state, but also at these other actors, believing that PCPSendero Luminoso should be the only one that relates to those masses, so as then, finally, to "educate them in the people's war...

...In that sense, Sendero is the "coldest" of the Marxist ventures that arose in Peru during the 1960s and 1970s...

...That science proposed a new but strictly carrying rifles and flags, with the great red sun setting hierarchical order where the students, upon acceding to behind him...

...The most notorious example is the "armed strikes" that have been held since 1987 in various localities...

...28, 29, and 30, 1988., 8. See "Bases de discusi6n...

...It is my position that as it matured, Sendero picked up the archaic characteristics of that regional society and of national political life and, in the middle of the generalized crisis of the 1980s, became the active vanguard of the "rearchaization" of society and politics...

...Maybe Sendero's venture would not have had to generate so much violence in China of the 1930s, because in that "semi-feudal" society they would not have found, for example, engineers repairing electric towers, agronomists doing rural extension work, anthropologists advising campesino federations, or foreign volunteers developing health programs...

...The same campesino went on to say: "Our highest aspiration is for the progress of rural people...

...diss., University of San Marcos, Lima, 1972...

...entered the university en masse...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS SOME CONSIDER SENDERO TO BE A MES- sianic or millenary movement, rooted in Andean Indian culture...

...Sendero compensated for the weakening of its impact on society by building a column of cadres steeped in ideology and increasingly well-organized...

...From that time on, the conquered peoples fluctuated between resignation and rebellion...

...At the same time, the military government in power since 1968 undertook a series of reforms that began to change the face of the region and the country...

...S ENDERO HAD BECOME A CLASSIC EXAMPLE of a party built from the top down and from its ideology out...

...The Communist Party of Peru, known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) points to that remote May 17 as the beginning of the "People's War...

...4 VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991) IIIA - Peru's Shining Path Police mug shot of Sendero founder Abimael Guzmdn, alias "Presidente Gonzalo," 1969 It was a classic retreat forward...

...That is how the major Sendero documents set forth the party-mass relationship: "...people's war is a political exploit that by means of overwhelming actions hammers ideas into the minds of men...