Time of Fear
Manrique, Nelson
PERU'S FORMER PRESIDENT FERNANDO BElatinde Terry is someone for whom proper manners are paramount. Every time he had to say something about the guerrilla movement growing in the mountains,...
...In the southern highlands, the traditional hacienda went into decline only some fifty years ago...
...OR CERTAIN INTELLECTUALS THE VERY ASsertion that Sendero Luminoso has a base of support is proof of complicity...
...Furthermore, mining in the central highlands supplies a large part of the foreign exchange necessary for foreign trade and for meeting the numerous international financial obligations that burden the Peruvian economy...
...According to the MRTA, government soldiers now pretend to be Senderistas when they kill suspected MRTA sympathizers...
...The new arrivals ordered the peasants to drastically reduce production for the market (primarily for Lima) and devote themselves to self-sufficiency...
...There the closing of peasant fairs and Sendero's attempt to control family production led the Iquicha communities and their confederation to rise up...
...Unquestionably, the last figure includes many civilian casualties, largely peasants caught in the crossfire...
...One might well wonder what a rank-and-file policeman will do in a future confrontation, when he knows that help will not be forthcoming or is dubious about its arrival and is also aware that Sendero is not after him...
...Partido Comunista del Perd, "Bases de discusi6n: El pensamiento Gonzalo y la lfnea international del PCP," El Diario, Jan...
...There they saw a response they never imagined possible...
...After the equipment and cattle were distributed, Sendero, it seems, had little to offer the peasants of Canipaco...
...For example, it is experiencing serious difficulties gaining influence within the labor movement, largely because the guerrillas' strategy is to subordinate everything to armed struggle...
...The armed forces were worn thin after twelve years of running the government, and President Belatinde, who had been deposed by the military in 1968, was very reluctant to seek their intervention...
...The salutary effects of this execution were immediate: The butchers no longer committed abuses, and cattle thieves and miscreants in general disappeared...
...If not resolved, it would be impossible to replace combat casualties or to expand...
...But this does not cause him to doubt the infallibility of the party...
...What is undeniable is that there were no prisoners, nor wounded, nor any survivors at Molinos...
...And it links up in the jungle with the "marginal" highway, the country's second great longitudinal axis...
...After two years the army was still unable to go in [to Ayacucho...
...To explain Sendero's extraordinary development we must examine the deep-seated deficiencies its success denounces...
...But on the other, though it seems contradictory, it also awakens the hatred harbored by those who have suffered at the hands of the gamonales for generations...
...Official sources now admit that Sendero is supported by internally generated funds-from the coca-producing Upper Huallaga Valley...
...Or was it fear...
...But this time everyone kept quiet--with the sole exceptions of Patricio Ricketts, editor of the conservative daily Expreso, and Jaime Urrutia, an anthropologist and human rights activist...
...The vanquished of 1532 are still the eternal losers...
...Sendero's inroads in Canipaco and elsewhere have not yet given it hegemony over the Mantaro region...
...If Lucanamarca was an operation decided upon and organized by the top Senderista leadership, one can imagine the extremes of which contingents led by cadres with lesser political formation are capable...
...This was to be dramatically confirmed as confrontations developed between the communities of Chongos Altos and Atcas...
...The Lima research institute DESCO set the figure at 16,470 as of last July 31...
...Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Las migraciones internas en el Perti, (Lima, 1987...
...This development in 1983 broadened the war considerably, sparking armed confrontations between communities whose rivalries dated in some cases from preHispanic times...
...After Sendero attacked the Soviet, Chinese, Nicaraguan and Cuban embassies in 1980 and 1981, Beladnde's contention that they enjoyed foreign financing gained few adherents...
...On December 29, the SAIS members approved by majority vote the liquidation of the company...
...5. Although in 1989, for the first time, the number of attacks dropped from the previous year (from 2,893 to 2,113), the numberof victims nearly doubled, from 1,526 to 2,877...
...its social basis is the peasantry...
...The Mantaro Valley is justly considered the larder for Lima's seven million people...
...2) a revolution that neither incorporates the best political experience of the nation's most advanced sectors, nor addresses the demands of the masses, can be arbitrarily imposed...
...The strategic importance of the central highlands goes beyond military considerations...
...They traditionally made up part of the local elites who oppressed the indigenous campesinos...
...3. See Norberto Bobbio, Elfuturo de la democracia, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1986...
...Sources report that robbers who had been stripping a house in the town that same day made sure to jettison their entire booty on the highway...
...Sendero became the virtual owner of a vast territory...
...Although Senderista cadres tend to be mestizos, their primary victims in Ayacucho are the representatives of the old mestizo order, as well as those Indians perceived to collaborate with that old order...
...It makes no distinction between the explosion of a bomb in the doorway of a public building, the assassination of an Indian mayor, the indiscriminate massacre of a peasant community at the hands of any of the forces, or the ambush of an army column with dozens of casualties...
...For intellectuals, the terrorist label is little more than a tacit convention for avoiding the grave questions raised by Sendero's relative success...
...The word "attacks" does not express the qualitative importance of the actions included in this category...
...2. The Special Senate Commission on the Causes of Violence and Alternatives for Pacification in Peru documented 12,402 deaths from political violence as of November 30, 1988...
...The fertile farmland in the valleys remained in the hands of free peasant communities...
...In retrospect, the decision to launch military actions in 1980-when a dictatorship was giving way to a civilian regime with strong support at the polls-turned out to be sound...
...By then, the large local landowners had been displaced by companies controlled by vested interests in Lima, including the Sociedad Ganadera del Centro (SGC), which bought the Canipaco haciendas, as well as important livestock haciendas on the other side of the Mantaro Valley...
...Yet another situation exists in the coca zone of the Upper Huallaga, on the eastern slopes of the Andes...
...They are regularly alluded toin the pro-Sendero newspaper El Diario, and occasionally could well have been written as a way of exorcising the possibility of a coup...
...While on their way to one community, local peasant leader Victor Lozano and CCP representative Manuel Soto were intercepted by a Senderista contingent and murdered in cold blood...
...Sendero tries to force reality into the mold of theory...
...28, 29, and 30, 1988., 8. See "Bases de discusi6n...
...Sendero Luminoso has overcome the three basic problems faced by all organizations trying to launch revolutionary war...
...That is, until the counterinsurgency forces arrive, forcing the migration and eviction of vast sectors of the peasantry, as has happened in Ayacucho and its surroundings...
...Abimael Guzmin admits that the proletariat still does not recognize Sendero as its vanguard: "We must win over the working class more and more....We don't believe the proletariat and the people will recognize us overnight as their vanguard and only core...
...pressure, the policy turned the Peruvian government into the ostensible enemy of the region's peasants and made it possible for Sendero to set itself up as their defender, using force to sabotage government eradication programs, even to the point of assassinating the technical personnel in charge...
...terrorist," at which point it becomes impossible to say another word without running the risk of being considered a sympathizer, if not secretly a member.' Sendero does routinely resort to terrorism, but the character of the organization is much more complex...
...There, the despotic rule of local landowner/bosses, known in Peru as gamonales, left a legacy of generalized, cruel and arbitrary violence which still persists, even though the agrarian reform of the early 1970s removed much of the gamonales' legal hold on peasants' lives...
...That's the truth, and we say so....We had to deal them a decisive blow, to curb them, to make them understand that things would not be easy....The top leadership planned the action and oversaw its implementation....Basically, we don't want the masses to go overboard...
...It was the form by which the military government turned bankrupt haciendas over to the surrounding peasant communities...
...Molinos is also a sign of another basic phenomenon working on the collective imagination, one which is not likely taken into account by the armed organizations: The poor and above all the middle classes are becoming fed up with the unbridled violence...
...Starting in 1971, the properties of these absentee companies were expropriated by the reformist military regime of Gen...
...In the case of the Upper Huallaga, Sendero has skillfully taken advantage of the government's inept anti-drug policy, which called for compulsory eradication of the coca plants.' Because no other crop is remotely as profitable as coca, and because it grows even in poor soil and on mountain slopes, the peasants resisted...
...This provided the insurgents with a strong rear-guard base and guaranteed them millions of dollars in "taxes" levied on the drug traffickers...
...Abimael Guzmin, "Presidente Gonzalo rompe el silencio: Entrevista en la clandestinidad," El Diario, July 24, 1988...
...On that occasion, even such right-wingers as Mario Vargas Llosa and Caretas magazine voiced immediate protest...
...Dwelling on isolated instances can be misleading...
...But we needed the river to overflow...and then slip right back into its channel...
...Sendero succeeded in gaining an important foothold in that valley by defending coca farmers from both government anti-narcotics forces and the drug traffickers who purchase their crop...
...7, 1988...
...I 1. CEPAL, Statistical Yearbook for Latin America: 1984 (New York: United Nations, 1985...
...Sendero's first theater of operations was the rugged mountainous region known as the southern highlands, comprised of the departments of Huancavelica, Ayacucho and Apurimac, three of the country's poorest, and home to 1.2 million of Peru's 20 million people...
...Experience so far has shown that this component of authoritarian violence against the poor, their organizations and leaders is not a consequence of "excesses" committed by unseasoned politically incompetent leaders, but is a vital part of political-military action, conceived of as such...
...In Canipaco, this new, increasingly authoritarian dynamic alarmed the peasantry, causing some to threaten to take refuge in Huancayo, the capital of the province...
...One version circulating in the zone maintains that the reprisals were motivated not by the comuneros' decision to contravene Sendero's orders, but because local officials had tried to take advantage of a momentary Sendero retreat to reorganize the local government to resist Sendero's rule...
...The new society will be neither better nor worse than the one prefigured in the actions now being carried out in its name...
...If the masses do not accept Sendero as their leader, they are simply mistaken and must be set straight...
...9 Although the coinuneros were aware that their personal freedoms were being further and further eroded, they apparently considered the price acceptable in exchange for the security Sendero offered...
...and so forth...
...Yet Sendero Luminoso makes most everyone in Peru so uncomfortable, especially intellectuals of the Left, that they too cry Nelson Manrique is an analyst at DESCO, a Lima research institute...
...In Marxism, whenever reality does not jibe with the theory seeking to interpret it, the theory is incorrect...
...It supplies their immediate food requirements, and provides essential agricultural inputs, like seed potatoes, for coastal farming near the capital...
...He took up the issue of race in his study "El problema del indio" (The Indian Question), in his writings on the land question and gamonalismo, and in the papers he presented at the First Latin American Communist Conference in 1929 under the title "El problema de las razas in America Latina" (The Question of Races in Latin America...
...The categories upon which its analysis rests are strictly of a class nature, borrowed from Mao Zedong's conceptual approach to Chinese society: The mercantile bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy are the enemies...
...The same order was passed on to workers at the other haciendas in Canipaco...
...Subsequently, Sendero took responsibility asserting that Soto "paid no attention to the warnings he had been given and for that reason was liquidated without further ado...
...By militarizing the party we take a step toward the militarization of society, which is the strategic outlook for guaranteeing the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...4. La Republica, March 19, 1989...
...the national bourgeoisie must be won over...
...Over a million people live in the region...
...The name Sendero Luminoso actually refers to the "Shining Path of Josd Carlos Maritegui...
...This was clearly explained by Lenin....The main thing was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack and would stop at nothing, at absolutely nothing...
...Sendero threatened the CCP representatives with death and called for the complete liquidation of the SAIS and the distribution of its land and cattle among the peasants...
...Adopted under U.S...
...T HE PROLIFERATION OF VIOLENCE OVER the last decade has tended to obscure the other basic component of the evolving political crisis: growing authoritarianism...
...Sendero then consolidated its presence in the region by acting as an intermediary between the coca farmers and the drug traffickers...
...Lima, Peru's major industrial center, and a large part of the coast receive their power from the Mantaro hydroelectric plant...
...For centuries, the gamonales organized the oppression and exploitation of Indians on a serf-like basis through the hacienda system...
...It is a group that considers itself nationalistic, indigenous....They neither traffic nor deal in drugs, but they do extort the drug traffickers, charging for permission to pass through certain key zones and for providing security...
...Sendero called together the town's butchers (commonly considered the worst exploiters in the livestock-raising zones) and warned them that they would share the fate of the thieves if they went on cheating the peasants on prices and weight of the meat they bought...
...A couple of years ago some analysts still believed that Sendero Luminoso's decision to launch armed struggle in 1980 was an act of desperation, the response to a series of defeats the organization had suffered over the previous NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28decade...
...But days later, Sendero attacked Laive hacienda, completely destroying the main house, installations, outbuildings and entire infrastructure...
...According to another document, "...cultural revolutions are to carry forth the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, to crush and eliminate all outcroppings of capitalism and to combat, by force of arms as well, any intent to restore it...''' 8 Can the ends justify the means...
...But this facile explanation says nothing about the heavy dose of compulsion and terror brought to bear...
...Support is drawn from a strictly pragmatic association: the provision of a service which depends on the illegal nature of peasant income: It would perhaps be more apt to refer to the Huallaga peasantry as "clients" of Sendero, rather than as a base of support for the revolutionary transformation of society...
...For horrifying examples of the extremes this can reach, see C6sar Guzmin Campos, La violencia en Colombia: Parte descriptiva (Cali: Ediciones Progreso, 1968...
...See Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopia en los Andes (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1988), pp...
...Bloody clashes took place during the war with Chile (1879-1884) and in Survivors of a Sendero attack on the Ayacucho village of Cochas:Repeated army occupations and Sendero 1947 during the Bustamante Rivero administration, and once more during the great peasant mobilizations of 1962...
...In November and December 1988, in defiance of Sendero threats, the CCP took its proposal to the Canipaco communities for consultation...
...A classic example of this in Peru is wool, which links the most backward highland regions (like those we have been describing) to the world market...
...By communal agreement, they turned them over, not to Sendero, but to the government authorities in Huancayo (who soon set them free...
...El Diario, July 24, 1988...
...In the regions Sendero is trying to penetrate today-the central highlands and the cities-the poor have a long tradition of democratic struggle, particularly since the great flowering of organizing in the 1970s...
...What took place in the community of Ucchuraccay in Ayacucho was typical of many other communities...
...Meanwhile, two ill-fated Indians are rotting in jail-the only guilty parties in the massacre of the journalists, as Peruvian justice has it...
...Nor is there anything in the measures taken that could be construed as part of a socialist program...
...His major work on Sendero Luminoso, "La Dicada de la Violencia, " was published in the Peruvian journal Mirgenes...
...It was obvious that Belalinde would have one fear, a coup, and would hold the armed forces back for that reason," asserted Sendero founder and maximum leader Abimael Guzmin...
...6. PartidoComunistadel Perd-Sendero Luminoso, "Desarrollar la guerra popular sirviendo a la revoluci6n mundial," mimeo, 1986...
...Between 1983 and 1985, the combined casualties of the army and police amounted to 219, while the number of civilian dead was 3,127 and those listed as "probable terrorists" was 3,473...
...In December 1988, the Canipaco Valley, an important livestock-raising region located southwest of the Mantaro Valley, in the province of Huancayo, became Sendero's first "liberated zone" in the central highlands...
...How is it possible that on the threshold of their second decade at war, these "terrorists" not only remain undefeated but have become a crucial factor in Peru's future...
...hence, it cannot have a social base...
...11-12...
...Thus, the war goes on eternally...
...And in a country where 60% of the population is less than 25 years old, the crisis hits young people hardest...
...This tactic was tried in Ayacucho and Huancavelica in 1982-1983 and proved disastrous...
...diss., University of San Marcos, Lima, 1972...
...As happened in many other localities, the state bureaucrats in charge attempted to quash this proposal, and accused all those seeking change of being terrorists...
...SAIS stands for Sociedad Agricola de Inter6s Social...
...and if [the Senderistas] find weak communities that are easy to control, the job is more feasible...
...Neither is democracy in force, even though the party has allowed local authorities to remain in office, except for known abusive individuals, justices of the peace, and governors (forced to resign because they are considered "the direct representatives of the old state...
...one must consider the whole...
...No further show of force was necessary to convince teachers that they should discharge their duties to the letter...
...Insurgent forces are particularly vulnerable during the early phase of their operations because of their localized nature, their lack of military training, their deficiencies in experienced cadres, funds, and armament...
...9 Leaving no survivors at Molinos, then, may have been the army's response to Sendero's "wedge"-a way to keep the war's inhumanity mounting, by letting the troops know that surrender will afford absolutely no assurance of survival...
...6 (March 1989...
...This gave rise in 1988 to a policy of intimidation and physical elimination of mineworkers' leaders and, more recently, the policy of "armed strikes" in urban areas...
...its inhabitants have been scattered like dry straw caught up in the wind of the puna...
...This version coincides with that of the inhabitants, although there is no agreement among them as to the number of civilian deaths...
...Revista Amauta, April 30, 1989...
...III, No...
...And it is very unlikely that VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991) M 33R"er4t osn th Az4 re Peru's Shining Path anyone would dare make proposals contrary to those of their "representatives...
...To understand how it continues to grow, we have to examine in detail what has occurred on the ground...
...If this is so, Sendero's problems are just beginning...
...On the one hand, the cruelty exhibited in these killings bolsters the passivity and fatalism that has historically nurtured the conviction that any effort to rebel is, by definition, useless...
...Time of Fear 1. Another version of this article appeared in Mdrgenes (Lima) Vol...
...I N MARCH 1989 THE ARMY MASSACRED AN entire column of guerrillas from Sendero's rival, the Tdpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), in the locality of Molinos, in the central highlands...
...This leaves unions little room for defending the immediate interests of their members...
...The question is straightforward as far as Sendero's spokespersons are concerned: They are the representatives of the people's interests, largely those of the peasantry, and the people identify with them...
...The desperate situation of Peru's economy, which it seems can only grow worse, is the best possible propaganda for Sendero' s cause...
...Sendero also became the arbiter of public morality, handing out Draconian punishments for drunkenness and adultery...
...Justices of the peace were compelled to resign, since "from now on the party would be in charge of administering justice," a campesino told me...
...Sendero Luminoso's success does not rest solely on having survived the first few years and having obtained a firm footing in the coca zone...
...This paves the way for a violent reaffirmation of the peasants' humanity, long negated by the racist nature of gamonal oppression...
...Women At War 1. The prison uprising was a protest against the anticipated relocation of political prisoners to a maximum security prison at Cantogrande, where accused Senderistas have subsequently been held...
...By the 1950s a number of haciendas in Ayacucho and the surrounding area had been abandoned by their owners...
...Initially, it was aimed at the vestiges of gamnonalismo: cattle thieves, merchants, abusive minor state officials, and those peasant middlemen that formed part of the base of the old structure...
...And precisely this-a base of support-is the third problem that must be faced by organizations that take up armed struggle...
...The large-scale killings began when the armed forces and the Senderistas began to use peasants as cannon fodder...
...Today, it is as though Ucchuraccay never existed...
...This energy also makes possible the processing of the bulk of Peru's mineral exports...
...It is no surprise that Senderista cadres tend to be young...
...There is an Ayacuchan Quechua expression that accurately describes the age in which we live: manchay tiempo, the time of fear...
...The brutal repression unleashed by the armed forces between 1983 and 1984 took a toll of 5,567 deaths, one-third the total losses in a decade of war...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASPainted on Laive's walls, along with the usual kudos for the PCP-SL, the Republic of New Democracy, and Presidente Gonzalo, was the following: "Total destruction of SAIS at the hands of the people directed by the PCP...
...and, "Laive passes into the hands of its legal owners, the peasants...
...The reform completed the liquidation of the highland landowners as a class...
...The militarized society is the armed sea of masses of which Marx and Engels spoke, which safeguards victory and defends the power that has been won...
...4. See "Bases de discusi6n...
...Nevertheless, the disappearance of the landowners caused a power vacuum in the countryside which merchants and the state agrarian reform bureaucracy were unable to fill...
...In the resulting bloody confrontation, which contravened the directives of Sendero, the residents of Chongos Alto captured three people, one armed, who had fought on the Atcas side...
...milk production amounted to 5,000 liters per day in addition to butter and cheese, and 150 tons of wool a year were sheared...
...In fact, the guerrillas avoided taking any stand, other than to make it clear they would tolerate no conflicts between communities...
...Sendero's refusal to recognize the importance of ethnicity is particularly significant in considering how it achieved such success in developing a base of support in the southern highlands where it first emerged (Ayacucho and surroundings...
...58, April-May, 1989...
...What makes the book so disturbing is that it seems absolutely credible, given where Peru stands today, especially since the military admitted in November to having prepared contingency plans for just such a scenario...
...The Mantaro Valley, just above Lima in the department of Junin, is such a valley, characterized by traditionally strong peasant communities, a relatively prosperous peasant economy, and the idiosyncracy of a peasantry that was never subjected to feudal servitude...
...Historically, large tracts of land were only consolidated for grazing in the highlands...
...Wasn't that how it was?...Then the military came in fighting [in January 1983] with larger and larger contingents, and after several years we emerged stronger, tougher, and growing...
...Gamonalismo, as Maridtegui pointed out, is not only a social relation but a social structure, which includes both merchants and authorities-civil and religious-as well as a constellation of petty local bosses who use violence to appropriate the peasants' economic surplus...
...Peru is not Ayacucho-and Sendero has yet to demonstrate that it can "Ayacuchize" the entire country...
...By shaking to its underpinnings the supposed eternal stability of traditional highland society, Sendero overturns the long-internalized conviction that the gamonal and all associated with him are fundamentally superior beings...
...It is striking not only because racism is so evident, but because the issue was at the heart of the classic Marxist analysis of Peruvian reality on which Sendero claims to base its doctrine: that of Jos6 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 34Carlos Maridtegui, who first brought Marxist thought to Peru in the 1920s...
...4 Lastly, the Upper Huallaga has given Sendero access to the best arms market in the country, run by the traffickers...
...And that is precisely what Sendero has set out to do, assassinating union and community leaders throughout the country...
...46-47...
...Moreover, by omitting the ethnic factor from its political line, Sendero keeps ethnic violence from turning against its own mestizo cadre, while simultaneously creating the conditions for violence against Sendero's enemies to reach staggering proportions...
...And the ploy of substitutions holds true for the other groups in whose name the revolution is being fought...
...Sendero cadres had only to put in a single appearance to strike: While Sendero murders labor leaders, "terrorist infiltration" has become a pretext for repression ensure compliance with this traditional custom that had fallen into disuse...
...They then distributed the equipment and some cattle "to compensate" the workers, turning over the remainder of the cattle as well as the sheep to the SAIS member communities with strict orders to make immediate use of the animals they had received...
...But just how firm is the guerrillas' foothold...
...Unbridled cruelty is not uncommon in wars involving predominantly peasants.' 4 Here what is different is the occult presence of the ethnic factor...
...Precapitalist merchant capital must then resort to the systematic use of extra-economic forms of coercion to ensure the unequal exchange between merchants and producers, since the source of commercial profit lies in the difference between the real value of the commodity produced and what the producer is, in fact, paid for it...
...Behind the decision to resort to this tactic-derived from the Maoist slogan of "laying siege to the city from the countryside' '--lies the conviction that the insurrection is unfolding quickly...
...For the moment, Senderista authoritarianism seems to have reached an impasse...
...The land is won and defended by force of arms...
...The war that resulted was most notorious for the massacre of a Senderista contingent by the Iquichas in the community of Huaychao, the killing of eight journalists who went to Ucchuraccay to investigate what was happening, and the reprisal slaughter of 80 members of the Lucanamarca community by Sendero...
...3, 1988...
...The group has not only remained undefeated but has increased its armed forces, extended its radius of action, and, despite the harshest of repression, expanded the scope of its attacks.' None of this could have occurred without a significant base of support...
...7 This did not settle the peasants' basic demand: the restitution of lands stolen by the haciendas...
...Sendero did not resolve the land issue around which Indian communities had struggled for decades...
...What matters is not so much that adversaries are being eliminated in ever increasing numbers, but fhow the killing is done-with fury and in an orgy of extreme cruelty...
...More than 80 of them were annihilated...
...Events have shown this position to be untenable...
...SOME TIME LATER, A SECOND SENDERISTA column arrived in Canipaco, called "the apparatus" by the members of the first column...
...Partido Comunista del Peril, "Bases de discusi6n: El Partido, el Ejdrcito y el Frente Unico," El Diario, Jan...
...protection of their worldly goods (the lesser their value the greater the importance this consideration assumes...
...Today the Mantaro is a bloody battleground among three forces: Sendero, its rivals the Tdipac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), and the Peruvian army (plus the counterinsurgency civil patrols, most of which are controlled by the armed forces...
...Sendero ordered the 200 workers living at Laive to return to their communities of origin...
...In March 1989, the Atcas community occupied a strip of land that Chongos Alto claimed as its own...
...The organization has achieved astonishing growth and there is nothing to indicate that it has yet reached its peak...
...At its 1987 congress Sendero placed high priority on its work among the proletariat and the urban poor, but it seems the party underestimated the difficulty of that task...
...They assumed that a violent movement to impose an authoritarian political regime could not possibly garner popular support...
...ROM THE TIME OF PERU'S INDEPENDENCE, observers have drawn attention to the military importance of the central highlands, particularly the Mantaro Valley, as the key to Lima...
...8. Author's interview with peasant informant...
...With the demolition of the ex-haciendas of the Canipaco Valley and several on the other side of the Mantaro Valley, Sendero probably sought to destroy the resources that could eventually support a counterinsurgency campaign...
...Sendero's second success was logistical: securing the funds and arms necessary to carry on its operations...
...The phenomenon can only be understood in the context of the society which gave rise to it...
...The paro armado is a unilaterally declared general strike under threat of retaliation against those who do not comply...
...8, 1988...
...However, serfdom and gamonalisino did not appear homogeneously throughout Peru...
...7. It had 5,000 cattle and 40,000 sheep...
...the book References 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...
...A Sendero contingent took immediate revenge...
...Sendero then shot the alleged thieves...
...The discrepancy does not necessarily arise from inaccurate information...
...After the massacre of eight journalists on January 26, 1983, this community was virtually wiped off the map by army occupation and repeated Senderista punitive incursions...
...In reference to Sendero's 1983 reprisal slaughter of 80 peasants in Lucanamarca, he said: "To be sure, neither they nor we will forget it...
...Yet, Sendero has guaranteed certain peasant rights that any moderately responsible bourgeois revolution should have put in place: personal security for citizens against common criminals...
...Nine villages of Chongos Alto decided to resist the Atcas invasion...
...Underlying Sendero's rhetoric and its methods are three basic convictions: 1) the majority of the people can be cowed by terror...
...the revolution is led by the proletariat (represented by Sendero Luminoso...
...1, 1988...
...It is not a matter of predicting Sendero's demise...
...Soon, however, the category of "enemies of the revolution, or the party," took on a Community meeting in the Mantaro Valley: Unlike Ayacucho, the areas which Sendero is now seeking to penetrate ara renleto with nrarnnta nrnnni7tinnc% with the armv'q heln...
...For Beladnde, "terrorist" meant that Sendero Luminoso was irrational and therefore not political, and that it was foreign, since those involved could not be "good Peruvians...
...Therefore, the data on the number killed is a better approximation of the true evolution of Peru's political violence...
...First of all, having survived the peak period of repression is a significant victory...
...The answer probably lies in the observation put forward by analyst Radil Gonzilez with respect to a Senderista attack in April 1989: "With this attack," he wrote, "Sendero Luminoso has driven a 'wedge' into the structure of the police as an institution, by murdering the officers and sparing the subordinates...
...A clear majority of the cadres who have been captured-a statistically relevant sampling-are provincial mestizo youths, whose families were peasants in the recent past...
...Comit6 Centraldel PartidoComunista del Peril, "Desarrollar la guerra popular sirviendo a la revoluci6n mundial," Ediciones Bandera Roja, Peru 1986, pp...
...6. The area planted with coca increased from approximately 7,000 hectares in 1973, to over 200,000 hectares today...
...The three major rural areas in which Sendero operates-the southern highlands, the Mantaro Valley and the Upper Huallaga Valley-are drastically different from each other...
...NE OFTHE MOST STRIKING THINGS ABOUT Sendero Luminoso's political program is the absence of any mention of segregation and ethnic domination in Peruvian society...
...According to him, Sendero considers, "the community to be part of the old state which must be destroyed...
...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...
...A political calculation, with elections approaching...
...Most of the country's energy comes from the central highlands...
...In 1988, the situation reached a critical point...
...It is to be the true organizational axis of the society of the future, until capitalism is finally liquidated across the planet: "...we are moving ahead toward a militarized society," says a party document...
...They are the equivalent of those who are called "ladinos" in southern Mexico and Guatemala...
...Although they did distribute SAIS Cahuide animals among the workers and peasants of the member communities, Sendero did not break up and distribute the land...
...In the early 1980s, Sendero stepped in to fill this vacuum by resorting to methods similar to those used by the landowners: authoritarian impositions supported by extensive recourse to violence...
...Given the nature of the organization, it will always be difficult to prove any thesis regarding Sendero Luminoso...
...and 3) this revolution is infallible, because it is the application of "the universal truths of Marxism" by a party which, proclaiming itself the vanguard of the proletariat, can not fail.' Violence is given such universal importance in Sendero's strategy, that it completely colors their outlook, even the social utopia they espouse...
...The Limabased human rights group CEAPAZ estimates over 17,000 have been killed since 1980...
...3 Gamonalismo permeates the entire social fabric of the Andean peasant world, incorporating whites and mestizos, and even some Indians, the final link in a long chain of middlemen who live off the indigenous population...
...At no point do they mention that being an Indian or a mestizo in Peru might be at all indicative of the form exploitation and class oppression takes, as was so clearly formulated by MariAtegui...
...But this reading of the objective situation is questionable in light of the growing problems Sendero is having in expanding its urban work...
...Was it difficult to foresee...
...To confront the violence and authoritarianism that threatens to devour Peru, only one option is worth betting on--grassroots organizing...
...There is a curious inversion of Marxist theory in Sendero's praxis...
...Eriberto Arroyo Mio was gunned down, presumably by the right-wing Rodrigo Franco Commando, and in the weeks that followed it was learned that dozens of opposition leaders had received death threats...
...tribunals to hear complaints, which see to it that the rights of all are protected and which take action when public officials do not carry out their duties...
...For others, just formulating the problem leads to a dead end: Sendero Luminoso is a terrorist organization that not only resorts to assassination but kills with cruelty bordering on the pathological, that PERU: AREAS OF GUERRILLA ACTIVITY VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBERI/JANUARY 1990/1991) I 29Perus Shin Ang Path Peru's Shining Path attacks not only the traditional enemies of the peasants but even strikes out at the poor themselves...
...There are other hidden meanings in the Molinos ambush...
...As always, the peasantry pays the cost...
...T HE VIOLENCE EMPLOYED BY SENDERO IN Ayacucho is to a great degree responsible for its success in building a base of support...
...That promise held a bloody irony, as we shall see...
...Merely pointing out these objective factors is not enough...
...In the "'New Power" with which Sendero is edifying its "Popular Republic of New Democracy, in formation," there are, then, representatives of the proletariat but no proletarians...
...To build a better life with all and for all, not by grant or imposition from above, we would do well to never lose sight of the lesson of this decade of violence: The stuff of which our dreams are made may become our worst nightmare...
...Several were already in de facto possession of their "serfs" when the military government introduced an agrarian reform in 1969...
...The mortality rate dropped in subsequent years, rising again since 1988...
...the elimination of the few individual survivors was to be one of Sendero's first banners...
...Sendero's violently authoritarian paternalism was accepted, it seems, because it was considered inevitable...
...Juan Velasco Alvarado...
...In Canipaco, the Senderista contingent explained that no one should worry: Soldiers are the sons of peasants, and will not fire on the people...
...PartidoComunista del Perdi-Sendero Luminoso, "Documentos fundamentales del Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista del Peri (Congreso marxista-leninista-maoista, pensamiento Gonzalo)," El Diario, Jan...
...The day before the massacre, Cong...
...Exchanging freedom in return for security might seem inequitable, but the freedom to be enjoyed in Peru today does not amount to much either, particularly if one is poor and Indian...
...The structural basis for the necessity of violence lies in the fact that precapitalist merchant capital makes its profit out of exchange, in contrast to true capitalism which restricts itself to appropriating part of the surplus value generated in the process of production...
...The Peasant Confederation of Peru (CCP) tried to expedite demands by proposing the dissolution of the SAIS, the return of the lands in question to the communities, and the establishment of a multi-community body to run the most modern portion of the operation and preserve the highly technical advances it had achieved...
...Such a catastrophe is not, of course, the only way out...
...Due to the extensive networks of family and godfamily relationships in the highlands, each killing moved a wide circle of people to seek revenge...
...An order that all comuneros share in communal labor followed...
...2 In addition, ethnicity is a decisive element in the social composition of the Senderista rank and file...
...A novel published last year entitled "Attila's Colts: The 1992 Coup in Peru" lays out the implications of such a development: Sendero is defeated at a cost of 600,000 lives, the elimination of all democratic organizations, and a dictatorship lasting 25 years...
...The congressmembers from Izquierda Unida brought so much pressure to bear that a commission was appointed to investigate the crime...
...See Ratil GonzAlez, "Coca's Shining Path," NA CLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...The testimonies are taken from Aracelio Castillo, "El movimiento popular de junio de 1969 (Huanta y Huamanga, Ayacucho)," (Ph.D...
...Sendero leader Abimael Guzmdin has affirmed the political usefulness of fanning the passions of blind hatred...
...Sendero needs no outside support," declared the head of the Peruvian Anti-Terrorism Agency (DIRCOTE...
...Canipaco is a high valley where haciendas and communities have historically vied for control of pasturage...
...Beladnde was wrong on both counts...
...What Sendero did not say was that in Ayacucho the armed forces used recruits mainly from the coast and the jungle-soldiers who not only did not identify with the highland Indians, but harbored deep racist prejudices, prompting barbarous abuses that have to date gone unpunished...
...Thus the door would be closed to any approach to revolution that is not authoritarian--and Sendero's line would, in fact, correspond to reality...
...Nine haciendas comprising 270,122 hectares, and 17 of the communities in their area of influence, were then consolidated to form the "SAIS Cahuide"--a state-controlled entity nominally run as a cooperative-which became one of the most modern livestock companies in Peru...
...Actually, Sendero's rhetoric asserts that at this stage the order of the day is to achieve capitalist objectives as yet unfulfilled...
...Not in light of his experience in 1968....We believe that events have borne us out...
...Sendero's leadership is right when it asserts, paraphrasing Mao, that "the line determines all...
...But herein lies its main strategic weakness, since to impose its vertical and authoritarian vision throughout the entire country, Sendero will have to liquidate the entire tradition of democratic organization developed by the Peruvian people throughout its history of struggle, particularly during the last decades...
...The construction of the coastal highway and new access roads to the interior has lessened the Mantaro's importance, but the central highway through it is still the most heavily traveled route to the departments of Junin, Pasco, Huanuco, and the northern part of Huancavelica...
...9. The information I present differs from that obtained from informants by Victor Caballero...
...Radil GonzAlez, "Recuperar el Huallaga: una estrategia posible," Quehacer, No...
...9. Ibid...
...3. Interview with Abimael Guzmn in El Diario (Lima), July 24, 1988...
...5. Mistis are the mestizos that live in middle-sized and small towns of the Andes...
...Sendero Luminoso's social base of support in Canipaco was not built by offering material benefits to the peasantry (except for the initial distribution of livestock...
...Sendero is an inflexible authoritarian organization that lashes out at the poor, displays utter contempt for the organizations the poor have built, and seeks to impose a new society from above while ignoring the opinion of its supposed beneficiaries...
...Aendern honnp to dentrov them all VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991) 35Peru's Shininq Path chilling scope, including anyone who could be considered an obstacle to Sendero's plans-those who simply refused to take part in the killing, for example...
...One obvious question is why all the survivors were wiped out...
...Lenin pointed out that the seed of the new society already exists in the party that is striving to construct it: that the social relations established in the party foreshadow those that will finally prevail in the new society...
...The Molinos massacre marked an important change in public attitudes toward the rising spiral of violence, contrasting sharply with the aftermath of the slaughter of imprisoned Sendero supporters in 1986...
...This changed, however, when three alleged cattle thieves were apprehended in the community of Chicche...
...There, nearly half a million recently migrated peasants enjoy some of the highest incomes in the nation, and are free of the enemies they had to contend with in the mountains since time immemorial...
...Lima must be starved now, to widen to the utmost the great gulfs that polarize Peruvian society...
...That's the way it has to be," one cornunero explained to me, "because mistreatment is all we Peruvians understand...
...Figures from Comisi6n Especial del Senado sobre las causas de la violencia y alternativas de pacificaci6n en el Peril, Violencia y pacificaciun, (Lima: Desco and the Comisidn Andina de Juristas, 1989...
...Rodrigo Machado GonzAlez Prada, Los potros de Arila: El golpe militarde 1992 en elPerd (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1989...
...The silence of the press and of public figures about so enormous an event was only possible insofar as it reflected a growing sentiment that is terrible in its implications: the open acceptance of authoritarianism as the only possible way out of the spiral of violence: "Kill them all and get it over with so we can live in peace...
...The second contingent seemed more concerned with the revolution's long-term cohesion, more possessed by questions of doctrine, and more aware that certain concessions hastily granted could sow the seeds of future trouble...
...2 The real threat today is a military coup or the de facto militarization of the state, which would destroy the popuVOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991) 37Peru's Shining Path s Peru's Shining Path lar organizations, the Left, and the democratic progress achieved at the grass roots in recent decades...
...0 Sendero decides from among whom the delegates should be elected, as well as what people should be considered potential representatives from the "three-thirds...
...ECOURSE TO AUTHORITARIAN VIOLENCE had unquestionable success in Ayacucho and the surrounding region, reaffirming Sendero's belief that it would be equally viable in the rest of the country...
...The military's plans assumed the dictatorship would last only 15 or 20 years...
...The other tactic which has won support, and is common to all three zones of operation, is what Sendero calls "moralizing": compulsory enforcement of a very strict code of behavior, with drastic punishment for drug abuse, robbery, adultery, and the like...
...On the basis of their firepower, the insurgents are able to guarantee the payment of "fair"-that is to say, relatively stable--prices, while protecting peasants from the most flagrant abuses...
...Over the next few days, the blue-blood stock was sold off to clandestine butchers at ridiculous prices: gravid cows at $100 and pedigreed sheep at $10-$12-a twentieth of their value...
...Through the violent destruction of those who disagree, Sendero seeks not only to eliminate competitors, but to provoke a military coup that would wipe out the slightest trace of democracy and 36 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASautonomous organization...
...Even in neighboring zones the Sendero contingents exhibit marked variations in their mode of operating, perhaps because Sendero's decision-making is centralized but implementation is not...
...a body to administer justice that is moderately efficient and not corrupt...
...This played right into Sendero's hands...
...And when they kill suspected Sendero sympathizers, they pretend to be MRTA guerrillas...
...The destruction of the highland landowner class did not lead to the disappearance of gainonalismo, since the power of the local bosses rested not only on land tenure, but on control of the market, and the agrarian reform left the merchants untouched...
...7. El Diario, Jan...
...Author's interview...
...The illusion that once power is taken it will be possible to dump the baggage of authoritarian ruthlessness, and build the ideal society by other means, has been painfully negated by history time and again...
...The area became a virtual "no man's land...
...The perceived legitimacy of Sendero's authoritarian violence stemmed as much from its being considered inevitable-' 'natural' '--as from its appearance as a generative force of a new order...
...Most comuneros considered the SAIS to be of no benefit to them and continued to struggle to recover the lands in dispute-this time against the government...
...Since Sendero believes no real popular organizations can exist under a regime it has characterized as fascist, it attempts to crush them and eliminate their leaders by threat or murder...
...But just as likely the goal was to isolate the countryside totally, expunging all government presence as well as all development projects run by NGOs: Only Sendero and the peasants should remain...
...the word implied such a departure from acceptable behavior that no more needed to be said...
...The communities are not allowed to share in the decisions made for them by the Sendero cadres...
...Perhaps if we look over the brink of the abyss we will find a way to avoid falling into it...
...Travelling by bus, they picked up local authorities from Chicche, Llamapsillon and Chongos Altos, and executed all twelve...
...The MRTA conceded that 42 of its members were killed, but claimed that the 20 other dead were eyewitnesses who had been summarily executed by the army...
...XXII, No...
...2. I have not observed these transformations personally but have heard them described by people who have left under duress as well as by people who have "gone home to visit...
...It also led to friction with the members of the first column whose approach had been more conciliatory...
...The party frequently annulled marriages in cases of domestic conflict, and even meted out corporal punishment-an expeditious and cruel but effective form of justice...
...And while the 1990 elections distracted the attention of national and world opinion, the number of attacks in just the first seven months of this year rose to 1,391, and the numberof dead to 2,262...
...Every time he had to say something about the guerrilla movement growing in the mountains, he would simply label it "terrorist...
...In that region, where most inhabitants are monolingual Quechua speakers, nothing is more evident than the racist nature of oppression...
...People's Committees were selected by an Assembly of Delegates in accordance with what Sendero calls "the standard of the three thirds: one-third Communists [that is, political cadres of Sendero] representing the proletariat, one-third poor peasants representing the peasantry, and one-third middle-level farmers and progressive elements representing the petit bourgeoisie...
...To achieve anything so fundamental in Peru implies a full-blown revolution, because Peru is a society burdened not only by class differences, but by a vigorous and pervasive caste structure-an onerous colonial legacy by which some citizens are more equal than others because of their place of origin or the color of their skin...
...However, the inappropriateness of Sendero's political line to the more modern areas of the country offers it little promise of winning supporters as easily as it has so far...
...Interview with Abimael Guzmin, El Diario (Lima) July 24, 1988...
...These "enemies" of Sendero were soon organized by the army into the notorious "Montoneras," counterinsurgency civil patrols...
Vol. 24 • December 1990 • No. 4
