Shining Path in the 21st Century: Actors in Search of a New Script
Izaquirre, Carlos Reyna
After Guzmhn proposed a peace agreement with the government, Shining Path split into two factions. Both seek to resolve the same problem: how to keep the organization alive and relevant after...
...The principal aim of such activities is to remind everyone of their continued presence on the political stage...
...In the fall of 1993, one year after his arrest, Guzmdn brought this cycle of violence to an end when he offered to negotiate a peace agreement with the Fujimori govern- ment...
...37REPORT ON PERU the use of terror...
...But given the reduced size of both factions, the violence will be lowkey and will take place mainly in parts of Peru that are of little political or economic importance, such as shantytowns in Lima and towns in the jungle or Andean highlands...
...Shining Path's insurrection became a revolution of campesinos against campesinosa popular war against the people...
...By declaring the start of a "pro- longed popular war" in 1980, Abimael Guzmin, the leader of the Communist Party of Peru, known as Shining Path, plunged Peru into a brutal cycle of violence...
...The final episode would take place in Lima-the headquarters of the reactionaries-which would fall exhausted beneath a portrait of Guzmin painted on a red background...
...Any political project based on these two pillars, he argued, was destined to fail...
...They tried to boycott elections, development projects, and the markets where campesinos sold their products...
...Between 1989 and 1992, Shining Path stepped up its armed activities in Lima, badly shaking the government's confidence...
...These activities will not endanger the stability of the state or even cause foreign investors to leave Peru in search of safer pastures...
...For the next 13 years, Shining Path was the lead actor in the country's unfolding drama...
...Shining Path had most appeal among social groups located on the periphery of productive activity: students, teachers, unemployed young people from the shantytowns...
...Shining Path's insurrection thus became a revolution of campesinos against campesinos--a popular war against the people...
...The idea of radical rupture is profoundly alien to Peruvians...
...They tried to impose the fiction of their own authorities and popular committees...
...By the time Fujimori and the military announced the autogolpe in 1992, the Special Intelligence Group (GEIN), a small elite police unit, had already uncovered a trail of clues that would eventually lead them to Guzmdn...
...The cycle of political violence begun in 1980 came to an end during the brief period framed by two watershed events: Guzmdn's arrest in September, 1992, and the declaration by Shining Path leaders still at large of their opposition to Guzmdn's peace proposal in February, 1994...
...Shining Path poses few risks to Peru's stability in the short term, but the risks may grow as time marches on...
...Aware that Shining Path has lost the leading role that it held in the early 1990s, both groups share the common goal of remaining in the wings, like understudies, in anticipation of better times...
...Feliciano and his comrades, by reducing their activity and prioritizing underground political activity, recognize implicitly that times have changed...
...Peru's so-called bureaucratic capitalism did collapse under the weight of hyper-inflation and Fujimori's neoliberal reforms...
...oth factions are trying to resolve the same problem: how to keep Shining Path alive and relevant after the many defeats the Party has suffered...
...Occasionally, they will carry out a spectacular act of sabotage or ambush a military patrol...
...Both seek to resolve the same problem: how to keep the organization alive and relevant after suffering numerous defeats...
...Guzmin has even said so explicitly in his new manifestos...
...In the end, they invited military repression and intervention in the areas where they organized...
...He is a researcher at the Lima-based Center for the Study and Promotion of Development (DESCO...
...Even though the police and the military did not coordinate their efforts-indeed, there was a great deal of rivalry between the two institutions-these shifts hastened Shining Path's demise...
...Rather, they are hoping to exercise a combination of political hegemony and terror at the local level...
...Some of Guzmdn's prophecies had a grain of truth to them...
...The play's final scene is the division of Shining Path into Guzm6n's pro-peace faction, and the faction that continues to wage war...
...Shining Path is no longer proclaiming-to audiences in Peru and the rest of the world-the existence of their popular committees or their impending overthrow of the state...
...Guzmdn's original script was premised on a double hypothesis: that A soldier patrol reads, "Long liv Peru's state-led capitalism would disintegrate, and that democratic institutions in place since 1980 would collapse...
...In particular, Guzmin underestimated the resilience of the survival mechanisms that the Peruvian people have developed over decades, and the faith in progress that underscores their Sisyphean efforts...
...Guzmin's predictions were, however, mistaken on a number of other counts...
...Shining Path sought to implant it through VOL XXX, No 1 JuLY/AUG 1996 Carlos Reyna Izaguirre is a sociologist and journalist who has written extensively on political violence for the Lima bi-monthly Quehacer...
...They wanted to turn every protest march into a general "armed strike...
...He failed to appreciate the true dimensions of this age-old game of resistance and adaptation, of skepticism and expectations, and of simultaneous rejection and acceptance of the rules and the predominant institutions...
...Shining Path had some success, but it was precarious...
...With this membership, Shining Path developed more as a sect than as a movement with a popular base of support...
...The only option was to leap outside the system, announce its impending collapse, recruit the millions of marginalized Peruvians, educate them with dynamite, denigrate and execute conciliators, create power vacuums, and slowly fill them with Shining Path's popular committees...
...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA...
...His peace proposal, which split Shining Path into two factions, opened up a new, more muted phase of violence in Peru...
...Despite their opposing prescriptions for action, both sides perceive that Shining Path has entered a new phase of its existence...
...For Guzm6n, saving the Party requires halting all sabotage and guerrilla activities and engaging in unarmed political activities for several years...
...Through stepped-up intelligence efforts, the police were able to arrest a number of key intermediate-level leaders, weakening Shining Path's internal organization...
...During this same period, after several years of striking out blindly against the population, the state began to reformulate its counterinsurgency strategies...
...But the pragmatism of the campesinos eventually led them to forge an alliance with the army, since it had both more power and the representation of the state...
...Since then, all the political parties have either drowned completely or are barely holding their heads above water...
...Fujimori's autogolpe dealt the final blow to Peru's fledgling democracy in 1992...
...It is unlikely that Shining Path will disappear from Peru's political stage any time soon...
...This lack of consistent social support would prove to have dire consequences for the Party...
...In this way, the spiral of terror grew from both sides...
...These errors were decisive in the ultimate failure of his strategy for taking power...
...Despite the military's record of brutality, tens of thousands of campesinos began forming, under military tutelage, civildefense patrols to fight off Shining Path...
...They killed hundreds of campesinos for bettering themselves as traders and sellers, for serving as state officials, for voting in elections, and for being mayors or grassroots leaders opposed to the armed struggle...
...It is a norm of the Communist movement that Party leadership cannot be exercised from prison:' said the dissident faction in direct allusion to Guzmin...
...Those who oppose him, led by Oscar Ramfrez Durand ("Comrade Feliciano"), believe the Party's only salvation lies in continuing its armed activities, though with less intensity than before, and emphasizing the reconstruction of its grassroots cells via the classic ant-like work of its clandestine militants...
Vol. 30 • July 1996 • No. 1
