Daniel Masterson - The Devolution of Peru's Sendero Luminoso: From Hybrid Maoists to Narco-Traffickers?

The Devolution of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso: From HybridMaoists to Narco-Traffickers?

Daniel M. Masterson*United States Naval Academy

Abstract

This History Compass article examines the ideological transformation of Peru’s Sendero Luminosoinsurgency from its immediate origins in the 1960s in the remote province of Ayacucho to itsdevolution to small armed bands of drug traffickers in the nation’s remote central Andean regions.Originally, Sendero claimed allegiance to the peasant-based Marxism of Jose Carlos Mariategui, thefounder of Peru’s Socialist Party. In reality, however, much of its ideology and revolutionary strat-egy was based on Maoist theory. As, Sendero’s Maoism was largely based on its leader’s experiencein China in the mid-1960s, the party felt compelled to rabidly defend ‘orthodox’ Maoism asChina moved away this ideology in the late 1970s. Maoism with a Peruvian radical stamp,nevertheless, failed to win over the peasantry in the 1980s. Sendero’s leadership then violated basicMaoist strategy and began an urban terror campaign which exposed its leadership to eventualcapture in late 1992. Since then, Sendero has survived only as a force fortified by drug revenuesand isolated by rugged mountain terrain. We can only speculate about its future. But an estimated66,000 deaths caused by its insurgency are stark evidence of its destructive potential.

Before Sendero Luminoso Peru has witnessed many Andean resistance movements from theTaki Onqoy sect in the 1560s to the Hugo Blanco led hacienda invasions of the early1960s. But only the Tupac Amaru II uprising in the 1780s can compare in violence andin scope with the self-styled ‘peoples war’ of Partido Comunista del Peru en el SenderoLuminoso de Jose Carlos Mariategui (Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of JoseCarlos Mariategui). Referred to commonly as Sendero or SL, this movement had little todo with the communal Marxist theories of Mariategui, who based many of his key ideason more than 1000 years of Andean traditions.1 Instead, SL was a hybrid mix of Stalin-ism, Maoism, and the thoughts of Guzman. This mishmash of ideologies came to becalled by Guzman, who adopted the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, ‘Gonzalo thought’.Much like the teachings of Peru’s most prominent political figure, Vıctor Raul Haya dela Torre, SL’s ideology remained an opaque assemblage of revolutionary thought poorlyunderstood by low-ranking Senderistas, academics, and Peruvian counter-insurgencyforces.2

Sendero’s emergence was made possible by the weakness of the Peruvian Left. Thetraditional Moscow-linked Communist Party was driven underground during the earlyCold War as was the nationalist, but increasingly conservative, APRA party. Clearly, theinsurgency was not primarily peasant-based as many earlier commentators believed.Rather, like in Mao’s China, it was seen as a tool of the revolution to be manipulated,intimidated, and at time brutalized to conform to ‘Gonzalo Thought’. In the end, thePeruvian peasantry came to loath Sendero and mobilize effectively against this terrorist

History Compass 8/1 (2010): 51–60, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00656.x

Journal Compilation ª 2009 Blackwell Publishing LtdNo claim to original US government works

front. The use of the name of Peru’s most venerable Marxist seems to have been anattempt to associate Sendero Luminoso with a more pure indigenous brand of Marxism.Peru’s Moscow line Communist party had been already ‘corrupted’ by political allianceswith military dictators like Manuel A. Odria (1948–1956) or Juan Velasco Alvarado(1968–1975). 3

More than any other belief system, the founder of Sendero Luminoso, Abimael GuzmanReynoso, drew on Maoist teachings as guidelines for his campaign in Peru.

Guzman, like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Pol Pot in Cambodia, was a disaffectedintellectual who sought ideological inspiration abroad. Ho Chi Minh and Pol Potacquired this in France, whereas Guzman traveled to Communist China during the espe-cially violent Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. There, he became deeply engagedin both the practical and theoretical aspects of Maoist thought, and it is believed that hewas especially schooled in small-unit tactics and use of explosives. After he returned toPeru his writings and oratory overwhelmingly make reference to the Maoist experienceas his model for his own country. Indeed, Sendero’s embryonic stage in the remote townof Ayacucho in Peru’s south-central Sierra coincides exactly with Mao’s early period ofrevolutionary outreach to the Third World. As China’s growing rift with the SovietUnion accelerated during the 1960s, Mao sought through foreign aid, and the training ofrevolutionary cadres in China to get the upper hand on not only his long-time enemythe United States, but his new rival the Soviet Union. Mao derisively characterized theSoviet Union as ‘revisionist’ and all too willing to sell out to the West with ‘peacefulcoexistence’.4 Guzman clung tenaciously to the idea of the ‘purity’ of Maoist doctrine,even as China’s communist leaders in the 1970s were rejecting Mao’s thinking as oppres-sively Stalinist.

To better trace the ideological evolution of SL we should begin with a brief look atGuzman’s early life. He was born in Mollendo, near Arequipa in 1934, the illegitimateson of a local merchant of some financial means. Guzman was educated at Catholic pri-vate schools and later at San Augustın National University in Arequipa. Reclusive andshy, Guzman completed his graduate studies with a dissertation examining EmanuelKant’s ‘Theory of Space’. He was then hired by the provincial university in Ayacucho,San Cristobal de Huamanga to teach philosophy. The university had recently reopenedafter a long closure. The military government at the time saw it as a progressive institu-tion for rural education. Pilot programs in vocational education offered students thepromise of better employment that unfortunately rarely materialized in impoverished Ay-acucho. This situation created a fertile ground for peasant discontent that SL effectivelyexploited. Significantly, the Ayacucho region was barely touched by the Velasco regime’sagrarian reforms as most of the reforms were concentrated in the coastal regions. Thus,there was great discontent among what some have called the ‘semi-peasantry’ or the sonsand daughters of peasants who were frustrated because of a lack of opportunities evenwith a legitimate education. In San Cristobal de Huamanga, as a professor, and later anadministrator, he began recruiting students and faculty for his cause. The group was smallbut intense in its sweeping ambitions. Some Peruvian commentators have characterizedSendero during those early years as a ‘dwarf star’, dark and difficult to detect, but heavywith implication for Peruvian affairs.

Guzman was in China during Mao’s Red Guard Movement and seeing Mao’s brutalityup close, may have strengthened his belief that only a movement that replicated such vio-lence could succeed in Peru. Violence as a cleansing or renewing experience is a centraltenet of Marxist ⁄Maoist thought. Peruvian writer Gustavo Gorriti commented on thisidea of transforming violence by noting that Guzman also owed much to Stalin in the

52 Devolution of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso

Journal Compilation ª 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 8/1 (2010): 51–60, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00656.xNo claim to original US government works

use of violence to promote radical change. By the late 1970s, the Sendero leader now wasconvinced that, ‘to kill gave life, that war brought peace, (and) that the most extremetyranny brought the greatest freedom’.5 By this time, Guzman had been underground fora number of years, planning his campaign and training his cadres in the highlands. Helater claimed that the exit of the military from politics in July 1980 was an opportunetime to strike. Guzman correctly assumed that the military was discredited, professionallydivided, and exhausted after 12 years of military rule. The frantic pace of nationalist leftistoriented reforms under Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975) had been largely reversed by hisconservative successor General Francisco Morales Bermudez (1975–1980). The limitedsuccesses of the military government disheartened the military and made its leaders waryof continued national power. Forgotten, as it had been for all of Peru’s modern history,was Ayacucho and its desperately poor peasantry.

Sendero opened its nearly cataclysmic campaign to destroy the Peruvian state in May1980 when hooded Senderistas burned the ballot boxes for the national elections as a showof protest against the democratic process. During the initial phase of Sendero’s operationsin Ayacucho, the movement presented itself as a moral force in the highland(s) metingout vigilante justice against cattle rustlers, corrupt village officials, and even unfaithfulhusbands or wives. President Fernando Belaunde Terry (1980–1985) initially refused totake the insurgency seriously referring to them simply as ‘cattle rustlers’. Belaunde firstresponded to the insurgency by employing Peru’s Guardia Civil’s counterinsurgency unitsknown as the Sinchis against SL. With poor intelligence and improper training, the Sinchisperformed badly between 1980 and 1983 and human rights abuses against the peasantrysoon began to become commonplace especially against villages that had been visited bySendero columns. One campesina woman, a native of Chuschi, in the central highlands,lamented at this time that the Peruvian campesinos was caught ‘between the sword and thewall’, in their struggle to survive the nation’s escalating violence.

Recruitment for Sendero took place in Lima’s universities and in the barriadas (shantytowns) where many supporters of Sendero early on were not fully aware of the insur-gency’s ideology or intentions. They were simply fed up with Peru’s economic and socialconditions and not enthusiastic advocates of democracy. Recruitment was often by forcewith Senderista armed columns entering villages at night and kidnapping children as youngas seven into their ranks. This recruiting pattern emulated the Khmer Rouge in Cambodiaand the Viet Cong.6 Then the SL would indoctrinate the young ones in ‘Gonzalothought’. They were then trained in small-unit tactics, use of explosives, and otheraspects of guerrilla warfare. Before being vetted into the insurgency they were requiredto kill a public official, a village leader or if in Lima, a policeman. It was not unusual forboth a father and a son to be dragooned into Sendero. This forced recruitment was a vitalfactor in alienating Peru’s campesinos during the 1980s. Still, eyewitness accounts by armedforces personnel underscored the fanaticism of young Senderistas and is a strong testamentto the strength of their commitment to their cause. In some cases, mortally woundedprisoners died rather than give information with a promise of medical aid.7 Guzman oftentalked about the ‘quota’ or the sacrifice in lives and blood that the insurgency would haveto make before it could achieve victory. Like every revolutionary leader from Lenin toEamon de Valera, Guzman dragged up the worn cliche about ‘crossing the river ofblood’ to achieve victory.

Senderistas jailed in the capital’s prisons may have been trying to meet the insurgency’s‘quota’ when they rioted simultaneously at Lurigancho, Santa Barbara (women’s prison)and the Naval Prison at El Fronton.in mid-June 1986. The rioting at El Fronton was metwith massive force by Peruvian marines with more than 300 prisoners dying in the riots

Devolution of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso 53


with reports that many were executed after they surrendered. The prison riots and theirsuppression hardened Sendero’s reputation as a tenacious foe. It also gave the movementthe martyrs that revolutionary movements need to develop their ethos.8

SL forces were small, disciplined, and ruthless. The standard Senderista armed columnusually numbered no more than 20 or 30 fighters. Often they were commanded by lead-ers who were older, usually in the late twenties or early thirties. These were the ‘core’ ofthe Sendero armed forces. Some were likely trained in North Korea, China, or Cuba andwere known as responsible politicos (political officers) which made them similar in a generalway to the commisars in the Soviet Army. They stayed constantly in the field gainingintelligence and planning operations. Usually their targets were government installations,such as electrical towers, bridges, agricultural stations, or anything which represented thepower of the state, but sometimes attacks were made on the property of peasant commu-nities such as when livestock herds were slaughtered to disrupt the traditional economy.Sendero’s goal, among others, was to destroy Peru’s infrastructure as a prelude to cuttingoff Lima from the rest of the country in Maoist fashion. The Peruvian armed forces hadthe advantage in weaponry throughout most of the conflict in the 1980s, but this chan-ged when Sendero forged an alliance with Peru’s narco-traffickers after 1987 so onceSendero began operating in the Upper Huallaga valley, revenue and training was forth-coming from the narco-traffickers.9 SL itself was not directly involved in drug traffickingbut rather supplied armed protection for the narco-traffickers in the region. SL thusacquired better arms such as AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket launchers making theinsurgency a tougher foe for government forces. Sendero’s hit and run tactics added to themilitary difficulties. Ambushes of patrols were facilitated by the mountainous terrain,roads with many switchbacks and blind turns, and the extremes of altitude which limitedthe range of the military foot patrols.10

Guzman created the Ejercito Guerrillero Popular (Popular Guerrilla Army, EGP) in 1983as the official military element of the party. As they gained confidence and strength theirtactics became bolder and more brutal. One veteran of two separate sierra campaignsagainst Sendero in 1983 and 1985, stated that the insurgency would often herd campesinostaken from nearby villages in front of a Sendero column to shield their fighters when theengaged army or marines. As in Vietnam, Peruvian forces conducted operations from‘firebases’ in remote areas of the interior. Hampering government operations more thanany single factor was the lack of good intelligence. As in any war against a clandestineinsurgency, whether it is Algeria, Vietnam, or Peru, poor intelligence usually assures highlevels of civilian casualties. Peru was no exception. As the terror war escalated killingsand reprisals on both sides caused casualties in the tens of thousands.

As the Sendero campaign evolved in the 1980s it became increasingly clear that theycould not recruit, forcibly or otherwise, sufficient numbers of fighters to win the waragainst government forces in the sierra. Either through a fundamental misunderstanding ofindigenous communal values and practices or arrogance, Sendero’s leadership never gainedthe lasting support of the peasantry.

Forced recruitment, of course, alienated many peasant villages from Sendero. Later assas-sinations of village leaders, very similar to the tactics of the Viet Cong, aroused campesinohatreds but mostly it was a fundamental disregard for the welfare of the campesinos thatdoomed Sendero. In an effort to ‘strangle’ the cities in Maoist fashion, Sendero tried tolimit agricultural production or completely curtail the external market. The destruction ofa peasant-owned milk-processing plant, or the mass slaughter of cattle and alpaca herdswere other examples of these tactics. In Chuschi, for example, where the ‘peoples war’began, Sendero, tried to completely remake village economic and social patterns that had



been in place for centuries. SL banned alcohol and fiestas, and campesinos were notpermitted to sell their products in at the weekly market. SL tried to put in place a plant-ing system which had no relation to the complex reciprocity and kinship systems thathad historically directed village activities.

Sendero Lumionoso’s organizing and recruitment program was more calculated andrestrained in Lima’s pueblos jovenes (new towns). Targeting the huge settlement of Villa ElSalvador south of Lima that contained 260,000 inhabitants, the insurgency first tried toundermine support for the legal left IU. Their tactics included participation in local coun-cils, participating in new land invasions and more mundane activities such as joining waterand electricity committees as well as women’s groups. Senderistas also gained sympathy withresidents by eliminating thieves and other dangerous members of the community that civilauthorities could not reach. Guzman referred to Lima’s shanty towns as ‘iron belts of mis-ery’. They were, indeed, the key to bring the ‘people’s war’ to the capital, but like Sendero’scampaign in the sierra, terror soon replaced collaboration in Guzman’s war strategy.

Claiming falsely that Sendero had attained ‘strategic equilibrium’ in the sierra, Guzmanordered in late 1990 a campaign of assassination and bombings in Villa El Salvador andsubsequently in metropolitan Lima. One of the victims of Sendero’s terror, was MariaElena Moyano, the extremely popular mayor of Villa El Salvador who had publicallydenounced the insurgency on numerous occasions in the press. Moyano was assassinatedand her body dynamited in full public view of hundreds of witnesses. Of all Sendero’sassassinations, Moyano’s was the most outrageous as she had worked tirelessly withwomen’s groups and then residents of Villa el Salvador to build better lives.11 Mary JoBurt effectively argues that Sendero never really tried to gain popular support in Villa elSalvador because that would have taken too long and required too much patience.Instead the insurgency sought to exploit divisions within the community and its politicalleadership to encourage the erosion of participatory government in the community.12

When faced with resistance in 1990 with the emergence of rondas vecinales (neighborhooddefense committee), Sendero responded with terror. But the ultimate result was thealienation of the inhabitants of these ‘iron belts of misery’. The insurgency confrontedthese same rondas on a much larger scale in the sierra.

The anthropologist Orin Starn has written extensively on peasant resistance to SenderoLuminoso in the sierra. He makes it emphatically clear that the insurgency was not apeasant-based movement when he argues that Sendero ‘was begun by privileged intellectu-als in the city of Ayacucho’. He further maintains that the movement mirrored the rigidhierarchy of race and class that it claimed it sought to destroy. Dark-skinned kids born inpoverty filled (Sendero’s) bottom ranks under a leadership composed mostly of light-skinned elites.13 The myth of a peasant-based Sendero is countered most effectively by theexperience of the rondas campesinas (peasant self-defense committees) which came intobeing in the Andes as a response to Sendero terror. These rondas spontaneously and at thebehest of the military, contested the insurgency throughout the Andes.

At first, the army followed a policy of relocating villagers in war zones into agrupaciones(nucleated settlements) to better control peasant movements and enhance monitoring ofSL’s activities. However, this caused substantial hardship for campesinos who were takenaway from their land and communal environment. Still it provided a measure of protec-tion for remote villages that were vulnerable to the insurgency’s activities. As indicatedearlier, during the early 1980s peasants suffered equally at the hand of the military andSendero. Much of the counter-insurgency theory studied intensively at Peru’s war collegesbefore the 1970s was not applied as commanders faced little accountability for theiractions in a war when the enemy could rarely be easily identified. Previously successful



counter-insurgency campaigns in Peru in the 1960s provided little insight for the armedforces. The insurgencies followed the flawed foco theory made popular by the Cubanrevolution. Unlike the foco theory which espouses one primary rural guerrilla base ofoperations, SL extended its forces over many remote areas. Clearly, Sendero leadersstudied the mistakes of these failed guerrillas of 1960s and learned from them.14

What the Peruvian army was doing before 1985 in the Sendero war was replicating thetactics of French paratroopers in Algeria (1954–1962) who often followed a scorchedearth policy with furious reprisals against rebel villages. Poor intelligence led directly tolarge numbers of casualties and produced virulent hatred against the French. Frenchsoldiers trained the Peruvian army from 1896 to 1943, but the fundamental lessons ofcounter insurgency warfare were clearly not mastered by either institution.15 As Sendero’scampaign of terror was countered by rondas campesinas (peasant self-defense brigades),military intelligence drawn from the peasantry improved and human right abuses by thearmed forces declined. This led directly to the rapid appearance of rondas committeesmainly in the poorest departments of Andahuaylas, Apurimac, Ayacucho, and Junın alllocated in the central and southern sierra. In these areas, war casualties declined by nearlyone-third by 1990. The Peruvian government was so convinced of the effectiveness ofthe rondas campesinas that in 1991 it took the unprecedented step of distributing 10,000Winchester model 1300 shotguns to peasants rondas throughout the war zones. Neverhad a Spanish colonial or Peruvian republican government ever distributed firearms tocampesinos. It was not only a measure of the desperation of the Peruvian government, butalso an indication of its growing confidence in the capability of the rondas campesinas tosuccessfully combat the insurgency. By 1990, there were as many as 300,000 peasantsdefending their homes as rondas campesinas by patrolling the highlands and forcing theleadership of Sendero to escalate the war in Lima even as SL was losing the war in thecountryside. Some of the most effective resistance was in the Apurımac River Valley, aregion in central Peru that is even now so remote that Lima is a full day’s travel from itsmain city, Abancay. Here, peasants were motivated often by their recent conversion toprotestant evangelicalism, resulting in these highly religious campesinos often being targetedby Sendero for particularly violent abuse. Reacting to this, the peasants responded with aform of ‘holy war’, which identified Sendero as the ‘anti-Christ’. Identifying Sendero inAndean mythical terms, the peasants claimed that the terrorists ‘eat human flesh and suckhuman blood’.16 Interestingly, the rondas in Apurımac used Sendero’s own tactics againstthem. More than half of the valley’s economy was composed of the coca trade. Therondas charged Colombian drug dealers a ‘tax’ of up to $5.000 per airplane shipment inthe early 1990s. The money was used to buy arms and ammunition to fight Sendero.17

It can be said that Sendero’s failure to win the war in the sierra was because of a deeplyflawed strategy that fundamentally misunderstood the peasantry. Primarily led by mestizointellectuals who had little sympathy for Andean traditional ways or beliefs, Guzman andhis immediate follower’s vision of a new Peru was distorted by his monumentalarrogance. Disregard for traditional Andean ways by Sendero’s leadership should not besurprising. Guzman’s hero, Mao Ze Dong exploited the peasants remorselessly throughouthis 27 years in power. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday demonstrate in their recent carefullyresearched biography of Mao Ze Dong that the Chinese leader was never interested inthe welfare of the peasantry. Rather, what consumed him was gaining and holdingpower, largely through terror. His ‘superpower’ program in the 1950s, for example, wasaimed at making China the military equal of the United States and the Soviet Union.18

To pay for the cost of militarization, Mao Ze Dong starved the peasantry so that foodsurpluses could be sold overseas to pay for arms and aid to China’s third world allies.19



But Mao Ze Dong was dead by 1976 and Sendero’s people’s war deviated from hisstrategy of ‘strangling the cities’ by opening a terrorist campaign in Lima, even as theinsurgency was being defeated in the sierra. By 1990 the capital was plagued by streetcrime because an overworked police force was constantly the target of Sendero assassins.Over 150 police were killed on Lima’s streets by Senderista gunmen. Between SL terrorand hard economic times, Lima, became one of the most dangerous cities in the worldduring the early 1990s. Sendero tried to exploit the turmoil by escalating its terror cam-paign to a climax in mid-July 1992 with a series of bombings in Lima and Callao. Policeand radio stations were targeted as well as military housing. The deadliest of these attackswas a car bombing in the night club district of the exclusive Lima suburb of Miraflores inJuly 1992. Said to have the explosive equivalent of 1800 pounds of dynamite, the ammo-nium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) bomb killed 22 and injured 250. An entire city blockwas leveled with 183 residences, 400 businesses, and 62 parked cars destroyed. Somecommentators noted after the car bombing that this was the first time residents of Lima’saffluent communities had come face to face with the war.

Less than 2 months after the car bomb offensive, when many felt Sendero was winningthe battle for Lima, a special police unit operating in Surco, a posh suburb of Lima,captured Guzman. Peru’s national intelligence police known as DINCOTE conducted anextended campaign of surveillance that finally located Guzman’s hideout. For years hehad been traveling in the trunks of cars, never being seen in public and only issuingcommuniques, so in his own right, he developed a mystique similar to Osama BenLaden. Captured along with Guzman were members of Sendero’s metropolitan committee,and computer files which were invaluable to police. Guzman was quickly tried by amilitary court and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is now incarcerated in aspecially constructed prison at the Callao Naval Base. Guzman was at first defiant in hiscourtroom appearances but relatively quickly he was calling for his Senderista followers tostand down, so negotiations could begin with the government. That Guzman seeminglysurrendered after such a short time in prison deeply divided his followers. Most of themovement’s senior leadership supported their leader and argued the ‘50 year people’swar’ was entering yet another phase. Guzman’s bitter critics, however, argued he wasonly negotiating for better prison conditions. He was also unfavorably compared withNelson Mandela, who suffered long years in South Africa’s Dobbins Island prison withoutever renouncing his ideals.

The hard line government of Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) broke the Sendero’s insur-gency, by giving a free hand to the military and turning a blind eye to human rights’abuses by the armed forces. Oscar Ramırez Duran, known as Comrade Feliciano and theson of a former army general, continued to command Sendero’s increasingly weak resis-tance to the government from bases in the Upper Huallaga Valley drug zone. A wellconceived Government amnesty programs prompted many Senderistas to turn in theirarms and abandon the armed struggle after 1992. Ramırez Duran was captured in midSeptember 1999 and is now imprisoned in the same facility as Guzman.

Sendero now seems to have morphed into a narco-trafficking mode and has little of themystical aspect of the insurgency of the 1980s. But at the same time Sendero Luminosoover the few past years has sought to soften its fierce image among the peasantry. Havethey learned from past mistakes? Only time will tell in this case.

Some well informed commentators feel that Guzman, although still confined in prison,is continuing to direct a very low key political campaign in Peru’s universities and Lima’sbarriadas. It is very possible that Sendero took advantage of a window of relative militaryinactivity against the insurgency during the first half decade of the new century. These



were the years of information gathering by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee,charged with bringing accountability for human rights abuses during the Sendero war.The armed forces culpability for a large share of the death toll thus has been closelyexamined. Now, Sendero’s continuing operations in the Ene-Upper Rimac-Apurimacriver valleys in an area known as the VRAE in south-central Peru have served twopurposes. By maintaining contact with coca producers, Sendero has secured a continuingsource of funding for its operations in Peru. Second, Sendero’s armed columns in theregion provide legitimacy to its claim that it was never really defeated by the Peru’s secu-rity forces. As evidence of this, a Senderista column ambushed an army motorized patrolin April 2009 using a roadside bomb, grenades, and AK-47 rifle fire to kill 13 soldiers inthe VRAE. In brief, revolutionary fighters in the field give urban revolutionaries andintellectuals the hope of a two front war against the government should conditionsprompt it.20 But hope is often far from reality and the continued presence of Sendero inPeru’s remote regions is not really surprising. Colombia’s FARC (Revolutionary ArmedForces of Colombia) has continued operations for decades fueled by cocaine financingand protected by the nation’s rugged geography.

As noted earlier, Sendero, however, appears to be changing its approach to thepeasantry. In a recent incursion at the Pukatoro mining camp in Ayacucho province, aSendero column dressed in black and wearing body armor addressed the miners assuringthem that ‘they were not going to commit the same acts of violence like they did in thepast’. Nevertheless, the army is seeking to establish two or three new firebases in theVRAE. Alan Garcıa government’s effort to eradicate Sendero Luminoso once and for allhas proven more difficult than planned. This will not be an easy task. The areas whereSendero operates are so remote and rugged that even helicopter operations are often notfeasible. Sendero is now in another ‘dwarf star’ phase where the very small size andsecrecy of operations may be its greatest strength. But what of its present ideology? Thisis the most pertinent question of all. If Sendero was truly never an advocate for the peas-antry but rather hybrid Maoists who lacked the patience and idealism for a protractedarm struggle, then are the Sendero fighters in the VRAE the last remnants of largelydefeated insurgency? Or are they simply drug traffickers by just another name? Peru’srobust economy of the last 8 years has muted the appeal of radical groups. But the eco-nomic situation will likely worsen as a result of the recent financial crisis in the UnitedStates and Europe. Peru’s government estimates the Sendero cadres operating in theVRAE to total no more than 500 fighters. Still, the insurgency has maintained apresence in Peru for nearly three decades, and so long as a cocaine-based economycontinues to exist in central Peru, it will be difficult to eliminate the insurgency withsuch a violent ideologically twisted past.

Short Biography

Daniel Masterson is a professor of Latin American history and Immigration Studies at theUS Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Over the past three decades his work hasfocused on Latin American militarism, Asia migration to Latin America, revolutionarypolitics, terrorism, counter-insurgency, race, and ethnicity. His most recent books are:Fuerza Armada y Sociedad en el Peru Moderno (Lima, 2001), The Japanese in Latin America,with Sayaka Funada Classen (Urbana, Illinois, 2004), and The History of Peru (Westport,CT, 2009). Masterson is now turning to the study of Irish revolutionary politics andnationalism and is in the process of research and writing a book with his brother Donaldto be titled The Black and Tans in Irish Memory.



Notes

* Correspondence: 107 Maryland Avenue, Sampson Hall, Rm 362, Annapolis, 21402, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 Sendero Luminoso began its effective organizing in the late 1960s after its leader returned from China. But thelong-term roots of peasant mobilization in the Ayacucho region can be traced to the so-called Tawantinsuyumovement of the 1920s. Recalling the strength and power of the Inca Empire, this movement sought to rallyAndean peasants against the unjust landholding structures and the continued marginalization of the regions’campesinos (peasants). One particular point of major contention was the so-called Conscripion Vial or draft labor for roadbuilding. Guzman Reynoso also stated that the failure of the APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance),party’s leadership to support the mutiny of naval enlisted personnel during the October 1948 Callao Naval Revolt,convinced him that the established Leftist parties in Peru had lost all legitimacy. Therefore, Guzman concluded thatonly intense revolutionary violence could succeed in achieving revolutionary victory in Peru. For a concise analysis ofPeruvian history, see Daniel M. Masterson, The History of Peru (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009).2 The APRA party was formed in the 1920s as an anti-imperialist alliance and was outlawed for most of the periodbefore the end of World War II. Thereafter, Haya de la Torre took the party to the right using anti-communism asits main political ideology. APRA’s shift to the right provided an avenue for Sendero Luminoso to dominate Peru’sradical politics after the 1970s.3 APRA’s leader Vıctor Raul Haya de la Torre in a calculated quest for political power moved the party increas-ingly to the right after the 1940s. The party still maintained an important labor base after that but many of its mostmilitant supporters abandoned the party. Some became active rural guerilla leaders during the 1960s.4 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005), 458–69.5 Gustavo Gorriti, ‘The Quota’, in Orin Starn, Carlos Ivan DeGregori and Robin Kirk (eds.), The Peru Reader:History, Culture and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 319.6 Many of the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge fighters were in the early to mid-teens, an age when they were veryimpressionable. Interestingly, the SL’s young cadres posed real problems for the Peruvian military efforts to infiltratetheir ranks. One military intelligence officer commented that it is highly unlikely that we could put a 15-year-oldintelligence operative into SL’s ranks.7 Personal interview with an armed force officer who commanded units in Ayacucho in 1983 and 1988; Lima,Peru, May 11, 1990.8 Personal interview with a former Peruvian Marine; June 18, 2005.9 The Upper Huallaga Valley is located in the Department of Huanaco, in the province of Tingo Marıa in centralPeru. This is one of the primary rivers in the Amazon watershed. The valley’s climate and soil are ideal for cocaproduction. It is also remote and its geography makes government anti-narcotics operations very difficult.10 Personal interview with a former Peruvian Marine; December 18, 2008.11 Marıa Elena Moyano, The Autobiography of Marıa Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activitist(Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2000).12 Mary Jo Burt, ‘Shining Path and the ‘‘Decisive Battle in Lima’s Barriadas: The Case of Villa El Salvador’’ ’, inSteve J. Stern (ed.), Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham: Duke Univesity Press,1998), 267–306.13 Orin Starn, ‘Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in the South Central Andes’, in Stern (ed.), Shiningand Other Paths, 229.14 Daniel M. Masterson, Militarism and Politics in Latin America: Peru from Sanchez Cerro to Sendero Luminoso(Westport, CT, 1991), 210–16.15 For an excellent retrospective on the ‘lessons’ of counterinsurgency warfare by a former French soldier whofought in Algeria see David Gulula, Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964).16 Ponciano del Pino, ‘Peasants at War’, in Orin Starn et al. (eds.), The Peru Reader: History, Culture and Politics(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 379–81.17 Ibid., 380.18 Mao’s government requisitioned large amounts of rice and other foods from China’s villages for export to pay forweapons. At one point Mao told his inner circle to prepare for deaths from starvation in 100,000 Chinese villages.19 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 393.20 This was the largest toll of armed forces casualties since the height the Sendero campaign in the early 1990s.

Bibliography

Chang, Jung, and Halliday, Jon, Mao: The Untold Story (New York: Knopf, 2005).Davies, Thomas Jr, and Villanueva Valencia, Victor (eds.), 300 Documentos para la historia del APRA (Lima: Editorial

Horizonte, 1978).



Guzman Reynoso, Abimael, El Diaro Interview, with Luis Arce Borja, 1988.Guzman Reynoso, Abimael, with Yparrguirre, Elena, De Puno y letra (Lima: n.p., 2009).Masterson, Daniel M., Miltiarism and Politics in Latin America: Peru from Sanchez Cerro to Sendero Luminoso (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1991).Moyano, Marıa Elena, The Autobiography of Marıa Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activist (Gainesville:

University of Florida Press, 2000).Noel Moral, Roberto C., Ayacucho: Tesimonio de un soldado (Lima: PUBLINOR, 1989).Palmer, David Scott, The Shining Path of Peru (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).Peru, Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion, 2003 (numerous website versions).Starn, Orin, with De Gregori Carlos Ivan, and Kirk, Robin (eds.), The Peru Reader: History, Culture and Politics

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).Starn, Orin, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).Villanueva Valencia, Victor, La sublevacion Aprista del 48: Tragedia de un pueblo y un partido (Lima: Editorial Millas

Batres, 1973).



Documents

Daniel Masterson - The Devolution of Peru's Sendero Luminoso: From Hybrid Maoists to Narco-Traffickers?