The Shining Path, by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna
Memories of 1982 in Peru, a year of brutality in the Andes
MGH: My own experiences in Peru in 1982 are recounted below.
Orin Starn & Miguel La Serna wrote:
Chapter Five
First Blood
None of the top senderista leaders came from the oppressed classes themselves. The Central Committee was composed mostly of light-skinned, city-bred people like the party’s ruling triumvirate. Even the one who knew the countryside best, Augusta, held to outdated Maoist caricatures about exploited serfs and evil landlords. A more feudal regime had indeed existed in the mountains as late as the 1960s. Some hacendados owned whole valleys and kept indigenous villagers in semi-indentured servitude. By the 1980s, though, peasant land invasions and Velasco’s 1969 agrarian reform broke up most big estates. Benigno Medina, exploiter? His Ayzarca “estate” barely topped sixty acres. The senderistas tortured Medina to death for belonging to a “feudal oppressor landlord” class that mostly no longer existed in the highlands.
The party’s foot soldiers did largely issue from more humble origins. As was true of Chuschi’s Bernardino Azurza, many fighters had been recruited from San Cristóbal or area high schools. They came from copper-complexioned, Quechua-speaking families: the children of construction workers, tradesmen, and peasants. Becoming revolutionaries allowed these young militants to join a momentous cause in a postcolonial Peru where provincial origins and an Indian-looking face were no passport to advancement. “By joining Abimael’s movement, young people became better than white; they went instantly from the bottom to the top of the social pyramid,” journalist Robin Kirk explains. Having weapons gave new recruits a feeling of power and adventure in the bargain. According to one senderista, they sometimes set off explosions “just for the sake of blowing [something] up.” Nobody seemed to notice how much their glorious party’s organization replicated the hoary colonial hierarchies of the system it intended to destroy. A coterie of leaders from the more privileged Spanish-descended echelons of society gave marching orders to a poor brown army.
Young rebels received training from Augusta and other high-ranking cadre. When they headed to the campo, the countryside, the senderistas could communicate in Quechua with the locals. One peasant described their message:
Laqatam qapisun, llapa autoridadmi tukunqa llapa apum chinkanqa. Manam sallqa runapaq despreciokuna kanqachu. (“The guerrillas and peasants will take the city and all its authorities and the rich will disappear. There will no longer be contempt for the high country peasants.”)
Earlier twentieth-century political movements, as historian Jaymie Heilman notes, failed to remedy the neglect and disdain for Ayacuchan villagers. (That included the populist APRA party, the modernizing Popular Action party, and Velasco’s military government.) Why not give the senderistas a chance? They promised justice for the poor—and seemed so confident in their triumph. Many villagers joined the “furious mob” at Ayzarca on Christmas Eve, according to a newspaper account.
The readiness to take life extended to animals. There had been the lamp post dog hangings, and an assault in 1982 on Huamanga University’s Allpachaka farm, an hour outside Ayacucho. Allpachaka bred improved cattle to make cheese for export, which made it a tool of market capitalism in senderista eyes. According to Antonio Díaz Martínez, a San Cristóbal agronomist and a friend of Abimael, the farm “follow(ed) the Prussian junker road” (a reference to Lenin’s theory about capitalism’s route to supplanting feudalism). The rebels would destroy Allpachaka to hand the land over to peasants.
One day in August 1982, the senderistas descended upon the farm. They plunged knives into the heads and necks of the panicked cattle. “We killed as many as we could,” one young fighter said. Some village women wept at the sight. “Waqcha animalkuna—the poor animals,” they pleaded in Quechua. “Why kill them that way?” At last, the senderista recalled, “we stopped, but we had already killed one-fourth of them, about eighty.” They set fire to the farm buildings before leaving.
The most famous Peruvian writer, still in his early forties, read about the attack. Mario Vargas Llosa had just published a six-hundred-page novel, The War of the End of the World, about a wild-eyed nineteenth-century rebellion in Brazil’s own backcountry. Was something like that now arising in his native Peru? Vargas Llosa based a scene in his later Death in the Andes on the Allpachaka slaughter. He described the cattle going “mad, stampeding, running into each other, falling, getting in each other’s way, blinded and stupefied by panic.”
Few could deny Shining Path’s successes by 1982. By then, the rebels had executed over 1,800 actions between burned municipalities, toppled electrical towers, and raided police stations. They had the police on the run not only in Ayacucho, but in Huancavelica, Andahuaylas, Apurímac, and Junín, the neighboring regions. Their party-run “Popular Committees” governed liberated villages. A war of national liberation, Mao warned, could take decades to wear down the enemy enough to claim victory. The senderistas were advancing much faster than Abimael imagined at the start. After only two years at arms, his fighters controlled a big swath of the Andes.
These successes emboldened Abimael to think big for himself. The highest promise of Communism was equality, and yet, paradoxically, the victory of revolutionaries always resulted in the rule of a single strong man. In Animal Farm, the most famous work of anti-Communist satire, George Orwell portrayed Stalin as the pig Napoleon, and lampooned the justificatory reasoning at work. “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal,” Napoleon’s lieutenant, Squealer, explains to the other farm animals. “He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?” In death, the great Communist leader was laid to rest like a Catholic saint in his own mausoleum. Both Lenin and Mao’s embalmed bodies lie in state even today. Lesser Communist leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, and Albania’s Enver Hoxha enjoyed their own personality cults in life and death.
That Abimael had such ambitions became evident at the party’s Second National Conference in May 1982. The Central Committee and fifty other party members gathered at a Lima house, arriving separately to avoid suspicion. These meetings usually began by everyone standing to sing “The Internationale,” the Communist anthem. “We will become brothers over the conception of the proletariat; over revolutionary violence,” Abimael said in his opening welcome.
“Every party assembly reserved some hours for a balance, a stock-taking to assess the war’s progress. Only a few weeks before, they had mounted a successful assault to free imprisoned comrades from the Ayacucho prison. There were supposed to be simultaneous jailbreaks in Jaén, a jungle town, and several other places. But the Jaén Shining Path commander deemed it too risky. The Ayacucho senderistas went ahead anyway, making a first try on the night of February 28. Their plan broke down when the getaway pickup truck failed to arrive in time. Four senderistas died. Abimael gave the Ayacucho commander, Comrade César, new orders by phone the next day. Do it again, right away. The same plan, the same fighters. At whatever price. The police would not expect a second attack so soon after the first one, Abimael correctly guessed. César and his detachment freed seventy-eight senderistas in less than half an hour, and the escape made national headlines. Two policemen died in the assault. Their fellow officers took revenge the next day by shooting three wounded senderistas in their hospital beds, and, finding a fourth about to go into surgery, ripping out his IV to strangle him with it. The jailbreak and its ugly aftermath forced the resignation of Belaúnde’s interior minister.
Freeing the prisoners had not been enough for Abimael, who faulted César for not succeeding on the first try. “When Comrade César reports,” he said now at the meeting, “he presents himself as the hero, a knight in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress.” In reality, the “failure to annihilate the enemy forces” from the start “betrayed the basic principles of war.” An outgoing college dropout from the southern town of Tacna, César stammered explanations, but others denounced his “vacillation,” forcing the young commander into the expected self-criticism. “I was wrong to disagree with our wise secretary general,” César admitted. He seemed genuinely distraught about failing to meet party expectations.
Then Abimael turned to Comrade Alberto, a Central Committee member and the man who ignored the order to storm the Jaén jail. Alberto claimed there had been no good way to retreat from the town. Abimael accused Alberto of “individualism,” placing personal over party interests. During a break, a few senderistas complained among themselves about Abimael being too harsh. When Abimael discovered this, he grew still more annoyed. It breached discipline to discuss party affairs out of session—and even more to criticize him, the secretary general, behind his back. He called the unhappy Alberto and his defenders to account when the conference readjourned.
“These [comrades],” Abimael said, “have ridiculous body language. They even look upset when you serve them a cup of coffee.”
Facing resistance never surprised Abimael. The correct proletarian line, Mao taught, would always be threatened by dark rightism in its “opportunist,” “revisionist,” and “reactionary” manifestations. Those who fell into counterrevolutionary error had to admit to their mistakes, and, afterwards, prove repentance through self-criticism (and be expelled from the party as a last resort). Abimael moved now to put down the deviationists.
“I’m tired of this!” he said. “[Alberto and his backers] should speak frankly and without antagonism. They should put their hand to their chest and not confuse weakness for fighting resolve.”
“Abimael was only getting going. “The struggle is just and correct and the party, as its organizing body, is even more so.” There could be nothing more holy than the party. “Some people don’t know what the party really is. The reactionaries speak despotically against the party and its Guiding Thought, and four idiots do the same. Our first obligation is defending the party.”
Abimael went a step farther. “I’ve been intentionally patient, [but] no one can deny that the Leadership is what directs the Armed Struggle.” There was no mistaking the message: Abimael was the party. Any dissenter would be branded a rightist opportunist or worse. No one dared to question his leadership again, at least in meetings like this.
“Now Abimael went in for the kill. “They want to go against the secretary general. They think he’s alone,” he said, speaking about himself in the third person. “Is the secretary general alone? The Political Committee is with him. The Political Bureau is with him. Two-thirds of the Central Committee and the party’s left [the truest Communists] are with him.” The dissidents could only bow down before Abimael and his revolutionary stewardship.
The groveling began with Alberto. He vowed to “learn from Comrade Gonzalo” and renounce individualism. Before the war, Abimael had been “Comrade Álvaro,” but he then chose Gonzalo, a German name for “warrior” in etymology. “Learning from Comrade Gonzalo is key. It guarantees the triumph of the Revolution,” Alberto submitted.
His repentant supporters repeated the same nostrums.
Elena Iparraguirre jumped in too.
“I criticize my comrades who have committed errors,” she said. “Our struggle is clear, firm, and correct. We must fulfill our role.” The meeting continued for some time, the criticizing and self-criticizing, without Abimael saying a word. Then he moved on to the next agenda item at last.
“We must never tire,” Abimael said, “of learning and teaching.”
That day heralded Abimael’s elevation to full cult status. Until then, he had been “Comrade Gonzalo,” but from then it would be “Chairman Gonzalo,” the infallible party leader. Their guiding ideology, once “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Thought,” became “Maoist-Leninist-Gonzalo Thought”—or simply “Gonzalo Thought.” …
… He was the great warrior-professor in his coat and glasses. One pamphlet showed a gigantic Abimael—the validating visages of Lenin, Marx, and Mao in the top corner—standing over the globe to plant the flag in Ayacucho. The iconography indicated unsubtly that Chairman Gonzalo was going from the Andes to captaining the Communist movement worldwide.
It remained Abimael’s absolute conviction that the laws of history and reason assured their triumph. “Marxism is an ideology and [also] a science,” he said. In truth, clearly enough, the senderistas had been swept up in the madness of their mounting illusions. Castrating a dead farmer? The quivering cattle carcasses? The invincibility of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Gonzalo Thought?
CHAPTER SIX
The Lynching
… Some men dug a hole to dump the bodies. Everyone recognized, once the atmosphere calmed some, their perilous predicament. How long before Chairman Gonzalo’s wrathful warriors returned for revenge? The Huaychainos knew that no one would come to their rescue, at least any time soon.
“The police, the army didn’t care what happened to us,” Narciso said later.
Feeling alone in the world was nothing new for Huaychainos. “Let me cry through this rain,” pleaded a vicuña, the llama’s wild relative, in a village ballad. Until 1975, the Huaychainos had been serfs, peones, who labored for a big landowner, Juan Juscamaita. The land belonged to them now, but little else—no money, no road, no clean water, and, when drought or blight struck, no food. Few even spoke good Spanish. It was hard to imagine a more unforgiving place than this neglected village at the roof of the world. …
… Narciso was in the fields with the animals.
He saw the senderistas head into the village.
“Long live the armed struggle and Chairman Gonzalo!” they shouted.
Narciso ran home to sound the warning. His father, Isidro, had them bar the door. Then he left to join other villagers down by the chapel. Strangely, even as a toddler, Narciso had never been able to cry. He wanted to now. “I was sure I wouldn’t see my father again,” he recalled.
A few Huaychainos greeted the rebels.
“Yaykukamuy, yaykukamuy—Welcome, welcome!”
One woman brought them some sugary tea.
It was a stalling tactic, allowing villagers time to arrive from their farmhouses. Then they would have the numbers to take on the senderistas as had been pacted at their assembly. At last towards afternoon, Huaychainos and the senderistas gathered in the assembly hall.
The woman leader spoke first.
She was seventeen, but assured and unsmiling.
Comrades,” she said, “the masses led by President Gonzalo will be victorious.” The party would appoint a “Popular Committee” to oversee village affairs in the meantime. “There will be no more thieves, witches, or fathers abandoning their families.”
Santos Quispe, the old man, rose to reply.
“Our village already has its own authorities.”
“You are with the reactionaries,” the young senderista said coldly, “an enemy of the revolution.”
“Remember who you are talking to,” someone replied. “This is our village.”
The Huaychainos were tiny people, really, none taller than 5’4” or so. They lived on little besides boiled potatoes and some shredded mutton and guinea pig. Their calloused hands had a farmer’s dirt under every fingernail. The men wore chullos under their felt hats for extra protection against the cold.
“You’re just suwatakuna, thieves!” one man shouted. “You’re not the real law.”
The senderistas reached for their weapons. They could not permit such defiance. But the Huaychainos pounced first. Several picked up the stones they had been sitting on to fling at the nearest rebel. One villager pinned down the teenaged commander. She was trying to light a bomb, ready to blow up herself and everyone else rather than surrender.
One rebel escaped back into the hills. The Huaychainos dragged the other seven outside to the juez rumi, the “rock of justice,” the place for discipline and punishment. Men tied their scrawny captives to the oblong rock.
The atmosphere turned ugly. It was too much, the harangues, the bomb, the senderista threats. Now men shouted to kill the suwatakuna, the thieves, and others crowded fiercely around the juez rumi.
Not everyone wanted the prisoners to die.
“Killing isn’t easy,” pleaded Juana Cabezas, Narciso’s aunt. “People die hard!”
“Don’t kill them,” said Isidro, his father.
They were a minority.
Other villagers grabbed ropes. They strangled the senderistas one by one between blood, vomit, and screams. “Surely now, they will kill us all!” a woman cried when it was done at last. …
… Several days later, the village delegation returned from Huanta. They brought with them a platoon of the anti-terrorism police, the sinchis. On the way to Huaychao, other Iquichan peasants had come out to meet the commandos, who warily gripped their automatic rifles. The villagers offered potatoes and broad beans, and, even though the sinchis did not understand their Quechua, pled for protection from the tirrukukuna, the terrorists. Once the sinchis arrived in Huaychao, the village leaders made welcoming speeches, then invited the sinchis to eat. They had some men dig up the putrefying corpses of the dead senderistas to show the police after the meal.
The sinchis had killed plenty.
“Well done!” the sinchi commander congratulated the Huaychainos. “That’s the way to defend yourselves.”
But the sinchis left before nightfall. They did not especially want to tangle with the senderistas, and peasant lives did not matter much to them anyway. The villagers would have to find a way to protect themselves.
The Huaychainos had no choice but to keep up their defenses.
Photos in the book
MGH from Social Science Files adds his own memories:
Normally I do not comment on the SSF exhibits but today I make an exception.
For 12 months during 1981-1982 I was an undergraduate student living in Peru, travelling the countryside widely as I researched an honours dissertation on the peasant market economy. I also took classes at the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima, the oldest university in the Americas, where the history professors were old-fashioned liberal-conservatives and the anthropology professors were radical marxists.
I remember the spreading fear, and the day I breakfasted as usual with my elderly Lima landlord (once an APRA politician) while the radio gave us the breaking news about the Dead Dogs hanging from city lamp posts.
I remember the red flags strung on wires across mountain passes during my bus journeys in the Andes, and a sleepless night of incessant machine gun fire in the city of Ayacucho.
I vividly recall the light-skinned well-educated conventional middle class girl from Trujillo who was a social worker and a friend before she suddenly began recruiting for Shining Path.
More positively, I have memories of excitedly attending the landmark conference in Lima where Hernando de Soto, Milton Friedman, and Mario Vargas Llosa debated their developmental ‘Other Path’. I still have the conference brochure in my files.
The diminutive Japanese-descent ‘El Chino’ Fujimori, the president who finally defeated Shinning Path in 1992, was easily reelected in 1995 with enthusiastic support from the poor, most notably the women (the cholas) who attended his awkward Elvis-like rallies.
When I returned in 1996 Fujimori was still regarded positively by a great many ordinary people as a good-humoured hyperactive hands-on laptop-wielding agronomist, and an exceptionally brave (or reckless) non-elite ‘political Outsider’ who, in almost total institutional isolation, attempted to implement market-friendly ‘Other Path’ policies through a thoroughly corrupt legislature, and at least succeeded in restoring peace and order to the countryside.
Today he is serving a 25-year prison sentence, convicted in Peru of human rights violations during the war he won against Shining Path.
Alberto Fujimori, presidential campaign, 1990
The Source:
Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes, W. W. Norton & Company 2019
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.