[Reader-list] The life and death of Sendero Luminoso - PRAVEEN SWAMI

[Pawan Durani]

Source : http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/30/stories/2010043062751300.htm


“When the shooting began”, wrote the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas
Llosa, “he thought it was thunder, another storm approaching. But he
saw the sheer terror in the eyes of the creatures closest to him, and
he saw how they went mad, running into each other, falling, getting
into each others' way, blinded and stupefied by panic, unable to
decide whether they should flee to open country or return to the caves
and he saw the first ones whimper and fall, bleeding, their haunches
opened, their bones splintered, their muzzles eyes ears torn apart by
bullets.”

Graceful vicuña, prized for their wool, lay dead all around. “In their
world strategy”, the young guerrilla who had led the killing explained
to their caretaker Pedro Tinoco, “this is the role they've assigned
us: Peruvians raise vicuñas. So their scientists can study them, so
their tourists can take pictures of them. As far as they're concerned,
you're worth less than these animals.”

Four decades ago, Peru's Sendero Luminoso, or “the Shining Path”,
launched an insurgency almost unparalleled in its savagery — the
inspiration for Mr. Llosa's masterpiece, Death in the Andes. Before it
was eventually crushed by a brutal military campaign, seventy thousand
lives were lost; half, Peru's Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación
(Truth and Reconciliation Commission) estimates, at the hands of the
Maoists and a third to government bullets. Sendero began to fall apart
after the 1992 arrest of its leader Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán
Reynoso, but small numbers of insurgents continue to operate in Peru's
jungles. The story of the Maoist group's life and death — and fears of
its possible rebirth — hold lessons for India.

Peru first saw an insurgent movement in 1965, inspired by the uprising
in Cuba. Less than six months on, they suffered a crushing defeat. The
country's military, which deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry in
1968, learned some lessons from the experience and instituted land
reforms.

During the tumult that preceded the 1965 uprising, Peru's communist
party — the Partido Comunista del Peru, or PCP —split. In January
1964, a faction led by Saturnino Paredes set up the PCP- Bandera Roja,
or “Red Flag”. In 1970, Guzmán led a split within the PCP- Bandera
Roja. From the small provincial University of Huamanga, where Guzmán
taught philosophy, the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario por el
Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui (Revolutionary Student Front for the
Shining Path of Mariátegui) slowly spread out.

Sendero launched military operations a decade later, targeting the
police with considerable success. In the summer of 1982, groups of
guerrillas launched simultaneous attacks on police stations at
Vilcashuaman and Luricocha, over a hundred kilometres apart. The
police were forced to withdraw from rural areas of Ayacucho, leaving
Sendero in de-facto control of the countryside. Maoist courts began to
settle disputes and enforce justice — often in a brutal fashion. Like
India, the Maoist ascendency was founded on the state's anaemic
presence in the heartlands. The police, in particular, were poorly
trained, under-resourced and had little usable intelligence.

Many analysts believe the underlying objective of Sendero's strategy
during this period was to precipitate a military coup against the
Belaúnde regime, which held power between 1980 and 1985. Sendero hoped
to precipitate a crisis which would compel the military to depose
Belaúnde — leading to increased repression and an upsurge in peasant
and proletarian militancy. Belaúnde was obliged to declare an
emergency in some of Ayacucho's provinces in October 1981. Hundreds of
federal police were pumped into the area, but with little success.
Later that year, troops were finally flown in to the central sierra —
setting off a decade-long war of attrition.

A Defeat Destined

In a 1982 party document, Desarrollamos la guerra de guerrillas,
Sendero claimed the Peruvian state was “bureaucratic and landlord,
dominated by a dictatorship of feudal landowners and the big
bourgeoisie under the control of imperialism”. Much of Sendero's
conception of Peruvian society drew on Mao Zedong's 1926 Analysis of
the Classes in Chinese Society and Left-wing author Jose Carlos
Mariátegui's popular Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality
published two years later.

Mao's simply-written tracts were profoundly attractive to a new
generation of Maoist leaders emerging from Peru's desperately poor
highlands: first-generation university students from artisan, peasant
and petty-bourgeois backgrounds who were seeking an explanation for
the backwardness and poverty of their people. Peru's complex hierarchy
of race — with white Peruvians at the top and native Andean people at
the bottom — coloured their Marxism. Slogans like necesitamos un
gobierno de Indios (we need a government of Indians) or hay que matar
a los blancos y destruir las ciudades que siempre nos han explotado
(we have to kill the whites and destroy the towns, that have always
exploited us) were just as popular as the work of Ernesto Guevara.

But, as the Cambridge University scholar Lewis Taylor noted in a
perceptive 1983 essay, Sendero's characterisation of Peru as a rural,
pre-industrial society dominated by feudal landlords was “hopelessly
mistaken”. “Feudal landlords”, Mr. Taylor noted, “play no role in
today's Peru, while large-scale landlordism, feudal or otherwise, as
an economic force was decimated by a thorough-going agrarian reform
between 1969 and 1976”. Post-reform Peruvian society, he argued, “was
characterised by an expansion in the ranks of medium-scale farmers and
comparatively well-to-do kulaks, who co-exist alongside vast numbers
of semi-proletarianised minifundists [small farmers] and landless
labourers, ‘feudal' landlords being conspicuous by their absence”.

Even in the backward Ayacucho zone where Sendero flourished, Mr.
Taylor pointed out, “the only people who even remotely merit the title
of large-scale landowners are in no way feudal, being involved in that
most capitalistic of businesses, the cocaine trade. Neither has nearby
Hauncavelica been a zone of great landlord influence, being a
predominantly mining region”.

Put simply, Sendero sought to bring about a peasant revolution in a
country that had ceased to be a peasant society. In 1980, agriculture
contributed just 10 per cent of the Gross National Product and 20 per
cent of the country's exports; some 70 per cent of Peru's citizens
lived in its cities.

Peru's Maoists often adopted tactics that alienated their core
constituency. In August 1982, Sendero destroyed the University of
Huamanga's agricultural experimentation farm and slaughtered livestock
that had been painstakingly acclimatised to the region's harsh
environment. Workers at the farm were told it was an example of
“imperialist domination”, since it was part-funded by western aid.
Electricity generation and transmission systems were frequently
destroyed, telephone networks disrupted and shops and schools burned
down. Factories run by major multinationals such as Bayer and Nestlé
were also targeted. In one bizarre operation, television stations
relaying the finals of the 1982 football World Cup were destroyed — an
action Sendero claimed it took because the sport was exercising a
narcotic effect on the population.

Many groups of the Left had long understood that Sendero was headed
towards a dead end. Between 1977 and 1980, Peru's working class
mounted successful struggles for better working conditions and brought
about a widening of democratic space. Key communist factions
participated in the June 1980 general elections that Sendero had
chosen as an occasion to launch its armed struggle. Even Peru's
peasants increasingly turned against Sendero. In 1983, the
organisation felt obliged to massacre 69 children, women and men in
the village of Lucanamarca in the face of assaults by rural militia
set up to support the military.

By 1992, when a Sendero car-bomb killed 24 and injured 200 in Lima,
the organisation had lost much of its popular base. President Alberto
Fujimori, who had staged a coup that April and dissolved Congress, was
able to unleash the army and private death squads against the group,
capitalising on the outrage.

Regrouping

Despite Sendero's death, there are well-founded concerns that
conditions exist for the organisation to take root again. Ever since
1999 there have been credible reports that the group has tapped the
cocaine trade in the valleys of the Apurimac and Ene rivers — a jungle
region close to its birthplace. Sendero guerrillas have succeeded in
mounting a series of murderous raids against Peru's security forces
despite their numerical weakness. In next-door Colombia, the Maoist
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia) has also used narcotics revenue to recruit new
cadre and build resources.

Peru is not India; but the key narrative elements of Sendero's story
will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the rise of
Maoist power in recent years. Both the government and the Maoists need
to reflect on the horrors that seem, with increasing inevitability, to
lie ahead.