Looking back on Peru’s Shining Path

FORTY YEARS ago this week, on the eve of a presidential election that ended a military dictatorship, five masked intruders set fire to the ballot box in Chuschi, a village in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian Andes. Their action kicked off modern Latin America’s strangest and most brutal guerrilla insurgency, the 12-year terrorist war of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a fundamentalist Maoist outfit akin to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Today, although unexpected death has returned in the form of covid-19, Peru is a vastly better place. But the terror unleashed by Sendero (as Peruvians called the group), often matched by the state’s response, exposed social fractures and left scars. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission later reckoned that 69,000 people were killed or “disappeared”, and around 500,000 were driven from their homes. It blamed Sendero for nearly half of the dead, government forces for around a third and village militias for most of the rest.

Sendero was the creation of Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor who gained control of the university in the colonial city of Huamanga, Ayacucho’s capital, in the 1970s, recruiting students and teachers, especially women. His insurgency’s centre was Ayacucho’s rural hinterland of rutted dirt roads, bleak mountains and lonely villages of Quechua-speaking...

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