The Shining Path a Book in the Series Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução

The Shining Path A Book in the Series Latin America in Translation/en Traducción/em Tradução Sponsored by the Duke—University of North Carolina Joint Program in Latin American Studies The Shining Path A History of the Millenarian War in Peru Gustavo Gorriti Translated, with an introduction, by Robin Kirk With a new preface by the author The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL © 1999 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Originally published in Spanish with the title Sendero: Historia de la guerra milenaria en el Perú (Lima: Editorial Apoyo, 1990). Manufactured in the United States of America Translation of the books in the series Latin America in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução, a collaboration between the Duke—University of North Carolina Joint Program in Latin American Studies and the university presses of Duke and the University of North Carolina, is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gorriti Ellenbogen, Gustavo. [Sendero. English] The Shining Path : a history of the millenarian war in Peru/Gustavo Gorriti ; translated, with an introduction, by Robin Kirk. p. cm.—(Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-2373-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8078-2373-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-4676-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8078-4676-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sendero Luminoso (Guerrilla group) 2. Peru—Politics and government—1968–1980. 3. Peru— Politics and government—1980– 4. Guerrillas—Peru. I. Title. II. Series. F3448.2.G67 1999 98-4360 322′.5′0985—dc21 CIP 10 09 08 07 06 7 6 5 4 3 Ayacucho seems more closely tied to death than life. It has always been a place of battle and death. Revolutions begin in Arequipa—an old Peruvian saying goes—but when they reach Ayacucho they are serious matters. CARLETON BEALS Fire in the Andes, 1934 But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered? G. W. F. HEGEL Reason in History Contents Introduction by Robin Kirk Preface to the English Edition Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations The Arrest 1 Return to Democracy 2 Chuschi 3 Mohammed, Mao, Macbeth 4 Expectations and the Transfer of Power 5 The Vanished Files 6 The Dogs of War 7 Guerrillas 8 The Quota 9 To Capture Weapons and Means 10 New Democracy 11 Tambo 12 The Emergency 13 Illusions 14 A City Dominated: A Blow Is Struck in Ayacucho 15 Let Us Develop the Guerrilla War 16 The Offer of Asylum to Guzmán 17 The Colloquium of the Blind: The Intelligence War 18 The Fall of Vilcashuamán 19 Party Military Thought 20 The Siege of Ayacucho Notes Index Introduction More than one friend who has visited Peru recently has commented on the changes since Gustavo Gorriti first saw The Shining Path in print in 1990. Where once alarm and anxiety reigned, foreign graduate students now eagerly conduct interviews. U.S. chicken chains no longer report bomb attacks. Computers and cell phones and pagers and photocopiers beep and buzz and rattle on limitless current. The financiers who once shunned the former Inca Empire now see gold, literally, in its gorges and riverbeds and figuratively in its unwhitened, unbrightened, unaccessorized, and undeodorized populace. Underneath this skin of giddy globality, though, has everything really changed? To be sure, Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader and a vivid and unsettling presence in these pages, broods on a prison island off Lima. What remains of his army is in a jungle redoubt, capable no longer of remaking society, only killing its weakest sporadically. Many of the villages they and the army razed have reemerged from the rubble. The Shining Path never seized power; a Nisei agronomist named Alberto Fujimori did, and in 1992 filled the vacuum guerrillas labored so hard to create. Yet the poverty, corruption, and institutional rivalries described in The Shining Path continue, as well as those remarkable and rare examples of quiet proficiency and wisdom that Gorriti took such pains to identify for this book. Although Peru, at its worst, tests the limits of what humankind can endure, it also proves, again and again, that once those limits are passed, the story continues, made up in equal parts of character, chance, and odds few in the First World are ever obliged to face. Some of the more memorable individuals Gorriti describes are the police and State Security officials called on to detect and dismantle the incipient insurgency. Among them is Eduardo Ipinze, whom Gorriti describes as a “Latin Elliot Ness,” who, at the outset, “appeared to be the incarnation of the ideal of the modern, honest, and efficient policeman that the country needed.” Appearance was deceptive, as was so often the case in the period covered by The Shining Path, essentially 1979 to Christmas 1982. Ipinze had been corrupted by the largest narcotics ring ever organized in Peru. As damaging to his country, however, was Ipinze’s dedication, as head of the Investigative Police, to annihilating his institutional rivals, not guerrillas. In contrast, José María de la Jara, the first interior minister under Peru’s reestablished democracy and called “Bonbon” for his rotund figure, took seriously his role as “defender of society” and tried, despite fierce opposition from within his own political party, to defuse the ticking bomb of rebellion. More than any interior minister who followed, De la Jara managed to slow the Shining Path. Significantly, his methods were not repression and brutality, but a tenacious support for democracy and the law, feared by guerrillas as well as De la Jara’s enemies within the security forces. But the Bonbon failed. When he resigned, Gorriti writes, any attempt for a “democratic reform of the mechanisms of state security” ended. But the man who dominates this book, inescapably, is Guzmán. Perhaps Gorriti’s most notable achievement is to have so accurately and richly described the fugitive Shining Path leader without ever having met or even glimpsed him. Through a close analysis of Guzmán’s writings, interviews with those who knew this philosophy professor as a member of the San Cristóbal de Huamanga National University faculty, and Shining Path documents and government intelligence analyses, Gorriti draws a full and convincing portrait, no less frightening for being taken essentially from meticulous research, never personal contact. Gorriti introduces us to Guzmán in the first pages of the book, writing of the professor’s brief arrest during a general strike in 1979. But he waits until the chapter called “Mohammed, Mao, Macbeth” to evoke the Guzmán that dominates the rest of The Shining Path. To do it, he depends on the guerrilla leader’s first and perhaps only true love: the political writings that were the bedrock of Shining Path military strategy. Gorriti’s use of these documents is brilliant. To those of us who, like me, are bored quickly with the jargon and historical murk of Communist theory building, these tracts can seem as dry and dusty as an Ayacucho plain. But Gorriti not only places them firmly and convincingly in their Communist and military context, but draws out the human passions at work within the Shining Path and Peru at the moment they were being written and debated. These passions were not, as Gorriti underscores, merely the result of growing pains and the predictable rivalries of any political machine built on the far margin of real power, although these forces were certainly present. Beneath the veneer of pseudoscientific certainty lies a deep faith and a palpable hatred. Guzmán’s task, at the very outset of rebellion, was to stiffen the resolve of his followers to embark upon destruction. Some among them, writes Gorriti, had already been figuratively “beheaded . (but the) realization that the actions they were about to take would irrevocably seal their future acted as a powerful stimulus to uncertainty.” Much had already happened. “Old friendships and long-standing camaraderies had been undone; homes and any hope for a normal life had been abandoned. Nevertheless, all of this journey had only reached the beginning that they now faced. For the Shining Path, this was the meeting on Rooster Island.” On Rooster Island, the conquistador Pizarro had drawn a line in the sand with a sword to separate those who would go on to wrest the Inca Empire from its founders from those who feared quick defeat and death in the mountains frowning on them from the east. Guzmán drew his line with words. The prudent met their political death at his literary hands, much as thousands of Chinese had seen their careers and families extinguished by the dazibaos and public humiliations of the Cultural Revolution, Guzmán’s model. He was relentless in his campaign against those he labeled “revisionists” and champions of the “rightist line in development”—in other words, anyone who questioned him. Those who survived were confirmed as wheels in what he would later call “his killing machine.” With his own ruthlessness against former colleagues and friends, Guzmán demonstrated the true measure of the sacrifice he would ask of his cadres as the price of victory. In the previous century, Abraham Lincoln had called it the “killer arithmetic” necessary to preserve the Union, and only found the men willing to apply it after discarding officers who proved too squeamish.

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