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Abstract
Though it is well understood that all internal upheaval within a polity is a consequence of agency interacting with structure, the importance of the former has perhaps become too pushed to the rear. In reality, as demonstrated by the case of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, even cases which seem most determined by structural factors, in practice remain problematic, absent necessary revolutionary leadership. This leadership in turn, can make mistakes just as it guides successes.
Notes
1. Portions of the discussion in this article have appeared previously in numerous efforts by the author; but see in particular two works co-authored with Thomas A. Marks: “Radical Maoist Insurgents and Terrorist Tactics: Comparing Peru and Nepal,” Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement [now incorporated in Small Wars and Insurgencies] 13, no. 2 (Autumn 2005), 91–116; and “Lessons From Peru,” Counterterrorism 13, no. 2 (2007), 18–25.
2. Numerous works shed light on this phenomenon. Particularly useful is David P. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, rev. ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
3. An overview that illuminates well the structure/voluntarism issue is Jack A. Goldstone, ed., Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
4. David Scott Palmer, “Rebellion in Rural Peru: The Origins and Evolution of Sendero Luminoso,” Comparative Politics 18:2 (January 1986), 142.
5. For background, among others, see Palmer, “Rebellion in Rural Peru,” 127–46.
6. Among others, see Senado del Perú, Comité Especial sobre las Causas de la Violencia y las Alternativas de Pacificación en el Perú, Violencia y pacificación (Lima: DESCO and Comisión Andina de Juristas, 1989).
7. There are a number of excellent studies of this period; one of the best is Cynthia McClintock and Abraham Lowenthal, eds. The Peruvian Experiment Revisited (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
8. Simon Strong, Sendero Luminoso: El movimiento subversivo más letal del mundo (Lima: Peru Reporting, 1992).
9. Particularly good for this period is Gustavo Gorriti, Sendero: Historia de la Guerra milenaria en el Perú (Lima: Editorial Apoyo, 1990). For summary details of Guzmán’s life, see Gustavo Gorriti, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” in David Scott Palmer, ed., Shining Path of Peru, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 149–70.
10. Including author Palmer, who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ayacucho and taught at UNSCH in 1962 and 1963.
11. Palmer, “Rebellion in Rural Peru;” Carlos Iván Degregori, Ayacucho 1969–1979: El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1990).
12. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación Perú, Informe Final: Tomo I: Primera Parte: El proceso, los hechos, las víctimas (Lima: Navarrete, 2003). The complete report covering all aspects of the Commission’s work is contained in nine volumes. Previously, official casualty and disappearance figures had been set at 35,000.
13. Hubert Herring, A History of Latin America (New York: Knopf, 1955), 40.
14. Rock, El radicalismo argentino 1890–1930 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Amorrotu, 1977), Ch. 4.
15. The author recalls a government functionary, a former radical student leader and pupil of his at the University of Huamanga, who said in a conversation some years after graduation, “I’ve already done my part for the cause.”
16. See Daniel C. Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), passim.
17. Jorge Balan, “Latin American Higher Educational Systems in a Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in Latin America’s New Knowledge Economy (New York: International Institute of Education, 2013), xiv.
18. Esteban Morales Dominguez and Gary Prevost, United States-Cuban Relations: A Critical History (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2008), Ch. 2.
19. Rex A. Hudson, Castro’s Americas Department Coordinating Cuba’s Support for Marxist-Leninist Violence in the Americas (Miami: Cuban American National Foundation, 1988).
20. As a concrete example, two or three of the author’s best students at the University of Huamanga were invited to Cuba in 1963, and went. One later became a leading member of the Shining Path.
21. Ibid.
22. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” in David Scott Palmer, ed., Shining Path of Peru, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 154–5.
23. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, Sendero. La historia de la Guerra milenaria en el Perú (Lima: Editorial Apoyo, 1990).
24. The author served as a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader in Peru between 1962 and 1964, and was invited to join the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga faculty as a visiting professor of English and social studies, where he taught in 1962 and 1963 During this time, he shared an office with his colleague Abimael Guzmán Reynoso and interacted regularly with him. Such a first-hand experience contributed to an early article on the university and the challenges of accomplishing its academic goals given the political agenda of Guzmán, as well as ongoing research and writing in an effort to explain Shining Path and its leader’s role over the course of the ‘People’s War’. See David Scott Palmer, “Expulsion from a Peruvian University,” in Robert B Textor, ed Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 243–70.
25. See Fernando Romero Pintado, “New Design for an Old University: San Cristóbal de Huamanga,” Américas (December 1961), 9–16.
26. Palmer, “Expulsion from a Peruvian University,” 244–7.
27. Ibid., 249–53.
28. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, Sendero, 41–7.
29. McClintock, Cynthia, “Theories of Revolution and the Case of Peru,” in Palmer, ed., Shining Path, 234–5.
30. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” 60.
31. Palmer, “Expulsion from a Peruvian University” 255–61.
32. Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, English translation and transcription of his interview in prison after his capture, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), U.S. Government, 1993.
33. Degregori, “The Origins, 52–3.”
34. David Scott Palmer, “Rebellion in Rural Peru: The Origins and Evolution of Sendero Luminoso,” Comparative Politics 18, no. 2 (January 1986), 127–46.
35. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, Sendero.
36. Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” 173–4.
37. Carlos Iván Degregori, Ayacucho 1969–1979.
38. David Scott Palmer, “Rebellion in Rural Peru,” 127–46.
39. Peter F. Klarén, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
40. Most fully developed in Gorriti, Sendero. Also see Cynthia McClintock, “Theories of Revolution and the Case of Peru,” in Palmer, Shining Path, esp. 247–9.
41. Such interpretations come from Guzmán’s own unpublished but privately circulated musings; one published exception is his interview by Luis Arce Borja and Janet Talavera Sánchez, “La entrevista del siglo: El Presidente Gonzalo rompe el silencio,” El Diario, 24 July 1988, 2–48.
42. From interviews and fieldwork by Palmer and Marks in Ayacucho, July 1998, with additional information subsequently provided by one of the military officers interviewed. See also the earlier findings of Thomas A. Marks, “Making Revolution with Shining Path,” Ch. 10 in Palmer, Shining Path, 191–205. Marks had first conducted fieldwork in Ayacucho in summer 1989.
43. Gabriela Tarazona Sevillana, “The Organization of Shining Path,” in Palmer, ed., Shining Path, op.cit., 189–208. Also see David Scott Palmer, “Peru, the Drug Business, and Shining Path: Between Scylla and Charybdis?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 34:3 (1992), 65–88.
44. Detailed in Palmer, “Revolutionary Terrorism.”
45. Among various excellent discussions of this turbulent period, see especially Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
46. David Scott Palmer, “‘Fujipopulism’ and Peru’s Progress,” Current History, 95:598 (February 1996), 70–5.
47. Comisión de Juristas Internacionales, Informe sobre la administración de justicia en el Perú (Washington, DC: International Jurists Commission, 30 November 1993), Typescript.
48. Benedicto Jiménez Bacca, Inicio, desarrollo y ocaso del terrorismo en el Peru (Lima: SANKI, 2000), three volumes, provides a comprehensive summary and analysis. Jiménez was the deputy chief of GEIN.
49. Carlos Tapia, Las Fuerzas Armadas y Sendero Luminoso: Dos estratégias y un final (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1997), esp. 43–55. Also Orin Starn, “Sendero, soldados y ronderos en el Mantaro,” Quehacer 74, November-December 1991, 64–5.
50. Interviews by Palmer and Marks with military personnel in Ayacucho, July 1998.
51. Starn, “Sendero, soldados y ronderos,” 64; Tapia, Las Fuerzas Armadas, 47–8.
52. Lewis Taylor, “La estratégia contrainsurgente: El PCP-SL y la guerra civil en el Perú, 1980–1996,” Debate Agrario, 26, July 1997, 105–6. Based also on Palmer’s observations in Ayacucho rural areas, June-August 1998.
53. Objections were overridden, and in 1991, 10,000 Winchester Model 1300 shotguns were distributed, as well as a larger number of pistols. A 1992 change in the law recognized the people’s right to self-defense. Fieldwork by Palmer and Marks, Ayacucho, July 1998. For an overview of the impact of the rondas campesinas, see Orin Starn, ed., Hablan los ronderos: La Búsqueda por la paz en los Andes, Documento de Trabajo 45 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1993).
54. The force-multiplication effect is evident in the figures for the key departments of Ayacucho and Huancavalica, which together were the area of operations for the army’s 2nd Division. In mid-1998, while the division had but 2,500 of its own personnel, the militiamen, or ronderos, numbered 142,000. This figure, by early 2000, had increased to some 200,000. Field work in Ayacucho by Palmer and Marks, July 1998, and by Palmer, July 2000.
55. David Scott Palmer, “FONCODES y su impacto en la pacificación en el Perú: Observaciones generales y el caso de Ayacucho,” in Concertando para el desarrollo: Lecciones aprendidas del FONCODES en sus estratégias de intervención (Lima: Fondo Nacional de Compensación y Desarrollo Social – FONCODES, 2001), 147–80.
56. As presented in internal documents of FONCODES and in the annual statistical compendium prepared by Richard Webb and Graciela Fernández Baca, Perú en números.
57. The force-multiplication effect is evident in the figures for the key departments of Ayacucho and Huancavalica, which together were the area of operations for the army’s 2nd Division. In mid-1998, while the division had but 2,500 of its own personnel, the militiamen, or ronderos, numbered 142,000. This figure, by early 2000, had increased to some 200,000. Field work in Ayacucho by Palmer and Marks, July 1998, and by Palmer, July 2000.
58. Palmer, “Revolutionary Terrorism,” 301–5.
59. As articulated in his long interview in El Diario.