Shining Path - Guerrilla War

Guerrilla War

When Peru's military government allowed elections for the first time in a dozen years in 1980, the Shining Path was one of the few leftist political groups that declined to take part. It chose to begin guerrilla war in the highlands of Ayacucho Region. On May 17, 1980, the eve of the presidential elections, it burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi. It was the first "act of war" by the Shining Path. The perpetrators were quickly caught, additional ballots were shipped to Chuschi, the elections proceeded without further incident, and the incident received little attention in the Peruvian press.

Throughout the 1980s, the Shining Path grew in both the territory it controlled and the number of militants in its organization, particularly in the Andean highlands. It gained support from local peasants by filling the political void left by the central government and providing popular justice. This caused the peasantry of many Peruvian villages to express some sympathy for the Shining Path, especially in the impoverished and neglected regions of Ayacucho, Apurímac, and Huancavelica. At times, the civilian population of small neglected towns participated in popular trials, especially when the victims of the trials were widely disliked.

The Shining Path's credibility was helped by the government's initially tepid response to the insurgency. For over a year, the government refused to declare a state of emergency in the region where the Shining Path was operating. The Interior Minister, José María de la Jara, believed the group could be easily defeated through police actions. Additionally, the president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who returned to power in 1980, was reluctant to cede authority to the armed forces, as his first government had ended in a military coup. The result was that the peasants in the areas where the Shining Path was active thought the state was impotent or not interested in their issues.

On December 29, 1981 the government declared an "emergency zone" in the three Andean regions of Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurímac, and granted the military the power to arbitrarily detain any suspicious person. The military abused this power, arresting scores of innocent people, at times subjecting them to torture during interrogation and rape. Police, military forces and members of the Popular Guerrilla Army (Ejército Guerrillero Popular, or EGP) carried out several massacres throughout the conflict. Military personnel took to wearing black ski-masks to hide their identities and protect their safety and that of their families. But the masks were intimidating, and also hid the identities of military personnel as they committed crimes.

In some areas, the military trained peasants and organized them into anti-rebel militias, called rondas. They were generally poorly-equipped, despite being provided arms by the state. The rondas attacked the Shining Path guerrillas. The first such reported attack was in January 1983 near Huata, when ronderos killed 13 senderistas; in February in Sacsamarca. In March 1983, ronderos brutally killed Olegario Curitomay, one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot him.

In response, in April the Shining Path entered the province of Huanca Sancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, Muylacruz and Lucanamarca, where they killed 69 people, in what became known as the Lucanamarca massacre. This was the first time the Shining Path massacred peasants. Similar events followed, such as the ones in Hauyllo, Tambo District. The guerrillas killed 47 peasants, including 14 children aged four to fifteen. Additional massacres by the Shining Path occurred, such as the one in Marcas on August 29, 1985. In addition to occasional massacres, the Shining Path established labor camps to punish those who betrayed the "forces of the people." Those imprisoned were forced to work the lands and the coca fields. Hunger and deprivation were commonplace, and attempting escape was punishable by immediate execution.

The Shining Path's attacks were not limited to the countryside. It mounted attacks against the infrastructure in Lima, killing civilians in the process. In 1983, it sabotaged several electrical transmission towers, causing a citywide blackout, and set fire and destroyed the Bayer industrial plant. That same year, it set off a powerful bomb in the offices of the governing party, Popular Action. Escalating its activities in Lima, in June 1985 it blew up electricity transmission towers in Lima, producing a blackout, and detonated car bombs near the government palace and the justice palace. It was believed to be responsible for bombing a shopping mall. At the time, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was receiving the Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín. In one of its last attacks in Lima, on July 16, 1992, the group detonated a powerful bomb on Tarata Street in the Miraflores District, full of civilian people, adults and children, killing 25 people and injuring an additional 155.

During this period, the Shining Path assassinated specific individuals, notably leaders of other leftist groups, local political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations, some of whom were anti-Shining Path Marxists. On April 24, 1985, in the midst of presidential elections, it tried to assassinate Domingo García Rada, the president of the Peruvian National Electoral Council, severely injuring him and mortally wounding his driver. In 1988, Constantin Gregory, an American citizen working for the United States Agency for International Development, was assassinated. Two French aid workers were killed on December 4 that same year. In August 1991, the group killed one Italian and two Polish priests in Ancash Region. The following February, it assassinated María Elena Moyano, a well-known community organizer in Villa El Salvador, a vast shantytown in Lima.

By 1991, the Shining Path had control of much of the countryside of the center and south of Peru and had a large presence in the outskirts of Lima. As the organization grew in power, a cult of personality grew around Guzmán. The official ideology of the Shining Path ceased to be 'Marxism–Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought', and was instead referred to as 'Marxism–Leninism–Maoism-Gonzalo thought'. The Shining Path fought against Peru's other major guerrilla group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and campesino self-defense groups organized by the Peruvian armed forces.

Although the reliability of reports regarding the Shining Paths alleged atrocities remain a matter of controversy,, the organization's use of violence is well documented. Lisa North, an expert on Peru at York University, noted that "the assassinations they carried out were absolutely ruthless . . . It was so extremist – absolutely, totally doctrinaire and absolutely, totally ruthless in pursuit of its aims."

The Shining Path brutally killed its victims and rejected the idea of human rights. A Shining Path document stated:

We start by not ascribing to either Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Costa Rica, but we have used their legal devices to unmask and denounce the old Peruvian state. . . . For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights. "Human rights" do not exist except for the bourgeois man, a position that was at the forefront of feudalism, like liberty, equality, and fraternity were advanced for the bourgeoisie of the past. But today, since the appearance of the proletariat as an organized class in the Communist Party, with the experience of triumphant revolutions, with the construction of socialism, new democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it has been proven that human rights serve the oppressor class and the exploiters who run the imperialist and landowner-bureaucratic states. Bourgeois states in general. . . . Our position is very clear. We reject and condemn human rights because they are bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, and are today a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally Yankee imperialists.

— Communist Party of Peru, Sobre las Dos Colinas