From 1977 on, Sendero Luminoso virtually withdrew from work in the university. For the next three years, it concentrated on preparing for guerrilla war. Eugenio Chang Rodriguez has written of this period that the SL “maintained schools for indoctrination, which like other of their enterprises remained hermetically sealed from the eyes of the public. The membership was organized with extreme caution. The loss of Sendero influence in the University of Huamanga was compensated for by the progress in proselytization among the peasantry and the urban and rural poor, members of the Indian communities and workers in the Ayacuchan villages.”[487]
The French journalist Nicole Bonet noted that in this two years of preparation, the “popular schools” of Sendero Luminoso “recruited and indoctrinated several hundred future combatants. For Sendero Luminoso rejected the ‘war of the elite’ or vanguard, and the ‘foco’ theory. … Their war is a ‘popular’ war, prolonged, which must destroy the ‘semi-feudal society led for a half a century by fascist regimes.’”[488]
On April 15, 1980, the PCP Sendero Luminoso held its 6th National Congress, at which “it was announced that the party had been reconstructed and consequently the prewar period was at an end.” Chang Rodriguez noted that “When they had incorporated contingents from the MIR and Political Military Vanguard, Sendero decided that it had the minimum of activists necessary to begin the popular war.”
Among the other organizations established in this period was a party “military school.” A few days after the 6th Congress, Abimail. Guzmán spoke to the graduating class of this school, saying, “This first military school of the party is a closing and an opening. … It closes the times of peace and opens the times of war. The phase of disarmament is ended. Today we begin our war. The phase of disarmament is ended. Today we begin our armed work: to arouse the masses, raise the peasants under the unmatched banners of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought. We close here what has been, we open the future. The key is action, the objective: power.”[489]
Guzmán’s messianic vision of what his party was about to do was reflected in his claim that “we enter into the strategic offensive of the world revolution.” Then, after citing such revolutionary events as the Commune of Paris, the October Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, Guzmán said that “all this great action of centuries has been concentrated here. The promise opens, the future is displayed.”[490] In due time, his followers (and he himself) would label Guzmán “the fourth sword of Marxism,” after Marx, Lenin, and Mao.[491]
On May 18, 1980, the Partido Comunista del Perú Sendero Luminoso launched its guerrilla war. Elections were in progress that day, and the first “military” act of Sendero was to descend on the community of Chuschi near Ayacucho, “breaking into the building where the ballot boxes were kept and burning them in the public plaza.” Although new ballot boxes were soon acquired and the people voted, Carlos Ivan Degregori noted that ”‘Sendero Luminoso’ recognized this event as the of the ‘popular war’ which since then has developed with increasing violence in the country.”[492]
Sendero Luminoso’s “Popular War”
During the dozen years or more following the outbreak of its “popular war,” Sendero was the largest and most important armed revolutionary movement in Latin America. By the late 1980s it had become a serious challenger for control of the country.
Gustavo Gorriti sketched the nature of the Shining Path insurgency in the early 1990s. He wrote, “Among Latin Americas’ revolutionary movements, the Shining Path insurgency stands alone, unrelated to other Latin rebellions, and it does not depend on any foreign country for support. Dispensing the same unconditional hostility to the Chinese, Soviet, Cuban, North Korean and U.S. governments (to name just a few), Shining Path wages revolutionary war according to Maoist People’s War doctrine, preserves its orthodox course through regular Cultural Revolution purging trials, and maintains unity through a personality cult of gigantic proportions.”
Gorriti also commented on the evolution of the Sendero Luminoso rebellion, saying, “Yet the Shining Path insurgency has grown to proportions approached by no other rebellion since Peru became independent in the 1830s. The ragtag guerrillas of the early days, who had no military training and poor weaponry, have been replaced in several parts of the country by battle-hardened, company-size groups armed with machine guns and riflepropelled grenades. … The organization has a well-developed strategy, disciplined cadres, and, of course, Guzmán. It was evident from the beginning that Guzmán was the insurgency’s key protagonist.”[493]
Although professing to be fighting for the peasants, Sendero Luminoso’s rebellion was not a peasant uprising. Tom Marks cited an unnamed U.S. Embassy official as saying that “the heart and soul of the movement remains youth from the disenfranchised, landless, former middle class. Frequently, the youth who join Sendero will have university training and be twenty to twenty-five years old; their parents will often have held land. All the modalities are present in Peru for a popular uprising, but one has not happened. This is not a campesino movement. True, it can recruit from disenfranchised peasants, but at least fifty percent of Shining Path columns come from the middle class whose parents were small landowners.”[494]
In the beginning, the Sendero Luminoso concentrated its insurrectionary efforts in the highlands of Ayacucho and neighboring departments. However, it soon spread outside of that region. An article in the periodical of the international grouping of parties loyal to orthodox Maoism and to the Gang of Four boasted early in 1992: The government has seen its military situation worsen drastically, even from the point of view of its own decrees and statistics. It has been compelled to declare a state of emergency in most of the mountain highlands… the long, fertile river valleys of the eastern foothills and the more populated of the eastern jungle lowlands, many of the short, steep valleys leading west to the Pacific coast… and the entire area around Lima.”[495] In the heavily Indian rural areas, the Sendero at first met with considerable sympathy from the peasants, who saw it attacking people whom they saw as oppressing them. However, the peasants soon began to have their doubts. Perhaps a typical case was the area in and around Chuschi, where the “popular war” had begun. There, according to Billie Jean Isbell, “SL leaders became… the new mestizos and lords, Shining Path had simply transformed the power structure with itself at the top and with the peasant masses, whom it considers in need of leadership and instruction, at the bottom.”
In Chuschi, as elsewhere, it sought to have the peasants avoid “the capitalistic market,” insisted on a kind of morality foreign to the peasants, and outlawed fiestas. When the peasants continued to take goods to market, Sendero Luminoso people took “informers” out of the trucks and killed them on the spot. The Chuschi peasants ended up asking the army to send troops to protect them.[496]
488
Nicole Bonnet,
493
Gustavo Gorriti, in David Scott Palmer, ed.,