Sendero Luminoso in Peru: terror is revolution

The Soviet-Chinese rift in the international communist movement in the 1960s led to the emergence of Maoist communist parties in almost every country in the world, most of which broke away from the communist parties. In a number of places Maoism gained more support than Moscow-backed parties, notably in Peru, where the Maoist movement demonstrated mass appeal and political strength. Within this movement a radical, dogmatic wing emerged which absolutised violence as the only method of political struggle. It was the Peruvian Communist Party Sendero Luminoso (“The Shining Path”) which plunged the country into a decade-long civil war with thousands of victims. In this article the author analyses the ideology and political praxis of the movement, which was a project of militant totalitarian egalitarianism and a left-radical terrorist dictatorship. Sendero Luminoso is an extreme political project, the explanation of which requires not only a political and social but also a psychological approach. The Sendero Luminoso Party grew from a coterie exploring the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1960s into a powerful underground insurgent movement in the 1970s and 1980s, which sometimes managed to successfully resist the Peruvian government with all its apparatus of violence, the army and the police. The tactics of the movement were based on the concept of a “protracted people's war” and the encirclement of the city by the countryside, and in practice on all-out violence, declared to be the main creative force of the revolution. The Maoist idea of “service to the people” and the self-sacrifice of revolutionaries was able to capture significant groups of young people, especially students, who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the cause of the Senderist revolution. Excessive secrecy and rejection of the mass character of the movement made the leadership of the party, led by Abimael Guzmán, invulnerable for many years. The civil war unleashed by the Senderists did indeed bring Peru to the brink of collapse, becoming the starting point of neoliberal political and economic reforms that gained significant public support, explained only by the shock from the left-wing project proposed by the Senderists.