LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 1

      “Ayacucho Is the Cradle”

      The blood of the people has a rich perfume,

      It smells of jasmine, violets, geraniums and daisies,

      Of gunpowder and dynamite!

      Carajo! Of gunpowder and dynamite!

      —Refrain from “Flor de Retama,” the unofficial anthem of Shining Path

      IN QUECHUA PEOPLE refer to the internal armed conflict as the sasachakuy tiempo (difficult time). The political violence is bracketed as a finite period in which normal moral codes were suspended, people engaged in the previously unimaginable, and many individuals grew strange unto themselves. It was a time most people fervently hope will never happen again.

      The sasachakuy tiempo began when the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) launched the armed phase of its revolution in 1980 with an attack on the Andean village of Chuschi. Militants burned the ballot boxes on the very day Peruvians were voting for the first civilian president in twelve years—and on the day that many campesinos (peasants) were voting for the first time since the 1979 Constitution eliminated the literacy requirement that had effectively excluded them from suffrage.

      Founded in the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho by professor Abimael Guzmán, this band of revolutionaries positioned themselves as the vanguard in a revolution to guide the nation toward an imminent communist utopia.¹ Drawing upon Maoist theories of guerrilla warfare, they planned a top-down revolution in which the cadres of Sendero Luminoso would mobilize the peasantry, surround the cities, and strangle the urbanized coast into submission.

      Initially Shining Path was considered a marginal group of fanatics. Espousing antifeudal rhetoric, hanging dead dogs from electrical posts with signs assuring passersby that a similar fate awaited enemies of the revolution—they may have raised a few eyebrows but little alarm. Even intelligence reports submitted to then president Francisco Morales Bermudez (1975–80) gave no indication there were any problems brewing with Sendero. They were wrong.²

      After a twelve-year military regime, the civilian government of President Fernando Belaúnde was voted into power in 1980. Given the recent transition, there was reluctance to summon the armed forces to deal with the insurgents. The new government was hesitant to “knock on the barracks door” just when the armed forces had been sent back to those barracks. Sendero grew, particularly in rural areas, without confronting any coordinated response from the state and did so within the context of a democratic government.

      During the initial period of Sendero’s growth (1980–82), Senderista militants concentrated their efforts on political work rather than armed actions. The cadres were not yet imposing the summary execution of campesinos or inhabitants of popular urban barrios for being spies or “traitors to the revolution.” It was during those years that Sendero launched an assault on the jail in Ayacucho, freed their political prisoners, and drew a crowd of ten thousand mourners to the burial of fallen Senderista militant Edith Lagos. Confronted with the guerrillas’ dramatic display of force, the ill-equipped police withdrew from rural posts located throughout the department of Ayacucho.³

      In the countryside, Shining Path grew in part because it filled the absence of the state. Following the Agrarian Reform (1969–75), no other authority filled the void left by the hacendados (large landholders). The authority that did exist was communal and limited to the jurisdiction of each individual campesino community.⁴ The Senderista cadres began to administer their own brand of justice. In their so-called juicios populares, they utilized physical punishment for common crimes and a bullet to the head or knife across the throat for more serious infractions. The party’s decisions were not open to appeal, thereby imposing an authoritarian order that resolved conflicts lethally—frequently with the rousing support of the campesinos, for whom the elusive search for justice was a feature of daily life.

      The ill-conceived response of the police and the armed forces was another factor that contributed to the growth of Sendero. In their rush to “drain the water and isolate the fish,” the “forces of order” practiced indiscriminate repression and committed serious human rights violations. These abuses generated resentment and a desire for revenge among various sectors of the population, and it was precisely these sentiments that the Senderista cadres channeled to their own ends.

      However, only a simplistic reading would reduce this conflict to a war between the guerrillas and the armed forces. Although the Senderista leadership was composed of university-based provincial elites, the rank and file were peasants. This internal armed conflict was fought among Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces, and the peasants themselves.⁵ Without denying the pressures exerted by the Shining Path cadres as well as the armed forces, the idea of being “caught between two fires” does not help us understand the brutal violence that involved entire pueblos or the fact that there was a “third fire,” comprised of peasants themselves. In the words of many villagers, “we learned to kill our brothers.”

      As late as 1991 there were concerns that Sendero would topple the Peruvian government. However, in September 1992, the Fujimori administration located the leader of Shining Path hiding in a safe house in Lima. The arrest of Abimael Guzmán virtually defeated the guerrilla movement. Although various would-be successors have vied for power, Sendero Luminoso remains an isolated group that has been pushed into the jungles of the coca-growing interior.

      The man credited with “pacifying” the country was former president Alberto Fujimori. Elected in 1990, he campaigned on a platform of ending hyperinflation and defeating the guerrilla movements that had been waging war for a decade.⁶ In fulfilling his promises, Fujimori used draconian measures, including staging a self-coup that shut down a recalcitrant Congress, rewriting the constitution, and dismantling political parties and other institutional intermediaries in the development of his self-described “direct democracy.” Fujimori’s popularity and vast patronage apparatus enabled him to handily win reelection in 1995; however, his authoritarian tendencies increased during his second term. To remain in power, he removed members of the Constitutional Tribunal who blocked his illegal run for a third term and reinterpreted the constitution to allow for the perpetuation of his presidency.

      Following a highly tainted presidential campaign in 2000, Fujimori fled the country, faxing his resignation from Japan. The massive corruption of his two administrations had become increasingly visible. Indeed, visibility was a key component in his downfall and the subsequent political transition. Hundreds of videotapes were discovered showing both Fujimori and his crony, former head of internal intelligence Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing a cast of characters that ranged from congressmen to talk-show hosts to body builders. The corruption charges forced Fujimori from office and provided the political opening for the establishment of the truth commission by interim president Valentín Paniagua in 2001. It was his successor, Alejandro Toledo, who added the word “reconciliation” to the commission’s name and mandate. That mandate was to clarify the facts of and responsibilities for the violence and human rights violations attributable to “terrorist organizations” as well as to agents of the state from 1980 to 2000.

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