The Shining Path Turns to Violence
"The Shining Path Turns to Violence" refers to the emergence and violent actions of the Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist guerrilla group in Peru that began its "people's war" against the government on May 17, 1980. Founded by Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the group drew support from student revolutionaries and impoverished Indian peasants, fueled by economic despair and societal inequities. The Shining Path's early acts of violence included burning election materials and attacking state facilities, which marked the start of a campaign characterized by extreme brutality and revolutionary fervor. The group's ideology promoted violent struggle as a means to achieve a classless society, and it notably integrated women into its ranks on equal footing with men. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the violence escalated, leading to widespread fear and destabilization within Peru, with the government grappling to respond effectively. A significant turning point in the conflict occurred with the election of Alberto Fujimori in 1990, who implemented a strict anti-insurgency campaign. Despite ongoing military actions that resulted in human rights abuses, the government eventually succeeded in diminishing the Shining Path’s influence significantly by the turn of the century, though the legacy of the violence continued to impact Peruvian society.
On this Page
The Shining Path Turns to Violence
The Shining Path Turns to Violence
May 17, 1980, marked the start of a decades-long “people's war” conducted against the government of Peru by Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group. The group had been founded some 10 years earlier by Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, a university professor who brought together student revolutionaries and Indian peasants. In their first violent actions, they burned village ballot boxes and a detested landowner's estate in the countryside and led an attack on a police station in the slums of Lima, the capital city.
Anger over a tottering economy and the rigid stratification of Peruvian society, which had reduced Indian villages to near starvation, fueled the growth of the Shining Path, and by the end of the decade it had several thousand active members. It was strongest among subsistence farmers of the Andean back country but found sympathizers among the urban poor and the children of privilege. Advocating revolutionary peasant communism, the Shining Path exalted violence as the way to a classless paradise. (A favorite anthem urged members to wade through a purifying river of blood.) Unlike most Latin American insurgencies, the Shining Path employed women on an equal level with men in its cadres, and these female terrorists were regarded with especial horror; a police manual spoke of their “aura of unnatural witchy power.” The entire organization was sometimes compared to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge in its ruthlessness and fanaticism.
The Shining Path was not the only group of leftist rebels to operate in Peru. Tupac Amaru, a smaller, more conventional Marxist insurgency on the Cuban model, also carried out terrorist actions starting in 1984 but was seen as a rival rather than an ally by the Shining Path. Both groups began to finance themselves by collecting “taxes” from Andean coca growers and drug dealers, which made them particularly difficult to suppress. By the end of the 1980s, robberies, beatings, arson, kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings had become everyday events in Peru, and the country's civilian government, reinstated in 1980 after 12 years of military rule, had been gravely weakened by costly and largely unavailing efforts to stem the tide of terrorist crime.
In 1990 Alberto Fujimori was elected president on a law-and-order platform and launched an all-out campaign against the insurgency. In his first term he dissolved the legislature, set aside constitutional protections, and assumed quasidictatorial powers. Many hapless peasants were jailed or killed in the course of the antiterrorist campaign, and there were international protests over the military's violations of human rights; nevertheless, Fujimori would be repeatedly reelected. In September 1992 Guzmán Reynoso was captured, and although the Shining Path continued to operate under his successor, Oscar Ramirez Durand, its range was greatly reduced. Most of the leaders of Tupac Amaru were killed in 1997, when Peruvian troops stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima during a hostage crisis, and in 1999 Ramirez Durand was also taken.
By the turn of the century, government action had reduced the ranks of the Shining Path from several thousand to a few hundred; of Tupac Amaru, to less than that; and terrorist incidents, though not unknown, had become infrequent. The death toll from the 20 years of violence following the inauguration of the “people's war” is estimated at 30,000.