The EconomistMay 16th 2020 The Americas 272
Bello Looking back on the Shining Path
F
orty yearsago this week, on the eve
of a presidential election that ended a
military dictatorship, five masked in-
truders set fire to the ballot box in Chus-
chi, a village in the Ayacucho region of
the Peruvian Andes. Their action kicked
off modern Latin America’s strangest and
most brutal guerrilla insurgency, the
12-year terrorist war of Sendero Lumi-
noso (Shining Path), a fundamentalist
Maoist outfit akin to Pol Pot’s Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia.
Today, although unexpected death
has returned in the form of covid-19, Peru
is a vastly better place. But the terror
unleashed by Sendero (as Peruvians
called the group), often matched by the
state’s response, exposed social fractures
and left scars. A Truth and Reconciliation
Commission later reckoned that 69,000
people were killed or “disappeared”, and
around 500,000 were driven from their
homes. It blamed Sendero for nearly half
of the dead, government forces for
around a third and village militias for
most of the rest.
Sendero was the creation of Abimael
Guzmán, a philosophy professor who
gained control of the university in the
colonial city of Huamanga, Ayacucho’s
capital, in the 1970s, recruiting students
and teachers, especially women. His
insurgency’s centre was Ayacucho’s rural
hinterland of rutted dirt roads, bleak
mountains and lonely villages of Que-
chua-speaking subsistence farmers.
Sendero would come to be abhorred by
most Peruvians. But its lynchings of
abusive officials and traders in a neglect-
ed region of an unjust country initially
garnered it some popular support.
Bello made half-a-dozen reporting
trips to Ayacucho in those years and
recalls the atmosphere of menace and
grief in a faceless war, often conducted atnight. Villagers soon tired of Sendero. Both
it and the army committed massacres.
Only when the army recognised villagers
as allies, organising them in militias, was
Sendero defeated in its heartland. By then
it had taken its terror and bombings to
Lima. It contributed to and fed on an eco-
nomic collapse.
Mr Guzmán created a bombastic perso-
nality cult, calling himself “President
Gonzalo” and bracketing himself with
Marx, Lenin and Mao as the “fourth sword
of Marxism-Leninism”. He acted with
absolute moral dissonance. He directed
the slaughter from the comfort of rented
houses in posh districts of Lima. When
old-fashioned detective work tracked him
down in 1992, he meekly surrendered. Now
aged 85, he has spent decades in jail. A few
thousand of his supporters lurk in Lima’s
shantytowns.
Alberto Fujimori, who presided over
Sendero’s defeat and the economy’s reviv-
al, used its threat to erect a dictatorship.
Hailed by many as a saviour, and hated by
many others as a corrupt authoritarian, Mr
Fujimori continues to divide. In differentways, both he and Sendero weakened
institutions.
Max Hernández, a psychoanalyst,
argues that despite the Truth Commis-
sion, the country “never carried out the
job of grieving, of trauma relief”. He says
that the war revealed that, after five
centuries of racial mixing, Peru had yet
to bridge the divide between its indige-
nous population and the rest. Three-
quarters of the victims of the war were
Quechua-speaking rural people, treated
with contempt by Mr Guzmán and with
indifference by the state.
In this century a flood of books about
the Sendero years has appeared. In 2015 a
museum of memory opened in Lima.
Based on the work of the Truth Commis-
sion, it is moving and even-handed,
telling the stories of victims on all sides.
It has few visitors. Many Peruvians who
lived through their country’s darkest
recent chapter want to forget.
As for Ayacucho, “terrorism destroyed
everything,” says Carlos Añanyos, whose
family set up a soft-drinks business in
Huamanga in 1988 that is now a multi-
national headquartered in Madrid. The
region’s income per person is still only
two-thirds of the national average. Mr
Añanyos has set up a foundation that,
pre-pandemic, was promoting tourism
in Ayacucho, as well as the region’s pro-
ducts, such as speciality potatoes, natu-
ral colourings and handicrafts.
There are other grounds for hope. Out
of the wreckage of the 1980s Peru created
a successful market economy that
slashed poverty. The racial divide has
blurred, especially among the young.
Economic growth has reached people in
the Andes, thanks to better communica-
tions. Ayacucho means “corner of the
dead” in Quechua. Covid-19 aside, at least
that is no longer true.The battle against murderous Maoist guerrillas changed Peru, for better and worseGoudreau started behaving erratically and
demanding huge payments. He accuses the
opposition of reneging.
Despite that, Mr Goudreau set up camps
in Colombia and began securing weapons
with help from Clíver Alcalá, a former Ven-
ezuelan general. Waiting for guns, recruits
trained with broomsticks. According to
some reports, the American ciaurged Mr
Goudreau to abandon the plan. In March
the United States indicted General Alcalá
(along with Mr Maduro and other regime
members) for drug-trafficking.
The day before his voluntary extradi-tion from Colombia, General Alcalá public-
ly revealed details of the plot, thus ensur-
ing its failure. A rump of the invasion force
went ahead anyway, perhaps enticed by
bounties offered in March by the United
States ($15m for Mr Maduro, $10m for Mr
Cabello). Venezuelan troops awaited them.
Mr Goudreau stayed at home.
The farce is such a godsend to Mr Madu-
ro that many Venezuelans no doubt sus-
pect him of having somehow connived in
it. In other areas, his regime is in trouble.
The price of oil, Venezuela’s main export,
has plunged. Mismanagement, plus Amer-ican sanctions, have led to fuel shortages.
The pandemic has cut remittances from
Venezuelans abroad. (It has also eased fuel
shortages by reducing traffic.)
Thanks to Operation Gideon, the oppo-
sition, fractured at the best of times, is in
no shape to take advantage of Mr Maduro’s
weakness. Moderates may distance them-
selves from Mr Guaidó. International sup-
port may flag. The raid provoked much
mockery, but Carmen, a shopkeeper in Ca-
racas whose three children emigrated last
year, has a wiser response: “This is a trage-
dy without end.” 7