Peru, 20 Years of Terror (1980 - 2000)

Perhaps it is not widely known that Peru is just coming out of 20 years of terrible violence; some may have heard of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) Guerillas, but are not aware of the full extent of the years of terror & violence they have inflicted on the Peruvian People.

We did not know ourselves until we reached Casa Marcelino and we were told the extent of the work that the charity gets involved in, the background of the projects. An important part is the work they do for Human Rights. They have Human Rights lawyers acting to fight the individual cases of Human Right breaches within the local community. Another very important area is their involvement in the "Para Que No Se Repita" (So that it is not Repeated) movement active throughout Peru. The movement aims to educate the population, especially the poor and cut off communities, about the 20 years of violence their country has endured.

69,280 people are dead or are still missing...

With the awareness of what happened and how the Shining Path became the horror they were, the hope is that with education of the events a tragedy like this cannot happen again.

The 20 Years of Terror

• 1968, Military Revolutionary Government took over Peru and introduced widescale land reforms to reverse white dominancy.
  


• The Shining Path were formed in the late 1960s by former university philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, whose teachings created the foundation for its militant Maoist doctrine. It was an offshoot of the Communist Party of Peru of the time.
  


• Peru's military government allowed elections for the first time in a dozen years in 1980, Shining Path was one of the few leftist political groups that declined to take part. They thought that the left parties involved in the elections were abandoning their principles. Instead they opted to launch a guerrilla war in the highlands of the province of Ayacucho.







• Shining Path grew in both the territory controlled and the number of militants in its organisation, particularly in the Andean highlands. Support from local peasants grew by providing "popular justice". The Shining Path beat and killed widely disliked figures in the countryside, often executed cattle rustlers, killed managers of the state-controlled farming collectives and well-to-do merchants. These actions caused the peasantry of many Peruvian villages to express some sympathy for the Shining Path, especially in the impoverished and neglected regions.

Many mourners at a Shining Path members funeral

• In 1981 terrorism attacks intensified. The government orders the military to restore order. 1982 state of emergency is declared. Army take control of Ayacucho. The military used this power extremely heavy-handedly, arresting scores of innocent people, at times subjecting them to torture and rape. In several massacres, the military wiped out entire villages. Military personnel took to wearing black ski-masks to hide their identity as they committed these crimes. The Shining Path start wearing civilian clothes to blend in with the rural communities. The Military torture the poor for information. Slaughter and disapperances are widespread in the rural communities with attrocities on both sides, the poor are stuck in the middle. Lima tolerates this brutality from a distance.








Sendero Luminoso poster celebrating 5 years at war

• Shining Path's attacks were not limited to the countryside. It mounted attacks against the infrastructure in Lima, killing civilians in the process. In June 1985 it again blew up electricity transmission towers in Lima, producing a blackout, and detonated car bombs near the government palace and the justice palace. In one of its last attacks in Lima in 1992, the group detonated a powerful bomb in the upscale district of Miraflores in Lima, killing more than 20 people and destroying several buildings. Poeple take to the streets to protest the government´s handling of the situation.

• Shining Path also engaged in armed conflicts with Peru's other major guerrilla group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). They differed from the Shining Path by a more "Robin Hood" approach, robbing the rich to give to the poor. They acted more in the urban environment targeting the police, army and the rich powerful members of society in cities like Lima. Their aim was to combat the uneven distribution of wealth and government. They killed very few people in comaprision with the Shining Path, but added to the feeling of terror in the country. They also made alliances with drug producers in the lowland jungle regions late in their campaign.

• Shining Path has been frequently participated in particularly brutal methods of killing of its victims. The Shining Path explicitly rejected the very idea of human rights. They held the belief that an indiviuals human life held no value, only the overall cause; any losses of life were completely tolerable, part of the "war". A Shining Path document stated:
  We do not ascribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights. "Human rights" don't exist except for the bourgeoisie man...

• While Shining Path quickly seized control of large areas of Peru, it soon faced serious problems. Shining Path's Maoism was never popular. It never had the support of the majority of the Peruvian people, and quickly lost almost all sympathy that it once had. Many peasants were unhappy with its rule because of its disrespect for indigenous culture and institutions, the brutality of its "popular trials" that sometimes included "slitting throats, strangulation, stoning, and burning", and also for its policy of closing small and rural markets in order to end small-scale capitalism and to starve Lima.

Maoist slogans painted in universities and schools by the Shining Path

• Faced with a hostile population, the guerrilla war began to falter. In some areas, peasants formed anti-Shining Path patrols, called rondas. They were generally poorly-equipped despite donations of guns from the armed forces. In March 1983, rondas brutally killed Olegario Curitomay, one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot him.

• As a response, in April, Shining Path entered the province of Huancasancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, Muylacruz and Lucanamarca and killed 69 people, many of whom were children including one who was only six months old. This was the first massacre by Shining Path of the peasant community. Other incidents followed, such as the one in Hauyllo, Tambo District, La Mar Province, Ayacucho Department. In that community, Shining Path killed 47 peasants, including 14 children aged between four and fifteen.

• In 1991, new President Fujimori issued a law that gave the rondas a legal status. They were officially armed, usually with 12-gauge shotguns, and trained by the Peruvian Army.
  The Peruvian government also dispatched the army to areas dominated by Shining Path, especially Ayacucho, to fight the rebels. Initial government efforts to fight Shining Path were not very effective or promising. Again military units engaged in many human rights violations, which caused Shining Path to appear in the eyes of many as the lesser of two evils. They used excessive force and killed many innocent civilians. Government forces destroyed villages and killed campesinos suspected of supporting Shining Path.

• On September 12, 1992, Peruvian police captured Guzmán and several Shining Path leaders. Shortly after the raid, most of the remaining Shining Path leadership fell as well. At the same time, Shining Path suffered embarrassing military defeats to self-defense organizations comprised of rural campesinos — supposedly its social base. When Guzmán called for peace talks, the organization fractured into splinter groups, with some Shining Path members in favor of such talks and others opposed. Guzmán's role as the leader of Shining Path was taken over by Óscar Ramírez, who himself was captured by Peruvian authorities in 1999. After Ramírez's capture, the group splintered, guerrilla activity diminished sharply.

Guzmán

• In 2002 the government set up The Commision for Truth and Reconcilation. Its aim was to investigate all the attrocites that had occurred over the years, and to discover what had happened to the thousands of people still missing. They made a list of all the people killed in each of the events to recognise the families' losses and to quantify the deaths. Payments could then be made to each family.
  

• Although the organization's numbers had lessened by 2003, a militant faction of Shining Path called Proseguir (or "Onward") continued to be active. The government claims that Proseguir is operating in alliance with drug traffickers.
  On June 9, 2003, a Shining Path group attacked a camp in Ayacucho and took 68 employees of the Argentinian company Techint and three police guards as hostages. The terrorists asked for a sizable ransom to free the hostages. Two days later, after a rapid military response, the terrorists abandoned the hostages. According to rumour, the company paid the ransom. In 2003, the Peruvian National Police broke up several Shining Path training camps and captured many members and leaders. It also freed about 100 indigenous people held in virtual slavery. By late October 2003 there were 96 terrorist incidents in Peru, projecting a 15% decrease from the 134 kidnappings and armed attacks in 2002.
  
  



Video footage from 2002



• Despite arrests of leading members, Shining Path continues to exist in Peru. On December 22, 2005, Shining Path ambushed a police patrol in the Huánuco region, killing eight. Later that day they wounded an additional two police officers. On February 19, 2006, the Peruvian police killed Héctor Aponte, who was believed to be the commander responsible for the killing of the policemen. In December 2006, Peruvian troops were sent to counter renewed guerrilla activity and, according to high level government officials, Shining Path's strength has reached an estimated 300 members. The return of President Alan García to office brings up his previous inability to clamp down on Shining Path just as many guerillas complete their prison sentences and their power continues to grow...

The truth must be known, diseminated to the people and not allowed to fade into the past, otherwise there is the risk that history may repeat itself.