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Communist Party of Peru Partido Comunista del Perú | |
|---|---|
 Flag of the PCP | |
| Abbreviation | PCP |
| Founder | Abimael Guzmán |
| Founded | 1969 |
| Split from | Peruvian Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) |
| Succeeded by | Militarized Communist Party of Peru |
| Political orientation | Maoism Gonzalo Thought Anti-revisionism Terrorism |
| Political position | Ultra-left |
| International affiliation | Revolutionary Internationalist Movement International Communist League (since 2023) |
| Slogan | ¡Viva la Guerra Popular! ¡Guerra Popular hasta el comunismo! ("Long live the People's War! People's War until communism!") |
| Part of a series on |
| Maoism |
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The Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (PCP-SL),[a] more commonly known as the Shining Path, is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party and guerrilla organization in Peru founded by Abimael Guzmán[b] in 1969 after an organizational split with the Communist Party of Peru – Red Flag.
The party organized its own militia, the People's Guerrilla Army and claimed to have begun a protracted people's war against the bourgeois government of Peru since 1980, with the intention of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.[1] Throughout its period of highest activity, the party frequently engaged in terrorist tactics, and has committed brutal and violent attacks on peasants, including children.[2] The class composition of the party consisted in mostly petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and the growth of the party was closely linked with student movements in universities.[3]
The PCP rejected all socialist states at their time, labeling them as revisionist and as having restored capitalism. The party based its ideology of "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism" around the figure of Mao Zedong and Guzmán, which they claimed to be a "higher stage of Marxism".[1]
The party has received extensive criticism for the large centralization of its leadership,[4] and crimes against peasants it committed during its People's War against the Peruvian corporate-military dictatorship.[5][6]
History[edit | edit source]
The Shining Path began to organize between 1968 and 1970 when Abimael Guzmán and his followers split from the Maoist organization Communist Party of Peru – Red Flag after conflicts between the center and periphery of the party.[7] At the time, Guzmán was a professor of philosophy at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga since 1962 in the city of Ayacucho, then a remote city neglected by the Peruvian state.[8]
During the early 70's, the party began to participate in the student movements of Peru, achieving support in the university Guzmán taught and in the National University of Engineering, but having insignificant support elsewhere.[9] At the time, the Shining Path was building a party apparatus, achieving considerable success in student circles. Party cells and regional committees were established throughout Peru, with a concentration of cadres in Central Sierra and Lima.[10] The party constantly engaged in political campaigns against other organizations of the revolutionary left.[11]
Between 1977 and 1980, the party began to re-structure itself and create a political and military apparatus capable of engaging in armed struggle. As part of this effort, the student cadres, along with urban militants, were withdrawn from universities in 1977 and sent into the countryside in 1978, establishing training camps in a few rural districts.[12] During this period of re-structuring, the party increased its members by attracting members of other revolutionary organizations, and even infiltrating them.[13]
In the early 80's, the party leadership concluded that they were ready to commence armed struggle.[14] In May 1980, while Peru was undergoing its first elections in almost 20 years, Shining Path militants stormed into the place where ballot boxes of a small village were being stored and burned them in public square.[15] The party also began to steal dynamite from mines, and in the following months organized several terrorist attacks, including in a school parade and in a peasant assembly.[16] They also hanged dead dogs in the city of Lima, with a sign written "Deng Xiaoping son of a bitch."[17][18]
The Shining Path believes that a Protracted People's War is a universal military strategy for the international proletariat, and intended to imitate New Democracy and a Cultural Revolution in Peru.[19]
Anti-indigenous acts[edit | edit source]
In the Andean highlands, Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) violently dismissed Quechua and Aymara cultural identity as "feudal backwardness" that had to be destroyed to make way for the proletarian revolution. They actively attacked indigenous community authorities (rondas campesinas) who did not submit to their party line. For Indigenous liberation which demands cultural survival, territorial autonomy, and linguistic sovereignty, a framework that views ethnicity as a mere "secondary contradiction" to be dissolved into a generic peasant-proletariat is structurally antagonistic to Decolonization.[20]
Gonzalo was a mestizo, disconnected from the communities. From the very beginning, the Shining Path used strategies of violence and coercion, which they rationalized as the strategy of "protracted war (guerra prolongada)". In addition to accessing communities via adventure-seeking westernized indigenous youth in schools and weaving its way in the communities through the youth's kinship ties, Shining Path made a show of displaying its coercive abilities to the peasantry. It occupied the place of the traditional Andean boss or patrón, who demanded quota payments (cupos) and settled "accounts in blood" (cuentas de sangre); and took advantage of conflicts between communities and cooperatives. Problems related to production emerged when Shining Path demanded that the peasants plant only for the party and for self-subsistence, and then proceeded to close off peasant fairs and markets. This strategy of conquering and then closing off territories in order to block the flow of agricultural produce and thus asphyxiate the cities, clashed with peasant families' own strategies of reproduction, which took place through the market.[20]
In spite of the idea that the poorest peasants would likely support the Shining Path, it was in the poorest zones, which were at the same time the most "Indian" and "traditional" which Shining Path had the greatest problems. Such communities were governed by the vara system, a traditional governance system led by the varayocc or alcade vara ("keeper of the staff") who personified the community and who assumed their role at an elderly age, having ascended via a community ladder of civic-religious posts or cargos. The replacement of these authorities by young senderista cadres was an affront not only to communal organization, but to the community's whole cosmovision. In fact, this wasn't even feudalist, these were egalitarian indigenous governance structures. Even within the communities that no longer elected varayocc officials but organized communal government according to national legislation, the installation of Shining Path as the new authorities tended to cause problems. For Shining Path, the peasant world appeared one-dimensional, without historical density or social complexity, divided simply into poor, middling, and rich peasants. Shining path would often end up depending on the youth of the middle and upper peasantry, neutralizing or winning over the adults and imposing itself upon, repressing, and finally massacring the poorer peasants (such as the 80 peasants in the community of Lucanamarca, April 1983, which Abimael Guzman himself justified in a communique, saying that the "Central Leadership itself planned the actions and ordered everything", and it was to "restrain them" and "make them understand that we were a hard bone to chew, and that we were ready to do anything, anything"). Above all, it was when Shining Path refused to recognize community authorities that the first overt rebellions occurred. Combined with the fact that, for the Shining Path, violence was seen as a purifying force ("blood baths", "hammer the countryside", "river of blood", "the blood quota"), and its harsh punishments (e.g. a woman punished with 50 lashes and the hair on her head being shaved off because she complained of the bad distribution of harvests), or a man who complained was punished with 50 lashes and a qoro rinri or "mutilated ear"), the result could only be terrifying for indigenous peoples. Shining Path proved so oblivious to reality that it escalated and entrenched community conflicts, stoking civil war.[20]
The substitution of indigenous communal identity with a "total identity" as a Shining Path member also was a fatal incompatibility that mirrored colonial erasure by Churches of centuries past. The peasants did not internalize Shining path ideology. Rather, they displayed "resistant adaptation", in a similar pattern displayed with Churches and drug cartels who saw the Shining Path as their rivals. That is to say, the Shining Path was received as an external or outside influencing force than as something that organically emerging within the hearts of the people. Indeed, the Shining Path had a disdain for Andean culture that mirrors the Church and the drug cartels, but they even went as far as to disdain Andean "folklore" and suppress fiestas. They viewed Andean art and culture like colonizers on a civilizing mission, as mere remnants of a past to leave behind, a reflection of the existence of man under landlord oppression and ignorance. If, as Mao said, the guerrilla army had to move among the masses like a "fish in water," then Shining Path needed not simply the peasants' neutrality or passive assent (the "resistant adaptation"), but their more active support. And it was precisely on this point that Sendero's problems increased. Shining Path's demands increased and they battered the fragile equilibrium of "resistant adaptation" that had prevailed in many places. More and more locals began to repudiate Shining Path, especially in 1989-1990, as national economic crisis coincided with a prolonged drought.[20]
Shining Path however, reacted by increasing violence against the peasantry, and by 1990 found itself entrenched in warfare against them. This passing from pragmatic acceptance, to resistant adaptation, to overt rebellion against the Shining Path constituted the defeat of the Shining Path, a movement who claimed to be for the people. Thus, while in the initial years the Peruvian Armed Forces demolished many communities (Secce, Pucayacu, Accomarca, Umaro, Bellavista, Ccayara), by around 1988 it was the Shining Path's massacres that predominated. Between 1987 and 1992, there were a total of 16 Senderista massacres of 12 or more persons. This pushed peasantry to make pragmatic alliances with the Peruvian Armed Forces, and to identify Shining Path with the devil, the Antichrist, or with the terrible Andean ñakaq or pishtaco.[20]
All of these events contrast starkly with the actual experience of the People's War developed in China, in which Mao and his comrades were warmly received and supported voluntarily.
List of criminal acts[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Eternal Glory to Chairman Gonzalo" (2021-9-25). Tjen Folket Media. Retrieved 2022-10-16.
- ↑ “Sendero have also assassinated peasant members of other revolutionary left Cadres of other organizations groups in the highlands. who disagree with Sendero's rural guerrilla strategy under present circumstances are dennounced 'as agents of the bourgeoisie infiltrated into the workers movement'. According to Sendero it is the rest of the Peruvian left who by their 'parliamentary cretinism' are preventing the In January 1983 masses from flocking to Sendero's banner. they hung dogs from lamp posts in the Lima suburb of Rímac as a sign of their contempt for the Maoist organization Patria Roja and its general secretary Rolando Breña. Patria Roja support the existing Chinese leadership. (p.31)
In one community in Ayacucho (Lucanamarca) 50 of Sendero Luminoso's cadres accompanied by 140 of their peasant supporters are reported to have killed 67 peasants with machetes and spades (p. 39)”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (pp. 31 & 39). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “The growth of Maoist-orientated political organizations has also been assisted by the large expansion in the university population originating from the provinces (many of these students coming from families of artisans, peasants or other petty bourgeois backgrounds). In Maoism these students found simple and clear explanations for the social backwardness and misery that envelopes the highlands through reference to concepts such as 'feudalism', ' dependency' and the like, Mao's easily readable tracts fitting in well with their limited horizons. Given this situation, it is no coincidence that Sendero Luminoso and its brand of politics took deepest root in some of the most backward zones of Andean Peru. Nor is it coincidental that in Latin America, only in the Andean countries has Maoism as a political doctrine dominated student politics in the universities.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (p. 19). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ Peru’s ruling elite unleashes anti-communist tirade after Shining Path leader’s death
- ↑ BJ Murphy (2010-8-1). "The Shining Path Revealed: Behind the Lies & Propaganda" The prison gates are open. Retrieved 2022-10-16.
- ↑ Silvio Rendon (2019). A truth commission did not tell the truth: A rejoinder to Manrique-Vallier and Ball. [PDF] SAGE journals. doi: 10.1177/2053168019840972 [HUB]
- ↑ “By 1966, Guzman and his followers at Huamanga were part of the Maoist Partido Comunista del Peru- Bandera Roja (PCP-BR, Communist Party of Peru-Red Flag). The relationship between center and periphery in the party was an uneasy one, nevertheless, with the withdrawal/expulsion of the "country bumpkins" of Huamanga occurring between 1968 and 1970. It was at this time that the Guzman faction adopted the title of Partido Comunista del Peru en el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui (Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariátegui), known to outsiders as Sendero Luminoso.”
David Scott Palmer (1986). Rebellion in Rural Peru: The Origins and Evolution of Sendero Luminoso. Comparative Politics, vol.18, no. 2. doi: 10.2307/421840 [HUB] - ↑ “The University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, where Abimael Guzmán taught for 12 years, starting in 1962, is located in what was then a remote capital, Ayacucho, connected to the outside world by a one-lane road in the indigenous heartland of the Peruvian sierra.”
David Scott Palmer (2016). Shining Path of Peru: a product of Latin American university radicalism? (p. 7). Journal of Security Studies. [PDF] Ankara: Turkish National Police Academy. - ↑ “At this stage the Sendero Luminoso group were concen- trating their organizational efforts in the student movement, with the Party's name originating from their control of the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario por el Sendero Luminoso Mariátegui de (the 'Revolutionary Student Front for the Shining Path of Mariátegui'). One of its most important bases was the University of Huamanga located in the small sierran town of Ayacucho, where Abimael Guzmán taught philosophy. Other educational establishments where the Frente Estudiantil had support were the Universidad National de Ingenería (National Engineering University - UNI) and the University of San Martin de Porres in Lima. Other important universities in the capital, such as San Marcos and La Católica, were dominated by Patria Roja, Vanguardia Revolucionaria and other left-wing organizations between 1970 and 1979, with Sendero Luminoso having but a relatively insignificant presence.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (p. 9). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “The first phase of Sendero Luminoso's existence covered the years 1970 to 1977. During this period they began to construct a party apparatus, achieving a surprising ; degree of success, especially in student circles. Cells were formed throughout Peru, as were regional committees:, with the main concentration of cadres (then and now) being found in the Central Sierra and Lima. Quickly gaining a reputa- tion as extreme dogmatists, Sendero's members were regarded somewhat dismissively by the other revolutionary left groups as 'nutters'.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (pp. 9-10). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “For its part, Sendero launched vilification campaigns against the rest of the revolutionary left that were so intense that they even surprised many activists with long experience of working in a political environment not noted for gentlemanly behaviour.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (p. 10). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “The second phase in Sendero Luminoso's development began in 1977 and lasted until early 1980. Those cadres who were deemed responsible for the organization's over-attention to purely educational matters and its failure to become involved in practical politics between 1970 and 1977, were censored ( they were mostly to be found in the Lima section of the Party), and the new central task was declared to be 'reconstructing the Party'. In effect this meant the creation of a political and military apparatus that would be Capable of waging armed struggle. By late 1976 Sendero Luminoso had increased its influence in the student movement, especially in the Central Andes and Lima. As part of this policy of 'reconstructing the Party', a majority of these student cadres were withdrawn from the universities in 1977 and 1978 and sent into the countryside. So too were a number of the non-student activists who lived in urban areas. Training camps were established in certain rural districts (such as the puna around Julcamarca in Ayacucho)”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (pp. 10-11). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “The years 1977 to 1980 are characterized by the careful contruction of a national organization (but still with a significant majority of the membership located in the Central Sierra and Lima). This process was aided by attracting members from other left groups. In 1976 a split occurred in Vanguardia Revolucionaria, with approximately 25 to 10% of the organization leaving to establish a new party called Vanguardia Revolucionaria – Proletaria Comunista (VR-PC). [...] VR-PC adopted an ultra-left position with respect to the 1978 Constituent Assembly elections, failing to participate on the same grounds as Sendero, but only to undertake later an abrupt volte-face in 1979-1980. This, in additon to other rather strange positions taken up by the organization in these years, created a high degree of confusion and disenchantment among YR-PC's membership. Into this situation stepped Sendero Luminoso, infiltrating VR-PC in 1978 and later leaving, taking with them many of V8-PC's cadres, including several of their most important and experienced peasant militants in 1979 (e.g. Felix Calderón from Cajamarca, among others). Similarly, in 1979 the Puka LLacta (Tierra Raja in Quechua) faction broke off from Patria Raja to join Sendero Luminoso. Puka LLacta's membership in the main consisted of miners in the departments of Junín and Pasco.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (p. 11). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “As a result of natural growth and defections from other left organizations, during the first months of 1980 Sendero's leaders arrived at the conclusion that the Party apparatus had been sufficiently 'reconstructed'. Having reached this decision, given the logic in which they were caught up, they then proceeded to commence the armed struggle. This, the third phase in Sendero Luminoso's trajectory, was launched on 18 May 1980 with actions synchronized to coincide with the general election of that month.”
Lewis Taylor (1983). Maoism in the Andes: Sendero Luminoso and the contemporary guerrilla movement in Peru (p. 12). Liverpool: University of Liverpool. [LG] - ↑ “The night of 17 May 1980, in the small village of Chuschi in Ayacucho, a group of young people burst into the place where ballot boxes and voting lists were being stored for the national elections taking place the following day, and burned them in the public square. The news was published a few days later in some newspaper, lost among the avalanche of information about the first presidential elections to take place in Peru in seven teen years.”
Carlos Iván Degregori (2012). How difficult it is to be God: Shining Path’s politics of war in Peru, 1980–1999 (p. 21). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. [LG] - ↑ “In the following months, as the press reported the theft of dynamite in some mines, isolated petards started to explode in unlikely places: the tomb of General Velasco in Lima; a school parade in Ayacucho; a peasant assembly in the same city. [...] The government as well as other political forces, including the parties that made up the United Left, downplayed the importance of these events.”
Carlos Iván Degregori (2012). How difficult it is to be God: Shining Path’s politics of war in Peru, 1980–1999 (p. 21). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. [LG] - ↑ “The situation acquired touches of sinister folklore when toward the end of the year, early rising limeños (residents of Lima) found dogs hanging from traffic lights with a sign around their neck that read: “Deng Xiaoping son of a bitch.””
Carlos Iván Degregori (2012). How difficult it is to be God: Shining Path’s politics of war in Peru, 1980–1999 (p. 21). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. [LG] - ↑ 18.0 18.1 Deng's Dogs
- ↑ "General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru". Retrieved 2022-10-17.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 Degregori, C. I. (1996). Shining and other paths: War and society in Peru: 'Harvesting storms: Peasant rondas and the defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho' (pp. 128–157). Duke University Press.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 The Shining Path of Peru
- ↑ April 3, 1983 | Massacre of peasants in Peru
- ↑ The Shining Path controversies that spurred Peru’s gov’t shake-up
- ↑ Interview with Chairman Gonzalo
- ↑ Three dead, homes and school damaged in rebel attack