Book Of The Shining Path

First published in Peru in 1990, The Shining Path was immediately hailed as one of the finest works on the insurgency that plagued that nation for over fifteen years. A richly detailed and absorbing account, it covers the dramatic years between the guerrillas' opening attack in 1980 and President Fernando Belaunde's reluctant decision to send in the military to contain the growing rebellion in late 1982. Covering the strategy, actions, successes, and setbacks of both the government and the rebels, the book shows how the tightly organized insurgency forced itself upon an unwilling society just after the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime. One of Peru's most distinguished journalists, Gustavo Gorriti first covered the Shining Path movement for the leading Peruvian newsweekly, Caretas. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and an impressive array of government and Shining Path documents, he weaves his careful research into a vivid portrait of the now-jailed Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman, Belaunde and his generals, and the unfolding drama of the fiercest war fought on Peruvian soil since the Chilean invasion a century before.

A narrative history of the unlikely Maoist rebellion that terrorized Peru even after the fall of global Communism. On May 17, 1980, on the eve of Peru’s presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night, but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and how brave police investigators and journalists brought it to justice, may be the most compelling chapter in modern Latin American history, but the full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as “cold-blooded and bestial,” Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations, and massacres across the cities, countryside, and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzmán, who launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre, and the formidable Elena Iparraguirre, who married Guzmán soon after Augusta’s mysterious death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic ideology, and the military’s bloody response, led to the death of nearly 70,000 Peruvians. Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna’s narrative history of Shining Path is both panoramic and intimate, set against the socioeconomic upheavals of Peru’s rocky transition from military dictatorship to elected democracy. They take readers deep into the heart of the rebellion, and the lives and country it nearly destroyed. We hear the voices of the mountain villagers who organized a fierce rural resistance, and meet the irrepressible black activist María Elena Moyano and the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who each fought to end the bloodshed. Deftly written, The Shining Path is an exquisitely detailed account of a little-remembered war that must never be forgotten.

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement emerged in Peru in the 1980s as the most radical and dogmatic expression of Marxist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Led by a former philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, it developed its militantly orthodox Maoist principles from the mid-196Os onward with a small band of committed supporters, virtually ignored by the outside world. But after more than 20,000 deaths and $20 billion in damage in over a decade of relentless pursuit of the people's war, Sendero is now taken very seriously indeed. This is the first book in English to provide a truly comprehensive view of Shining Path. To do so, it brings together fifteen scholars, journalists, and development workers from Peru, the United States, and Europe who, from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, have studied one facet or another of Sendero. The underlying rationale for this edited study is that Shining Path forms such a distinct phenomenon that no single author can capture the full scope of the movement. Presented together, however, they succeed.

When Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero was a child, the government imprisoned and executed his parents, who were members of Shining Path. In The Surrendered—originally published in Spanish in 2015 and appearing here in English for the first time—Agüero reflects on his parents' militancy and the violence and aftermath of Peru's internal armed conflict. He examines his parents' radicalization, their lives as guerrillas, and his tumultuous childhood, which was spent in fear of being captured or killed, while grappling with the complexities of public memory, ethics and responsibility, human rights, and reconciliation. Much more than a memoir, The Surrendered is a disarming and moving consideration of what forgiveness and justice might mean in the face of hate. This edition includes an editors' introduction, a timeline of the Peruvian conflict, and an extensive interview with the author.

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, Before the Shining Path is the first long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. Heilman reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

The Corner of the Living

Set in modern-day Peru, this is the exciting tale of a young boy who sees the courage of a missionary in the face of the Shining Path. Ages 8-12.

The first comprehensive study of the Shining Path, the Maoist sect of indigenous people who waged a a brutal war in Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s in an attempt to effect a Communist revolution .