The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru

Introduction

More than one friend who has visited Peru recently has commented on the changes since Gustavo Gorriti first saw The Shining Path in print in 1990. Where once alarm and anxiety reigned, foreign graduate students now eagerly conduct interviews. U.S. chicken chains no longer report bomb attacks. Computers and cell phones and pagers and photocopiers beep and buzz and rattle on limitless current. The financiers who once shunned the former Inca Empire now see gold, literally, in its gorges and riverbeds and figuratively in its unwhitened, unbrightened, unaccessorized, and undeodorized populace.

Underneath this skin of giddy globality, though, has everything really changed? To be sure, Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader and a vivid and unsettling presence in these pages, broods on a prison island off Lima. What remains of his army is in a jungle redoubt, capable no longer of remaking society, only killing its weakest sporadically. Many of the villages they and the army razed have reemerged from the rubble. The Shining Path never seized power; a Nisei agronomist named Alberto Fujimori did, and in 1992 filled the vacuum guerrillas labored so hard to create.

Yet the poverty, corruption, and institutional rivalries described in The Shining Path continue, as well as those remarkable and rare examples of quiet proficiency and wisdom that Gorriti took such pains to identify for this book. Although Peru, at its worst, tests the limits of what humankind can endure, it also proves, again and again, that once those limits are passed, the story continues, made up in equal parts of character, chance, and odds few in the First World are ever obliged to face.

Some of the more memorable individuals Gorriti describes are the police and State Security officials called on to detect and dismantle the incipient insurgency. Among them is Eduardo Ipinze, whom Gorriti describes as a Latin Elliot Ness, who, at the outset, appeared to be the incarnation of the ideal of the modern, honest, and efficient policeman that the country needed. Appearance was deceptive, as was so often the case in the period covered by The Shining Path, essentially 1979 to Christmas 1982. Ipinze had been corrupted by the largest narcotics ring ever organized in Peru. As damaging to his country, however, was Ipinze’s dedication, as head of the Investigative Police, to annihilating his institutional rivals, not guerrillas.

In contrast, José María de la Jara, the first interior minister under Peru’s reestablished democracy and called Bonbon for his rotund figure, took seriously his role as defender of society and tried, despite fierce opposition from within his own political party, to defuse the ticking bomb of rebellion. More than any interior minister who followed, De la Jara managed to slow the Shining Path. Significantly, his methods were not repression and brutality, but a tenacious support for democracy and the law, feared by guerrillas as well as De la Jara’s enemies within the security forces. But the Bonbon failed. When he resigned, Gorriti writes, any attempt for a democratic reform of the mechanisms of state security ended.

But the man who dominates this book, inescapably, is Guzmán. Perhaps Gorriti’s most notable achievement is to have so accurately and richly described the fugitive Shining Path leader without ever having met or even glimpsed him. Through a close analysis of Guzmán’s writings, interviews with those who knew this philosophy professor as a member of the San Cristóbal de Huamanga National University faculty, and Shining Path documents and government intelligence analyses, Gorriti draws a full and convincing portrait, no less frightening for being taken essentially from meticulous research, never personal contact.

Gorriti introduces us to Guzmán in the first pages of the book, writing of the professor’s brief arrest during a general strike in 1979. But he waits until the chapter called Mohammed, Mao, Macbeth to evoke the Guzmán that dominates the rest of The Shining Path. To do it, he depends on the guerrilla leader’s first and perhaps only true love: the political writings that were the bedrock of Shining Path military strategy. Gorriti’s use of these documents is brilliant. To those of us who, like me, are bored quickly with the jargon and historical murk of Communist theory building, these tracts can seem as dry and dusty as an Ayacucho plain. But Gorriti not only places them firmly and convincingly in their Communist and military context, but draws out the human passions at work within the Shining Path and Peru at the moment they were being written and debated.

These passions were not, as Gorriti underscores, merely the result of growing pains and the predictable rivalries of any political machine built on the far margin of real power, although these forces were certainly present. Beneath the veneer of pseudoscientific certainty lies a deep faith and a palpable hatred. Guzmán’s task, at the very outset of rebellion, was to stiffen the resolve of his followers to embark upon destruction. Some among them, writes Gorriti, had already been figuratively beheaded . . . (but the) realization that the actions they were about to take would irrevocably seal their future acted as a powerful stimulus to uncertainty. Much had already happened. Old friendships and long-standing camaraderies had been undone; homes and any hope for a normal life had been abandoned. Nevertheless, all of this journey had only reached the beginning that they now faced. For the Shining Path, this was the meeting on Rooster Island.

On Rooster Island, the conquistador Pizarro had drawn a line in the sand with a sword to separate those who would go on to wrest the Inca Empire from its founders from those who feared quick defeat and death in the mountains frowning on them from the east. Guzmán drew his line with words. The prudent met their political death at his literary hands, much as thousands of Chinese had seen their careers and families extinguished by the dazibaos and public humiliations of the Cultural Revolution, Guzmán’s model. He was relentless in his campaign against those he labeled revisionists and champions of the rightist line in development—in other words, anyone who questioned him. Those who survived were confirmed as wheels in what he would later call his killing machine.

With his own ruthlessness against former colleagues and friends, Guzmán demonstrated the true measure of the sacrifice he would ask of his cadres as the price of victory. In the previous century, Abraham Lincoln had called it the killer arithmetic necessary to preserve the Union, and only found the men willing to apply it after discarding officers who proved too squeamish. Guzmán’s innovation, if it could be called such a thing, was to place not only his fighters and their uniformed opponents in the equation, but the people themselves, the ones he and the Shining Path were pledged to conduct into the promised land of Maoist utopia. After weeks of brutal criticism and self-criticism sessions, during which the killer-scholar used quotes from Shakespeare, Marx, Mao, the Peruvian hero Andrés Cáceres, and Washington Irving’s The Life of Mohammed to finish off and bury internal opposition, he declared the Shining Path was ready to draw Peru into the powerful vortex of revolution.

In Gorriti’s subsequent chapters, the state’s attempts to detour Guzmán’s plans were occasionally successful, usually uncertain, and in the end thoroughly inadequate. Consistently, Peru’s leaders underestimated Guzmán and failed to perceive that they played their roles in the theories he had devised too faithfully. Above all, after the Bonbon’s departure, they failed to use the best tools at their disposal—democracy, the rule of law, and careful intelligence work—to trap and disarm the Shining Path at its most vulnerable.

The country’s leadership did not pay the price of incompetence. Farmers did, and community leaders, police officers, mayors, Protestant ministers, and students. They felt the full force of Guzmán’s extremism and the equally consuming rage of the army, sent to quell the rebellion at the close of Gorriti’s book. Guzmán showed the lengths he was willing to push his cadres to at Lucanamarca in 1984, where the masses, he later commented, conveniently overflowed and murdered more than sixty people. Peru’s elected leaders and their military henchmen did it at spots whose names are still tinged with horror: El Frontón, Accomarca, Pucayacu, Cayara. By 1990, massacres, extrajudicial executions, battles and forced disappearances had converted much of southern and central Peru into a wasteland, with 30,000 dead. More than 600,000 families fled their homes for the misery belts surrounding cities like Huamanga, Ica, and Lima. The list of ghost towns was long, each with its shocking story.

At the time, I was covering Peru for a U.S. newspaper. I remember particularly the story of Umaru, obliterated by an army offensive and mentioned only by the handful of ragged refugees who had escaped to Lima. Perhaps some among them had supported the Shining Path. Others hadn’t. Their former mayor spoke no longer of the relatives and neighbors he had lost, but only the church organ that had been seized in the fighting, the bellows and pipes and pedals that had once been Umaru’s pride and distinction but now only served to measure the true scale and particularity of their loss. Lima was blacked out regularly by Shining Path attacks on the electrical towers feeding it from the Mantaro River. Pundits raised the possibility of a Shining Path takeover. Ever on the lookout for the sensational, foreign correspondents quoted its messages hopefully, seeing in the graffiti-stained walls of Lima’s Central Highway proof positive that a big story was on the way along with the end of democratic Peru.

There was both more and less to this fear than people supposed at the time. But I can say without doubt, since I lived in Peru at the time, that the arrival of Gorriti’s The Shining Path underscored the degree to which many of us had been operating out of an almost complete ignorance of the force set loose in Peru. To say that I devoured this book as soon as I got my hands on it is an understatement. Upon release, it became the book to read, the only book. It put to rest persistent fallacies still passed around as insight—that the Shining Path strove to reestablish Inca rule, that it was led by peasants, that it was funded from abroad, that its willingness to kill the masses it claimed to represent was disinformation designed to discredit (this last from the group’s handful of international supporters). Beyond any reasonable doubt, it demonstrated that what Peru faced was not a demented, drugged-out cabal of Sino-savages (as some among the local press routinely described them), but a determined cadre of Peruvians willing to pledge their lives to apply Guzmán’s so-called scientific certainties.

Gorriti made them human. He also gave them a story, the character, context, and motive that placed them firmly in Peru’s tumultuous history and soil. Up to the publication of The Shining Path, little of what had been written outside the pages of the magazine Caretas, where Gorriti did much of the leg work for the book as a reporter, had captured the narrative in the destruction. Bombs, deaths, attacks jumbled in people’s minds, a blind force, a chaqwa to use the Quechua term, seemingly headed only for chaos. Indeed, destruction was among Guzmán’s fondest aims; but there was also grim method at work, a conscious planning to the rubble, and this is what Gorriti has captured and scored here, the text of the music that President Gonzalo, as Guzmán was known, played for his fellow Peruvians.

For Gorriti, this book was not without its price. In El Diario, the Shining Path newspaper, Gorriti was a favorite target, excoriated with all of Guzmán’s infamous flair for hyperbole. Perhaps more dangerous to this journalist’s well-being in the long run, however, was the evidence, so convincing in these pages, of Gorriti’s ability to analyze and, when necessary, expertly ridicule those in power. Since the publication of The Shining Path, he has honed these skills. After publishing a series of investigative pieces on President Alberto Fujimori and his shadowy security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, a former drug cartel lawyer, Gorriti became Enemy Number One to Peru’s new regime. He was arrested after the 1992 self-coup during which Fujimori dissolved Congress and Peru’s judiciary. Gorriti was forced to leave the country with his family for safety.

In 1996, he became deputy editor of Panama’s La Prensa. There, Gorriti developed and led an investigative unit that published a series about the collapse of a local bank, used by a Colombian cocaine cartel to launder money. The most controversial article showed that the Cali cartel had funneled $51,000 to the election campaign of President Ernesto Pérez Balladares. The president initially denied taking money from drug traffickers but later had to make a humiliating public retraction.

In response, the Panamanian government filed an expulsion order aimed at ridding the country’s leaders of what they considered a pesky foreigner. There was even well-founded information that the Panamanian government knew of a Peruvian plot to assassinate Gorriti and chose to expel him rather than risk being linked to his murder.

Characteristically, Gorriti refused to be cowed. For weeks, he was forced to live in his office, to make the task of the police sent to deport him more difficult. Could I have avoided the type of reporting I did and concentrated on tamer subjects? he wrote at the time in a New York Times opinion piece. Sure. Could it still have been good journalism, while acceptable to the political authorities? Not impossible. Would it have presented a fundamentally incomplete view of reality? Certainly. Would I have felt it to be a betrayal of the fundamental tenets of a free press? Absolutely.

Gorriti saw his case not as unique but as part of a wider problem in countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. These are countries, he wrote, with imperfect, or even cosmetic, democracies. There is no real balance of power; indeed, the judiciaries have been unable to stop government corruption that grew exponentially when companies were privatized. In these countries, the independent press—particularly investigative journalists—has a critical role to play. But cosmetic democracy is only comfortable with cosmetic press freedom. That is the reason why many journalists throughout Latin America have to struggle so hard to defend their work, and often their lives, from harassment and threats. The Panamanian government eventually backed down, and Gorriti remains as of this writing at La Prensa.

Journalists continue to struggle to defend their work in Peru, threatened by the likes of Fujimori and his creole Rasputin. What Peru gained from its lost decade, besides a close knowledge of grief, is a jumble. The Shining Path was finally defeated not by the army and its blind blows, but the police and the people themselves, who rebelled against the rebels and made the countryside, Mao’s launch pad of revolt, hostile to them. What it lost is all too clear in these pages: a chance, perhaps fragile and doomed from the outset, at a more equitable society. For all of its admittedly laudable ideals—justice for the disenfranchised, bread for the hungry, respect for the downtrodden—the Shining Path sowed only misery for Peruvians. In that task, it received timely and energetic aid from the army, which tilled with matching fervor.

Finally, a word on this translation. Translation can be an irritating endeavor, both for the translator and the subject of his or her attentions, the writer. There can never be an absolute transparency between two languages, only an aspiration to narrow the distance to it. Inevitably, the journey from one to another form of expression loses something of the original. With lesser writers, this transition can be complicated by sloppy thought and ungainly expression. With The Shining Path, however, I can say that any faults here are my own, and the felicities wholly Gorriti’s. I could not have asked for a clearer, more absorbing text to work from. At times, it caused me great sadness; it also caused me to laugh out loud. Throughout, it betrayed not only the considerable skills of a writer at the height of his powers, but the compassion of a man striving to understand and to explain the terrible and the beautiful workings of the country that raised him.

Robin Kirk

Preface to the English Edition

This book was first published in Peru in July 1990, at a time when the Shining Path insurgency was fast coming to affect the survival of the country as a whole. If the 1980s had witnessed the seemingly unstoppable growth of the insurgency, at the turn of the 1990s the Shining Path purported to have achieved a level of strategic parity with the Peruvian state. The new decade, the rebels proclaimed, would witness their conquest of power. That, in turn, would mark the beginning of the strategic counteroffensive of world revolution. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Tienanmen massacre only showed, from their point of view, the decrepitude of worldwide revisionism. Pure Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was, the Shining Path contended, alive and well in the Andes and would eventually prevail all over the world. Regardless of grandiose claims, for most Peruvians the Shining Path insurgency continued to be a deadly paradox: so alien to Latin American political discourse and, at the same time, so effective, as events were proving.

At the time, the insurgency’s very obscurity seemed to add to its power. Few people understood what the Shining Path was all about, what its doctrine and strategy were, who Abimael Guzmán really was, and how all of this related with Peru. For some, the questions were more pragmatic, though no less anguishing. If the Shining Path was a devastating infection of Peru’s social tissue, was there anything that could be done to stop it? These questions acquired an air of urgency, as the internal war was increasingly shifting its center of gravity from the provinces to Lima. Its quite specific terrors, the fear of sudden, horrifying violence, were going to be felt more and more by Lima’s inhabitants within the next two years.

That was the Peruvian quandary when this book appeared. It was widely and (if I might be excused for saying so) even avidly read for reasons pertaining to the book’s contents as well as to the circumstance. Although Sendero described events that had taken place eight to ten years earlier, it related very much to the distressing questions that were very much on Peruvians’ minds at the time. It explained, by dint of revealing and ordering both known and unknown facts, how the Shining Path insurgency had been able to take hold in what appeared to be a refractory reality. It told about the actions, countermeasures, perceptions, and misperceptions on both sides and about the results they engendered. It also addressed more general questions, such as the role of strategy, doctrine, organization, and will in the creation and growth of revolutionary movements and how these related to social conditions.

This book was originally intended to be part of a three-volume project that would cover the whole insurrectionary process, from the founding of Peru’s Communist Party to the latter stages of the internal war in Peru. That intention was not realized because, in a sense, the project also became a victim of the war. When Alberto Fujimori, democratically elected as Peru’s president in 1990, waged his April 5, 1992, self-coup, I was captured by an army intelligence squad and technically disappeared for nearly fifty hours. This is not the place to explain in detail the background of that criminal action, but it was directly related to my previous work as an investigative journalist. It was ordered by Vladimiro Montesinos, who at the time had already become the power behind the throne in Peru and who saw (in the window for impunity created by an ongoing coup d’état) an opportunity for revenge for exposés I had written in the past. I emerged alive and relatively well from that experience. Moreover, I managed to save my files and hide them in the nick of time. Then I had them safely carried out of Peru, but several months elapsed before I had them with me in a safe environment, in the United States.

Then, Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path’s leader, was captured in a masterful stroke planned and executed by a small police unit and its very capable leader, Benedicto Jimínez, and the course of the internal war changed dramatically from one day to the next. As I wrote in reaction to the event: Could just one masterful lightning stroke implode the long anthill-like insurrectionary build-up of the Shining Path? Could carefully built strategic initiative and favorable strategic momentum—both of which the Shining Path unfortunately had—be lost in a moment if a dashing action rendered the queen-bee a prisoner and the red beehive steerless? If the second defeats the years; and if audaciousness defeats deliberateness; there was an added drama in there because of the fact that the Shining Path was widely regarded as a movement which had been rowing against the stream of history, and actually making progress against the current. Militant anachronism subduing reality, defiant Stalinism reincarnated and making elaborate progress in a wounded country. Could this disappear in a wink? As Sendero’s prophet—the one who claimed to interpret the allegedly inexorable laws of history—was stared at in his human stature, abruptly diminished by defeat, you couldn’t help but think on whether a group of policemen had not only made an arrest but simultaneously stated a philosophical case: That accident is central to History, and that single events can defy and eventually alter powerful trends of progression or regression in human affairs.

Together with Guzmán, the central archives of the Shining Path were captured. Therefore, the ability of scholars to investigate and understand the organization was fundamentally changed. Documentation whose existence I could previously only infer was now out of the Shining Path’s hands. Any history of the war written without access to these files would be necessarily incomplete and would have an assured obsolescence. Of course, those files were, and are for now, in the possession of Peru’s National Intelligence Service, and we will have to wait until democracy is fully restored in Peru before independent scholars will have access to them.

So, this book ended up as a single volume. This is, perhaps, as it should be. It is a self-contained book that examines in depth a crucial moment of Peru’s history and, in doing so, explicates events and phenomena that have relevance for other realities and other research perspectives. As an in-depth study of the early stages of a revolutionary movement attacking an incipient democratic regime, it will hold, I hope, some interest to those studying other processes that share some of these elements.

But, for me, the primary reason that drove me to write the book in the first place still holds and justifies both the writing exertions and the consequences endured afterward: that the tragedies recounted would not be forgotten and that the record of lives and hopes shattered would endure as long as the memory of the internal war itself, so that time would not distort what really took place.

Gustavo Gorriti

Panama City, Panama

July 1, 1998

Preface

This book is an account of the biggest insurrection in the history of Peru. It is not an interpretation or an analysis of a series of more or less well known and accepted events, but rather the recovery and ordering of little-known deeds. For this reason, the greatest service this work aspires to is to unify deeds and actions with the context and meaning in which they occurred, and thus contribute to general knowledge. By this, I do not mean to say that analysis is entirely absent from this war tale. As the patient and diligent reader will note, I try again and again to connect, associate, and match details, to compare and establish analogies between the actions I describe and the theories behind them with other events and theories from other times and places, as long as this helps make the story understandable. However, I have tried to do this only sparingly and without altering the purpose of the story.

I decided to write this book after attending a Lima seminar where I perceived as a journalist how the multitude of tragedies we were writing about were becoming repetitive and dulling our readers’ interest and sympathies, particularly presented as they were in the inevitably disconnected and episodic style of a weekly publication. As a consequence, not only were the suffering and horror then engulfing people, villages, and whole regions forgotten, but new events drew less and less attention. It became difficult to take seriously the warning signals meant for the rest of the country.

Yet, though it seemed only fair to rescue this tragedy from oblivion, the more compelling reason to begin work on this book—evident to me at the same moment—was that in this war, deceptively small, deceptively primitive, I discerned that the very future of the country was at stake, with a finality and irreversibility unmatched since Spanish had been first spoken within our borders. The group that had launched the war did so with imperial designs on society as well as history, and—in contrast to those ubiquitous groups of more or less innocuous lunatics—waged it with a methodical consistency and discipline that had carried to victory, at other times and places, groups with equally unlikely initial and apparent disadvantages. I have not attempted to prove this idea in these pages, but instead leave the events to speak for themselves. Nevertheless, this book’s subtitle, A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, is drawn from this perception.

The final reason for writing this book was my recognition—as I see it even today—that this war is one of the least understood chapters of Peru’s history, even by those who waged it and their victims. This is due in part to the very nature of the conflict, but also owes much to the fact that the leading actors, their organizations and institutions, and the way in which these entities function are unknown; what is crucial is not how they present themselves but how they really are. I thought and continue to think that it is necessary to try and remove from this tragedy the accumulated darkness of ignorance.

Security and Access to Sources

To write this book, I have used extensively and with passion the experiences, methods, and sources I have gained through many years of working in investigative journalism. Throughout the book, there are many footnotes and references to documents, institutions, and occasionally people whose identities must be kept in reserve or secret. I have used these references only when I have deemed that to leave a citation out would impoverish the text.

The documents that served as this book’s foundation have been donated to the Princeton University library. A large number of them will be available to academic researchers and journalists as of 1991. Another collection—documents that could contain information potentially harmful to individuals—has been deposited separately within the same library, and will be made available in the year 2004.

A fundamental concern of this book has been to guarantee the safety of those who entrusted me with information in confidence. In the same way, I have endeavored not to write anything that would endanger anyone regardless of his or her position in this war. This is why those who requested that their identities not be revealed were identified with pseudonyms, marked by italic type in the text (for example, Sergio Escalante is a pseudonym). I have also used pseudonyms for people whose past or present allegiances are unknown to one or all sides in the war, and finally, for those who were simply unnoticed witnesses to various events. To ensure safety, in some cases I have given the same person two or more pseudonyms or combined two individuals under a single name. I must add that some of those I have protected in this manner have carried out acts repugnant even to those with the most pragmatic moral beliefs. My guiding reason for protecting even them has been that the aim of this book is to serve as a medium or as a catalyst, to comprehend, to rethink, and to know, and not to kill, spread fear, or persecute anyone. Those individuals whose acts, political allegiances, or duties were public are of course identified with their real names.

Acknowledgments

Though it is always a solitary endeavor, the work of writing is rarely possible without an array of help that supports and complements the work of the writer. Here, I would like to recognize and thank those individuals and institutions who contributed to the completion of this book.

The long period of research and writing was made possible thanks to the generous help of a research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. To this foundation, and particularly to Program Director Karen Colvard, whose admirable work is the search for academic research projects worthy of support, I send my lasting thanks.

In Boston, writer Douglas Bauer read with care several early drafts that were later partially incorporated into this book. His comments were a great help to me. In an even earlier stage, Felipe Mac Gregor, S.J., urged me toward a deeper study of the theme, after examining the already considerable (1982–83) archive of documentary material. I want to express my gratitude for this early stimulus, decisive in the undertaking of this endeavor.

Most of the writing of the book took place during a prolonged stay at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while I was a fellow first at the Center for International Affairs and later as an associate at the Committee on Latin American and Iberian Studies. The teaching and administrative staff at both programs offered me invaluable encouragement and understanding during the most difficult periods in my work. Without forgetting the appreciation that others deserve, I would like to give special thanks to Leslie H. Brown, director of the Fellows’ Programs of the Center for International Matters; and John Womack Jr., director of the Committee for Latin American and Iberian Studies. Samuel P. Huntington, at the time director of the Center for International Matters, urged on and inspired the continuation of this work.

Different parts of this manuscript were read and commented upon by the following people: David Scott Palmer, Boston University; Peter Johnson, Princeton University; Cynthia McClintock, George Washington University; Jorge Domínguez, John Womack Jr., Jim Brennan, Ronald Berg, and Robert Leiken, Harvard University; and Susan Kaufman Purcell, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Writers Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Toscano, and José Rodríguez Elizondo, the latter a longtime colleague at the newsweekly Caretas and now with the United Nations in Spain, stoically endured the infliction of the manuscript and gave observations as insightful as they were valuable. On more advanced drafts, and on specific points, the commentaries of Héctor López Martínez and Rafael Merino Bartet were extremely useful.

This book, and the journalistic vision that underlies it, owes much to the teaching and example set by Howard Simons, the legendary managing editor of the Washington Post during the Nixon presidency and Watergate investigation, which he contributed to in a decisive manner. He later became the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he devoted much of his effort—with the combination of bravura, generosity, piercing ingenuity, and alert intelligence that characterized him throughout his life—to defending reporters persecuted for doing what in established democracies is no longer simply a right but a necessity: free expression, criticism, investigation. Thanks to his ability to mobilize dozens of editors, publishers, and politicians, Howard managed to defend the freedom, and in more than one occasion the lives, of journalists in, among other places, South Africa, Panama, China, and Guatemala. In 1989, after being diagnosed with an incurable illness, Howard chose not to submit himself to any treatment, with the familiar logic that to prolong his life would increase the suffering of his loved ones and diminish his own dignity. To the memory of this master reporter, of the dear friend, my gratitude, my fond memory.

Although I have the impression that the director of Caretas, Enrique Zileri, was not entirely in agreement with my departure from weekly journalism in his magazine to dedicate myself to this book, I owe him special recognition. It was during those intense weeks, enduring the sleepless deadline nights of Caretas, that I learned what I know about journalism; and it was for Caretas that I began to cover the theme of this book. From these years of work, I cherish a great admiration for Zileri’s quality as a journalist, expressed in the bohemian energy at the close of the issue, intuition and the sudden inspiration for the perfect photo, the irreverent and exact emphasis, the creative bellowing and the eccentricities that made Caretas many things but never boring. And from another perspective, for those of us who have worked in the relatively new territory of investigative journalism in Peru, the demands of an editor like Zileri with respect to the veracity of the detail, the imagination to consider new angles, new ways of getting close to the news, were without question invaluable.

I have conducted dozens of interviews of as many people for this book, in some cases openly and in other cases in secret. In them, I acquired frequently not only facts but also an enriched vision that directed and gave perspective to my work. I would like to express my appreciation to all of those who gave of their time and trust, who shared memories, notes, and in some cases documents, hoping that a truthful account of the events of this war would be written.

I must convey my special gratitude to those people whose long-ago or continuing political activism in Ayacucho’s leftist parties allowed them to test, closely and with intensity, the early stages of these events; and who shared their recollections with generosity and patience. My special thanks go to Carlos Tapia, Juan Granda, Germán Medina, Manuel Granados, and others, who because they still live in Ayacucho must remain in anonymity.

I must close with the necessary qualification that, despite this still incomplete list of intellectual debts, the responsibility for occasional errors or limitations in this book is mine alone.

Abbreviations

Apra American Popular Revolutionary Alliance APS Popular Socialist Action ARI Leftist Revolutionary Association CCP–Red Flag Peruvian Peasant Federation CGTP General Confederation of Workers CIA U.S. Central Intelligence Agency CTR Confederation of Revolutionary Workers CTP Peruvian Federation of Workers Dimin Interior Ministry Intelligence Center ELN National Liberation Army EPL Popular Liberation Army ERP People’s Revolutionary Army FER Federation of Revolutionary Students FEUNTA Student Federation of the Altiplano FOCEP Peruvian Workers, Peasants, and Students Front FUE United Student Federation GC Civil Guard JOOPP-ZE Joint Operative Command of the Emergency Zone MIR Leftist Revolutionary Movement MOTC Movement of Laborers, Workers, and Peasants PCP Communist Party of Peru PIP Peruvian Investigative Police PPC Popular Christian Party PRT Workers Revolutionary Party PSR Socialist Revolutionary Party SIN National Intelligence Service Sinamos National System for Social Mobilization Sinchis Civil Guard special forces SL Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Sutep Peruvian Teachers Union UDP Peruvian Democratic Unity UI Left Unity UNIR National Union of the Revolutionary Left UNSCH San Cristóbal de Huamanga National University

The Shining Path

The Arrest

It was January 1979. State Security, reinforced with other units, was deployed throughout Lima to search houses and offices and arrest leftist politicians and members of the Peruvian General Confederation of Workers (CGTP). Nevertheless, the union leadership continued to call for a seventy-two-hour general strike on January 9. Tense, on edge, the military government had put into play all the tools at its command to stifle the strike. A new plan to respond to urban disturbances, inspired by the lessons of previous strikes, had been put in motion for the first time. The plan emphasized the need to maintain open access to the city’s northern, southern, and central highways by massively deploying police and military units while at the same time forcing public transportation to continue uninterrupted despite strike roadblocks. Troops had been assigned to protect public buses. Military drivers prepared to take over in case there were not enough civilian drivers to be found.

The military’s attitude was meant to be decisive, demonstrating the depth of its resolve with deeds. In it, there was also a message to the Constitutional Assembly, a warning about the precarious nature of the democratic opening and underscoring who was still in charge. The interior minister and vice-minister, generals Fernando Velit and Jorge Lassús, had received the new operation plans from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the unmistakable arrogance that characterized the military regime, maximum repressive might, they took charge of issuing orders to their police subordinates.

Several magazines had been closed. Other information media were warned by the military commanders of the central and coastal security zones to refrain from disseminating news that could provoke the perturbation of order. But the most threatening warning was the military’s decision to submit to court martial anyone who participated in or incited others to commit acts that alter public order. News bulletins released incessantly by press controlled by the military government warned the population that troops had been authorized to make use of their weapons to put down any disturbance.

Put in the context of events earlier that month, these threats were not empty. A case of espionage acknowledged by the government of Chile, culminating with the Chilean ambassador to Peru being declared a persona non grata, had captured the public’s attention. Julio Vargas Garayar, a junior officer in the Peruvian air force, had been condemned to death and would be shot by firing squad within the month. Relations with Chile were at their lowest ebb since the almost war of 1975. Once again, preparations for war had intensified. There was talk of postponing general elections. Some politicians, like Luis Bedoya Reyes, accepted this possibility in principle. The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (Apra), in contrast, did not; but in order to ensure that elections would take place, the party ordered the union it controlled, the Peruvian Federation of Workers (CTP), to openly oppose the strike and try to make it fail.

This combination of events doomed the strike. On January 10, after its failure was evident, the CGTP chose to call off the strike. It was the third strike in under thirty months, and the only one to end in defeat. Yet just as the two previous strikes had prodded the military government forward with the transfer to democratic rule, paradoxically this last one had the same result. In contrast to the rancor of past years, the moderating effect exerted by the Constitutional Assembly was extremely clear for most officers. Clearer still was that the decisive help given by unions controlled by the Apra would force the strike to abort. Yet this help was conditioned on sticking to the timetable for general elections.

Among State Security top brass, a small group of detectives wanted to take advantage of their virtually unlimited sphere of action during the strike to carry out unrelated investigations whose importance could be crucial. For example, in matters concerning the Shining Path. Information reaching State Security through intelligence channels in Ayacucho indicated that the Shining Path was making serious preparations for armed insurrection. And while the military scoffed at these persistent rumors, some veteran detectives who had followed the Shining Path sporadically over the years and who continued to receive information from inside the Maoist organization judged that to fail to take into account these preparations was a serious error.

On his own authority, the division chief, Commander Modesto Canchaya, ordered a tactical group whose mission was to arrest Ricardo Letts, a Revolutionary Vanguard leader, to add to its original objective the task of locating and capturing Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader. It was known that Guzmán was in Lima, but not where he was staying. At dawn on January 7, detectives divided into various teams to look for him simultaneously in his most likely haunts: the home of his father-in-law, Carlos La Torre (the