Shining Path and Peasant Responses in Rural Ayacucho

Abstract

Since Shining Path’s declaration of a “prolonged people’s war” in 1980, one of the most frequently asked questions has been “Does Shining Path have peasant support?” McClintock’s assessment in 1984 was encapsulated in the title of her article: “When Peasants Rebel.” In contrast, however, Carlos Iván Degregori cautions against such a generalization.1 During his address to the 1988 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) meeting in New Orleans, Degregori stated that what is really surprising is that Sendero has not been more successful in receiving peasant support. I am going to address that issue by analyzing the local history of a locality that has been the focus of Shining Path (Sendero or SL) activities since the mid-1970s: the Rio Pampas region of the province of Cangallo in the department of Ayacucho, Peru. This analysis is based on my own research in Chuschi, which began in 1967 in the Rio Pampas and continued until 1975. I returned to Peru in 1986 and conducted interviews with a wide range of people in order to reconstruct a history of the events since 1975. I was able to interview people from the Rio Pampas and other areas of Ayacucho who had fled to Lima to escape the violence that has caused some 120,000 people to flee the countryside. I was unable to travel to Chuschi, as it was located in the epicenter of the Ayacucho Emergency Zone (EMZ). Nevertheless, a number of interviews in the communities of the Rio Pampas were conducted by Peruvian colleagues and the materials were shared with me.