By the end of the first two pages of With Masses and Arms, Miguel La Serna has drawn his reader into the world of the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA). Néstor Cerpa Cartolini, a leading Túpac Amarista with a labor organizing background, and 13 other members of the MRTA have taken over the home of the Japanese ambassador to Peru with a sizable number of hostages. We learn of Cerpa's stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise, of the MRTA's precarious position, and of their reason for being at the ambassador's home in the first place: to negotiate a release of imprisoned comrades. The story of this occupation is well-known but is often told quickly, tacked on to the end of an in-depth history of Shining Path. According to La Serna, this emphasis on Shining Path has resulted in a relative dearth of scholarship on the MRTA. With Masses and Arms seeks to counteract this lack.La Serna is quite familiar with the literature on Shining Path, having previously written extensively on the group, and he uses some of the methods derived from this literature, as well as its gaps, to work on the MRTA. With Masses and Arms, for instance, addresses the everyday lived experience of militants and the place of women in guerrilla organizations, topics that much of the existing scholarship on Shining Path has found difficult to cover. The focus on Shining Path has also, according to La Serna, created an image of the Andean militant Left as “dogmatic, cultlike maniacs at the fringes of the global left” (p. 7). La Serna's history provides a close-up view of the reasons that some joined the MRTA and the political-ideological calculations of its leaders, in a way that portrays the organization as comprised of real people rather than caricatures. The vast number of interviews and group conversations conducted by La Serna paid off in revealing personal and collective motivations.Founded in 1982, the MRTA must be studied, as La Serna argues, within a broader history of the Left in Peru and the Cold War in Latin America. To do this, With Masses and Arms points to the deep roots of those involved in the organization. For instance, Víctor Polay Campos, one of the MRTA's founders, grew up in a household in the port of Callao deeply supportive of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). Some thought that he might succeed Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as APRA's next leader, though that would fall to Alan García, with whom Polay roomed while in Madrid. While in Paris, Polay moved further to the left, eventually joining the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. It was out of these experiences—and the rise of Shining Path—that Polay and others organized the MRTA. Over the course of 15 years the MRTA slowly moved toward a more hard-line position, shifting from redistributing goods to those in need to assassinations (of figures both outside and inside the organization), a process that Nelson Manrique calls the “‘Senderization’ of the MRTA” (p. 74).The three parts of the book represent, roughly, the geography of the MRTA. Parts 1 and 3 take place mostly in Lima, and part 2 focuses on the department of San Martín, in the northern Amazon. This allows La Serna to vividly depict the trajectories of actions across neighborhoods and on specific streets in Lima, the violent history of local labor organizing, the long history of Asháninka communities, and the racist and homophobic perspectives of some Túpac Amaristas in San Martín. The book would work well in a class on modern Peru or Lima—I have decided to use it in such a course. With connections and comparisons to other Left organizations in Latin America, the book would also easily fit in a class on modern Latin America or the Left in Latin America.The book is useful for the classroom in part due to its style. This is a narrative history, split into 22 chapters, in which people are fully developed, with descriptive language when needed, and the narrative arc is built with pacing in mind. Some chapters patiently build, while others (such as the chapter on the Canto Grande prison escape) pull the reader across the pages. The book is, in no uncertain terms, hard to put down. While La Serna is interested in writing history that is enjoyable to read, he also pauses to remind the reader of his central arguments. While at points I do think the emphasis on battles over the symbolic in the MRTA is a stretch, this in no way detracts from the book. With Masses and Arms is elegantly written and analytically sharp, and it will surely be the key book on the MRTA for years to come.
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Sep 22, 2024
Arūnas Bubnys 
Open Access