Shining Path : Terror and Revolution in Peru

by Simon Strong

A detailed account of Peru's Shining Path explores the devastating impact of the terrorist revolutionaries on Peru; exposes the group's history, bizarre ideology, and global links; and examines the potential international implications of the Shining Path. 12,500 first printing.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

286 pages, Hardcover

Published March 9, 1993

Reviews

[Michael Boyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can squint past the knee-jerk anti-communism and post-modernism, it's a well-written and incisive history of the peoples war in Peru; particularly notable that Strong delves deeply in the fertile ground the Maoist in: of colonialism, racism, and neo-liberalism, as well as the failures of the official left.
Like many anti-communist observers of revolutionary movements, he falls into the trap of treating political line struggle as personality differences, and matters of principal as expedience.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seems to me like a tract by an anti-Maoist, anti-communist writer. But still the first book I read giving a comprehensive account of the rise of the Peruvian Maoist movement in the 1960s-1980s.

[Arya · Rating 3 out of 5]

good resource and a basic intro to peru, but many dubious sources

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writer's misunderstanding of communism is sometimes hard to look past, but you should try if you want a well-researched and concise history of a pivotal movement on the way to world communism.

[Quinn Dougherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by the former NYTimes Peru correspondent, Shining Path is a story of a civil war that got most intense in the 1980s and also very serious in the 90s. Strong emphasizes the sort of personality-cult features of one of the communist parties involved, but I was in bookstore the other day and saw a book on the same subject titled literally (embellishment status: hyperbole) *sexy erotic marxism*, so by comparison I think Strong keeps the personality-cult stuff to a minimum.

(NOTE: the first edition of this book was in 1993, so it ends at a place that doesn't look 100% like an "ending" from a more 21st century perspective-- in my review is a youtube documentary recommendation that supplements)

Consuming history, I look for a "chessboard analysis" feeling, like I wanna get a sense of who's making what moves with which pieces on which regions of the board. This book succeeds. It's not a story of communist geurillas vs. the liberal state-- it's a story of multiple distinct communist geurillas AND a genuinely pynchonian web of paramilitaries or cartels connected either to local political parties or global north bank accounts AND I guess a government's military & police squeezed in there somewhere. I'm almost disappointed that the title is "Shining Path"-- Shining Path is the communist force that had university and international foothold, and yes the eccentric Professor Guzmán, at the helm. Save for a few excellent pages about how dialectical materialism preyed upon the analogies Peruvian culture had already found between Incan and Catholic mythologies, I found Guzmán to be an absurdly boring character.

But the sense I get is that it's not *just* a quasi-orientialism or horny-for-professors that makes northerners emphasize Guzmán in this story-- he really was the major public face of the conflict (even though the indigenous geurillas, allied with a more mainstream political party, didn't care for him), and (i get the sense that he) is remembered ambiguously in Peru. I also recommend a documentary you can find on youtube called "State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism (Peru's War on Terror 1980-2000)" that gives extra context about Fujimori, the businessman who ran populist and ruled with a combination of technocracy a military posturing that certainly puts the f-word on the table. (Advice to liberals: slaughtering one's neighbors for the crime of being false-positives in a crackdown on terrorism makes one wonder if the terrorists were the good guys). *

But far and above the most crucial insight I got from this took place in less than a paragraph. Somewhere in mountains, a cluster of subsistence farmers were in the crossfire. Maybe the words "innocent bystander" are too complicated, because the only crop they could manage to grow was drugs (a situation which Shining Path, at least in intent / symbolically, wanted to fix), but dammit even if it's a rounding error I'm leaning toward calling them innocent bystanders. For emphasis, I start a new paragraph:

Week to week, they didn't know which gang they'd be paying protection money to. The revolving door of police, paramilitaries, cartels, and geurillas was so kinetic that they payed each of them at least once. I was quite shocked-- I had a moment sort of like empathy with the existential confusion and injustice of that situation. It fundamentally changed my understanding of tax/rent/violence, going forward.

If you're an american and you're bad at configuring your browser, you've probably been exposed to thinkpieces of the form "is US heading for civil war?" or "so and so is a populist but such and such is a technocrat: a comparison" or "prohibition: good or bad?", and I think you should configure your browser to prevent exposure to these things and/or pick up a book like this.

*Footnote: Fujimori also provides a little dark comedy by running a really intense internal-war-on-terror (which in hindsight would be called "human rights bad" or "crimes" by courts in 2008, though it was ambiguously popular both at the time and during the trial), but getting taken down by extremely negligible corruption.

[Jerome · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent if you read between the lines. The history of the Communist Party of Peru in the 80s and 90s is a controversial one, to say the least. Though Strong plays into many anti-communist myths and analysis surrounding that period, this book still provides some thorough research and valuable insight. Instances of this anti-communism include but are not limited to: a shallow pseudo-psychonalysis of Gonzalo's strained relationship with his father among other things in the early chapters, and reducing political line struggle within the party to personality differences.

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strong provides an interesting look into the earlier life of Abimael Guzman and the beginning of the reconstituted Peruvian Communist Party, but he has a strong anti-communist bias that leads him to use questionable sources for the rest of the book

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

In July of 2015, many years after this book was published and just when most Americans had forgotten about this communist revolutionary terror group, Peruvian authorities rescued thirty-nine peasants who had been held captive against their will for thirty years and forced to work at a Shining Path farm. Once again, communism had made literal slaves out of those it claimed to represent. Through unflinching investigative journalism, Simon Strong documents a stunning array of atrocities committed in the name of social justice. The Path even used suicide bombers and other ISIS-like methods in their quest for revolution. But Strong's book is not a one-sided account. He delves deep into Peruvian history to dissect the colonial and imperialist legacies that caused a large segment of the population to sympathize with the Path's socialist ideology, if not their incredibly violent and destructive methods. The Path was even celebrated and promoted in Berkeley, CA and in other left wing strongholds of the United States and Europe. Of particular interest is the biographical treatment of Professor Guzman, the intellectual brainchild and maniacal leader of Shining Path. This was an incredibly eye-opening book and an epic effort by Simon Strong. Highly recommended.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-a...

https://www.breitbart.com/latin-ameri...

[Cash Guyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love anything Peruvian, but the writing was bad

[A L]

Oh those Maoists...