Qué difícil es ser Dios

by Carlos Iván Degregori

Entre 1980 y 1999, el Perú vivió el episodio de violencia más intenso, extenso y prolongado de toda su historia republicana. De acuerdo con la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), la cifra de víctimas fatales de la violencia fue de casi 70000 personas. Más que el total de pérdidas humanas sufridas por el Perú en todas las guerras externas y guerras civiles ocurridas en sus 183 años de vida independiente. Con esta publicación, Carlos Iván Degregori nos permite repensar esa etapa oscura de nuestra historia, para lo que nos entrega una larga introducción que titula: "Sendero Luminoso: un objeto de estudio opaco y elusivo".

Genres: History, Latin American History, Anthropology

325 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Carlos Iván Degregori was Professor of Anthropology at the National University of San Marcos in Lima. He served on Peru’s government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission and wrote dozens of books and articles about Peru.

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 2 out of 5]

Degregori had a front-row seat on Sendero Luminoso and the violence that engulfed Peru through the 1980s. Not only was he a member of the 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a leading liberal media 'Senderologist' during the worst of the violence, he personally knew and was a peer of Abimael Guzmán. Both of them were social sciences professors at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho at the same time. But while Degregori went to Lima, and mainstream success, Guzmán went underground, becoming the ideological focus of fanatical Maoist movement which sparked a war that killed 69,000 Peruvians, most of them Quechua-speaking campesinos. This was a dirty war on all sides, but Sendero started it, and they were responsible for roughly 2/3rds of the deaths, by the accounting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I believe Degregori has the raw material for a really amazing book here, a kind of Andean A Bright Shining Lie. Unfortunately, this book is turgid mass of sociological theory, where a few anecdotes stand in for narrative, let alone story.

The opening chapter warns against essentializing Peru, against treating the Inca heritage of the highlands as some kind of root Pagan barbarity cast against coastal modernity and metizo hybrid confusion. So it is with greatest irony that every subsequent chapter does just that. In Degregori's analysis, Peru in the period 1945-1980 lagged regionally in material development indicators like GDP, but it excelled in providing secondary and post-secondary education. Provincial mestizos like Guzmán and the raw recruits of the Shining Path were educated, cut off from their ancestral roots, but unable to break into the true power of Lima's elite. Frustrated as a class, they were easy pickings for the sureties of 'scientific Marxism and the inevitable historical dialect of Revolution.' Even the earliest Shining Path rhetoric is drenched in blood, so it is unsurprising that they started killing in their liberated zones. First the violence was a kind of revolutionary justice, against cattle rustlers, thieves, wife beaters, etc. But as the Senderos were pushed out by the Peruvian Army, the killings escalated to include all the people who had failed the People's Revolution. Fanaticism was little match against the resources of the state, and when Guzmán was captured in 1992 in a Lima safehouse, the revolution fell apart.

It's an interesting thesis, but it's backed up with a few scanty interviews, a few quotes from the voluminous hardcore Marxist propaganda of the movement, and nothing about Guzman, or why his version of People's War was so bloody.

[Connor Keeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little collection of essays on the infamous Peruvian guerrilla movement 'Sendero Luminoso' that lit the country on fire in the 1980s and 1990s - it digs deep into their worldview and their relationship to the Peruvian peasantry they were tenuously rooted in and claimed to represent. Degregori makes some fascinating points about the relationships of peasants to power, the fundamentalism of some 20th century communist insurgencies, and senderistas total misperception of the Peruvian countryside they sought to harness to topple the state. The writing was also quite good, and had some memorable turns of phrase ("They are the last children of the Age of Enlightenment who, two hundred years down the road, lost in the Andes, have converted science into religion... They were priests for a god that spoke (sometimes literally) Chinese."). It is a pretty brisk but informative read and it seems like it is one of the best works on the Shining Path in English. Worth it if you are at all interested in the topic.

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Degregori’s reflection on the Shining Path is complex. The book is, at times, very dry and dense, and at others, woefully not specific enough. Some of his critiques read to me as fair, balanced, and reasonable. While others are somewhat ridiculous and poorly argued. The book beginning with a serious effort to establish left-wing credentials for the author is transparently an attempt to lend his criticisms more value as coming from someone “on the left”. I didn’t hate this book and I feel that I learned a fair amount about the Shining Path and the internal conflict in Peru from it, I just think there were tons of missed opportunities to explore various topics relating to the organization and the conflict. I’m glad this book exists and has an English translation, but Degregori could have done far, far better at making his points in these essays. 2.5/5

[Patrick Rowland · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a boring book about a very interesting subject. This reads like a first draft, with entire paragraphs and pages repeating themselves sometimes three times word for word. Although the book has been translated, the editor/translator left certain words like Patrones, campesino, Senderistas and misti mostly untranslated, often then following with a translation in commas before continuing the sentence. Why bother to explain what the translation is? Just translate it, like you did every other word in the sentence.

[Greg Mathis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-documented sociological work that’s reachable to most all who are interested in the subject matter. This said, the book is not an introduction. It would help most readers to complete La Serna and Starn’s work first for an overview of the entire Sendero movement.

[LORENA GARCIA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Buen libro

[Orlando Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente libro

[Michael Boyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even knowing going in that Degregori was an anti-communist, this was deeply frustrating. Using his credentials as some kind of 'leftist', senderologist and a member of the truth and reconciliation commission, he stays away from both direct narrative, interviews with principals, or personal experience in favor of heavy academic jargon, and petti-bourgois bullshit. The poor peasants always stuck between two sides, never as a radical agent for change (like... who the fuck does he think made up the Sendero in the first place), when the Sendero uphold classical Marxism it's dogmatism, when they synthesize with the ideology of the peasants it's irresponsible.

Degregori himself came out of the section of university 'Marxists' who choose bourgeois legality, conciliation with imperialism, and an ultimate reverence for the reactionary state over the dreams of a better world that we're brought to life in the revolution; he seems to be celebrating that path here, while occasionally offering a morsel of interesting fact.

The Simon Strong book has similar anti-communist prejudices, but is a convincing narrative, and wrestles much more the actual lived conditions of Peruvian life.

[José · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recopilación de los textos de Carlos Iván Degregori sobre Sendero Luminoso. Interesante para conocer la ideología y lógica política de esta organización. Complementa bien el Informe Final de la CVR.