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How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999
The revolutionary war launched by Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency, was the most violent upheaval in modern Peru’s history, claiming some 70,000 lives in the 1980s–1990s and drawing widespread international attention. Yet for many observers, Shining Path’s initial successes were a mystery. What explained its cult-like appeal, and what actually happened inside the Andean communities at war?
In How Difficult It Is to Be God, Carlos Iván Degregori—the world’s leading expert on Shining Path and the intellectual architect for Peru’s highly regarded Truth and Reconciliation Commission—elucidates the movement’s dynamics. An anthropologist who witnessed Shining Path’s recruitment of militants in the 1970s, Degregori grounds his findings in deep research and fieldwork. He explains not only the ideology and culture of revolution among the insurgents, but also their capacity to extend their influence to university youths, Indian communities, and competing social and political movements.
Making Degregori’s most important work available to English-language readers for the first time, this translation includes a new introduction by historian Steve J. Stern, who analyzes the author’s achievement, why it matters, and the debates it sparked. For anyone interested in Peru and Latin America’s age of “dirty war,” or in the comparative study of revolutions, Maoism, and human rights, this book will provide arresting new insights.
In How Difficult It Is to Be God, Carlos Iván Degregori—the world’s leading expert on Shining Path and the intellectual architect for Peru’s highly regarded Truth and Reconciliation Commission—elucidates the movement’s dynamics. An anthropologist who witnessed Shining Path’s recruitment of militants in the 1970s, Degregori grounds his findings in deep research and fieldwork. He explains not only the ideology and culture of revolution among the insurgents, but also their capacity to extend their influence to university youths, Indian communities, and competing social and political movements.
Making Degregori’s most important work available to English-language readers for the first time, this translation includes a new introduction by historian Steve J. Stern, who analyzes the author’s achievement, why it matters, and the debates it sparked. For anyone interested in Peru and Latin America’s age of “dirty war,” or in the comparative study of revolutions, Maoism, and human rights, this book will provide arresting new insights.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Carlos Iván Degregori
32 books15 followersCarlos 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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 6, 2019
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.
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.
October 3, 2025
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.
December 27, 2019
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.
January 2, 2024
Buen libro
September 3, 2025
Excelente libro
May 11, 2018
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.
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.
September 1, 2012
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.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews