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Description
The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) insurgency initiated its armed conflict against the Peruvian state in 1980 by burning ballot boxes at a local voting registrar office in Chuschi, a small town located in Ayacucho. Under the leadership of philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the group had embarked upon a years-long struggle that claimed roughly seventy thousand lives. Radically violent and marginal among Peru’s litany of leftwing organizations, Sendero scholarship has often focused on this organization’s efforts to universally superimpose Maoist revolutionary doctrine in Peru. Although there is no doubt that Shining Path interpreted Peru’s social, political, and economic difficulties through a Maoist framework, few scholars have situated Sendero within Peru’s own intellectual historical context. This project places Shining Path in dialogue with seminal texts written by both José Carlos Mariátegui, the 1928 founder of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP) and Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943-1976. Mariátegui’s writings about the socialist predisposition of indigenous peoples, the failure of constitutional liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the centrality of land in transforming Peru’s society and economy, and the persistence of semi-feudality predisposed Shining Path leaders nearly half a century later to re-appropriate Mao’s ideas concerning the revolutionary centrality of the peasantry under working-class leadership and anti-imperialism as the principal contradiction facing semi-feudal societies. My work therefore aims to present a comprehensive examination of Sendero ideology that goes beyond the portrayal of Shining Path as a Maoist movement in the Andes. Rather, Shining Path ideology, known as Gonzalo Thought, emerged at the intersection of local and transnational intellectual histories.
