Abimael Guzmán and the Shining Path of Peru - Documentary

[Music] the video for the 1993 rage against the machine single bomb track is a tribute to the peruvian maoist guerilla group shining path sendero luminoso in spanish it presents them as heroes struggling against injustice for a better tomorrow and introduces the viewer to their leader avemel guzman pacing back and forth in a cell in a cartoonish prisoner outfit he'd been captured by police not long before the video was produced but behind the heroic image that it presents there was a horrible incredibly violent war between the shining path the peruvian state and various other guerrilla groups which was at its height from 1980 until the mid-90s very few people outside of peru even had a vague idea of what was going on at the time and even within the country itself things were not very well understood so for many people abroad rage's video was probably the first indication that anything was even happening over there this woman interviewed in 1986 summarizes the chaos of the period very well contrary to bomtrak's presentation of the group as a popular force that represented the majority many if not most peruvians didn't exactly think of them very highly they were and very much still are widely seen as a death cult that forced themselves upon the population both that image and the one in the bomb track video do have elements of truth to them the shining path whose members are known as sanderos were a fanatical and brutal group guilty of many atrocities who killed upwards of 30 000 people but the other main belligerent of the war the peruvian state its military its police force its intelligence services etc were no better they themselves committed countless crimes and murdered just about as many people with most of their victims being indigenous peasants contrary to their supposed obligations to protect their citizens they were their tormentors in the early 90s some well-respected analysts legitimately believed that the shining path might be able to win the war as they were active in about 60 of the country and they appear to be gaining influence in the capital lima or at least they were before their leader was thrown into the cell shown in the bomb track video pundit enrique obando said that the state is on the verge of defeat the armed forces could tumble down at any moment and renowned journalist gustavo goriti said that if they continue this way they will be able to defeat the peruvian state there's no way that that would have been possible if they weren't able to recruit at least enough people to fight for them and support them to get to that point but then how did a group that did so many undeniably terrible things to the very masses that they claimed to represent nonetheless managed to resonate with those that joined them and what about the other side the state that was hardly any better than them in its attempts to put down the insurgency and whose abandonment and oppression of its people led to it in the first place i'm gonna talk a little bit about those things actually a lot let's go in order to understand the conflict we first need to look at its roots in 1928 peruvian marxist theorist jose carlos mariategi released his landmark work seven interpretive essays on the peruvian reality like most things it's hardly perfect as some parts of it haven't really stood up to the test of time such as the way that it romanticizes the incan empire but it's nonetheless important as mariategi mostly cited other latin american writers and died only two years after the book's release so he was not influenced at all by later marxist figures like stalin and mao and therefore created a very uniquely peruvian interpretation of marxism maria teghi expertly identified the root of most of peru's socioeconomic problems land distribution there meant that despite the republican liberal image of its independence fighters and subsequent governments rural peru was for intents and purposes still a feudal society this analysis was so influential among peruvian leftists that there's about eight dozen parties shining path included that all claim to be the true inheritors of maoritegi's legacy such as its prestige and it's also been influential across the entire political spectrum such as among reformist liberals and conservative oligarchs looking to know their enemy he wrote that peruvian independence never meaningfully changed the colonial status quo massive estates known as lakifundias or haciendas were established in colonial times and ended up monopolizing the country's limited arable land these estates were most often in the hands of families that had owned them for hundreds of years or those that had purchased them from those families the vast majority of peasants therefore had no choice but to rent small plots of land from these large landowners known as gamonales to eat gout a living creating an exploitative economic relationship between a hereditary elite and the depressed peasant class that resembled that of the surf and lord under feudalism this also meant that these large land-owning families despite ostensibly being mere private citizens of the peruvian state were the real authorities in their regions which they effectively ruled over the hacienda is run like a baronial thief the laws of the state are not applied in the latifundiam without the tested or formal consent of the large land owners the authority of political or administrative officials is in fact subject to the authority of the land owner in his domain the latter considers his lucky funding to be outside of the jurisdiction of the state and he disregards completely the civil rights of the people who live within his property he collects excise taxes grants monopolies and imposes sanctions restricting the liberty of the labourers and their families within the hacienda transportation business and even customs are controlled by the landlord and frequently the huts that he rents to the labourers do not differ greatly from the sheds that formerly served as slave quarters this situation was also irrevocably linked to the status of indigenous peoples most landless rural peasants were indigenous and most indigenous people were landless rural peasants while peru has since changed a lot maria tegi's land thesis still accurately describes parts of the country even today and it was even more relevant in the decades leading up to the civil war in the 60s abimel guzman alias gonzalo a white peruvian from an upper class background was a philosophy professor at the university of omanga in the rural majority indigenous province of ayakucho guzman had joined the communist party that mariategi founded in the early 1960s soon after he married augusta latorre a woman from a rich land-owning gamonel family after the sino-soviet split of 1963 the party divided and guzman quickly emerged as the leader of the pro-chinese faction a position that was solidified by a trip to china where he trained with the communist party this is where the shining path name comes from the chinese faction were called the communist party of peru shining path to differentiate them from what soon became many other groups also laying claim to the name communist party of peru it comes from shining path the party's newspaper which itself took its name from a mariatei quote from this leadership position guzman grew a large base of followers among the university's student body and teaching staff as gustavo goriti wrote his objective was clear to use the university to recruit educate organize and subsidize the growth of communist cadres guzman had the university create a teacher training school that was staffed mostly by communist party members or sympathizers those students who became early recruits proved an ideal way to forge a relationship with their towns and communities many would return home to lay the groundwork for revolutionary work guzman's recruits had very legitimate grievances tied to the problems identified by mariategi to these students some of whom would have been the first in their families to ever have access to university the appeal of guzman's knowledge of mouse fury which emphasized the role of the peasantry is very easy to understand it's no surprise that soon enough guzman was followed by dozens of admirers everywhere he went but this would become a huge problem guzman intentionally cultivated relished in and took advantage of the personality cult that so quickly formed around him paying little more than lip service to mao's idea of the mass line that revolutionary leaders need to serve and be informed by the masses first and foremost he took the exact opposite approach he would inform the masses and they would adhere to his line or face the consequences the party's official program is the best example of this it says the peruvian proletariat in the midst of the class struggle has generated the leadership of the revolution and its highest expression the great leadership of chairman gonzalo they just outright kind of say it there the highest possible expression of revolutionary leadership is this one singular man he is the living avatar of the proletariat he is the ideology he is the party it continues gonzalo handles revolutionary theory and has a knowledge of history and a profound understanding of the practical movement who through hard two-line struggle has defeated revisionism the right and left liquidationism the right opportunist line and rightism he has reconstituted the party leads it in the people's war and has become the greatest living marxist leninist maoist a great political and military strategist a philosopher a teacher of communists and the center of party unity our party has defined that leadership is key and it is the duty of all militants to constantly work to defend and preserve the leadership of the party and very especially the leadership of chairman gonzalo our great leadership against any attack inside or outside the party and to subject ourselves to his personal leadership by raising the slogans of learn from chairman gonzalo and embody gonzalo fort okay so basically guzman is the smartest and most perfect human being ever in history no one else needs to think or theorize or anything he'll handle all of it he is a superhero who has defeated all of the evils in the world and we must all coalesce not just around his ideas but around his person specifically we must very especially defend him at all costs and ensure that we subject ourselves to his personal leadership it sounds like a very very uncharitable parody of what conservatives think communists are like but no it's the actual real official party program it's so unhinged that i thought it might have been fake so i double checked and it is real it's right there on the website of the shining paths official magazine after seeing that last excerpt it probably won't surprise you that guzman also went as far as canonizing himself as the equal of all of the other big well-known marxist theorists like how mouse theories are called mao zedong fought he called his gonzalo fort the latest culmination of the ideas of all of those had come before him effectively deeming himself as the sixth face on the famous image of communist fearest heads oh and there's also witnesses who say that they were forced to replace part of their worship of jesus with worship of gonzalo you can take that with a grain of salt if you want but it really doesn't sound out of character besides this ludicrous cult of personality that went far beyond any that i've ever seen guzman's other key method of centering everything around himself was an utterly fanatical adherence to sectarianism for him anyone outside of the shining path was to be opposed if you didn't submit to him specifically you were his enemy that didn't just mean right wingers liberals and other capitalists but also other leftists and not just non-marxist leftists but also other marxists and even other followers of mao anyone who did not specifically join his group and adhere to his doctrine threatened the primacy of his personal leadership and thus was just as much of an enemy as the capitalists were even if they were the very indigenous peasants that he claimed to want to liberate cynthia mcclintock summarized how the rest of peru's left saw the shining path sendero is certain that it is the sole repository of marx's truth for the rest of peru's marxist left the dogmatic sectarianism of shining path is an especially serious error the left believes that shining paths dogmatism transforms it into a type of fundamentalist religious sect where absolute truth is opposed by absolute falsehood this sectarianism is so extreme that other marxists are frequent targets of shining path this also extended internationally they were no less hostile to international communist governments such as those of cuba the ussr albania you name it than they were to those of professed capitalists like the usa for example guzman hated che guevara and said that castro's cuba was an advanced bourgeois state and after deng took over in china it became another big target of the rio there was no room for alliances no room for common ground no room for compromise regardless of how inconsequential the disagreements really were you kneeled before guzman or you were his enemy this is a pattern that can be seen even from those early university campus days long before the shining path became the infamous guerrilla group that they're known as today in 1965 a guerrilla insurgency inspired by the cuban revolution surfaced in peru including in the shining paths native ayakucho a reaction to the failure of the elected liberal president milan de terry to implement promised reforms the shining path were pressured to help their comrades but guzman argued vehemently against lending them any support for him just like castro's cuba they were bourgeois and that since ties between cuba and maoist china had recently weakened no group inspired by cuba deserved their solidarity while some shining path members left to join the insurgency guzman remained firm he was the sole holder of the correct line and others were to fall in line behind him guzman also abused his personality cult in more petty matters luis kawata one of his most loyal commanders in the early days was purged from the party for sleeping with a woman who guzman considered to be one of his personal lovers even though he was already married to someone else kawata had never deviated from guzman's doctrine and even remained loyal to him and the party for decades following his expulsion but that wasn't enough even personal slights against guzman's honor could not be tolerated and in 1988 his wife who had been the organization's second in command died in mysterious circumstances it's theorized that guzman had her killed which seems likely given that his lover who he would later marry immediately replaced his dead wife as deputy in 1968 the armed forces staged a coup against terry's government partly because they wrongly believed the 1965 insurgency to still be ongoing and they thought that his government was not doing enough to combat it it looked like they were going to install a right-wing military dictatorship like those in other south american countries at the time but to everyone's surprise they did the opposite general juan velasco who became the regime's dictator didn't crack down on leftists as was expected rather he actually immediately gave amnesty to the very gorillas that he had fought against releasing them from prison without charges they also again to everyone's surprise pursued a left-wing program inviting leftist intellectuals of all stripes to advise the government and undertaking one of the broadest programs of nationalization in latin american history dozens of industries were nationalized and monopolized by the state including oil telecommunications and electricity they also carried out a very ambitious land reform program designed to address the very problems faced by the rural and indigenous community that mariategi had identified they even expelled the us military and intelligence services from peru and sought improved relations with the ussr velasco's government was undoubtedly a dictatorship but nonetheless quickly became very popular for taking actions that elected reformist liberals like terry had dragged their feet on it was critically supported by practically all of the peruvian left along with cuba and the ussr even china still led by mao at the time established cordial diplomatic relations and advised peruvian maoists to avoid violent actions for the time being but guzman rather than joining in with everyone else instead saw this government as a huge threat to the shining path's goal of spurring a revolution with himself at the head so he denounced it as fascist and attacked practically all other leftists in the country for cooperating with it even as it became widely believed that the cia was plotting to overthrow velasco the shining path still remained resolute in their opposition and actively tried to sabotage his government they were so vitriolic that some others among the contemporary left believed the shining path to be a caa front hell bent on dividing them to enable velasco's overthrow luckily for them velasco was overthrown by a different right-wing military faction in 1975 that undertook the same sort of reactionary program that had originally been feared including cooperation with the other far-right dictatorships of the region this event gave the shining path the opening that they needed to gain more recruits it's no coincidence that this is also the year where they finally abandoned their previous base at the university of omonga and began preparing to launch a violent revolution this right-wing dictatorship ruled until 1980 when it finally gave up power and allowed elections their counter-revolution had left the electoral left in shambles so bolande teddy was able to return with his liberal program and winning a landslide the year before guzman had been arrested in the capital lima but at that point there was little to no evidence of any wrongdoing so he was quickly released this arrest was perhaps convenient it showed guzman that he needed to go into hiding as soon the state would have no shortage of charges to pin him with the shining path didn't exactly have a great reputation during this period aside from the perception of guzman being a cia agent the actions that they took while preparing to launch the armed struggle made them appear as comically disconnected from reality in peru the best example of this was when they hung dead dogs from lampposts alongside signs that denounce deng xiaoping for revisionism in china which i'm sure the peruvian masses cared a whole lot about but in spite of these perceived eccentricities that soon rise very quickly from 1975 to 1980 they had been quietly growing their influence in various small towns in ayakucho effectively replacing whatever tiny presence the state had there and challenging the latifun distas who despite the land reforms of velasco still control parts of the countryside regardless of their inflexibility their sectarianism and the atrocities that they would later commit it's not hard at all to understand why they were able to gain influence there without yet needing much of the coercion that would later become a hallmark they were the only group getting out there and engaging with these communities that also had a wider goal to rapidly recruit combatants willing or otherwise for a revolution that would cease control of peru while turning these isolated rural towns into integral parts of the revolutionary army supply chain recruiting for a revolution isn't something that's bad by itself at all actually it's very good where it does become kinda grotesque though is in the way they went about it the shining path indoctrinated people into believing that their life was something that needed to be and should be sacrificed in a way that was very similar to modern islamist extremists the party's own official program doesn't mince words on the subject thus the new power passing through the bloodbath develops the people's committees which are being tempered in hard battles against the enemy watered by the blood of the masses of peasants of the fighters and of militants death was not seen merely as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of their struggle rather it was something absolutely necessary something to be relished in celebrated sort out and not just for combatants either they list peasants fighters and militants all separately all of them needed to contribute their blood to the blood bath guzman himself spoke frequently of the quota meaning a quota of peasant blood that must be met for the good of the revolution this is the quota the stamp of our revolution of the world revolution is wetted with the blood of the people that runs through our country this quota of blood did not just refer to the fact that inevitably people die in war and that those who do happen to die should have their sacrifice on it rather it was absolutely integral people needed to be sacrificed the quota could not be allowed to go unfulfilled the basic principle of war annihilate the enemy's basic force and preserve our own we do not support absolute preservation since this is tied to the problem of the quota we promise to face down the bloodbath there is no one who fails to feel the bloodshed by the people's children the quota is necessary they have not died their hearts live and beat within us the message there is clear even if the lives of the masses could be preserved they should not be their deaths are actually desirable necessary if all of that's not enough well let me throw in this shining path song that was used to make peasants comfortable with the idea of dying to fulfill the quota at the exit of aokayaku there is a body whose is it surely a peasant who gave their life for the struggle the quota must be fulfilled now we have to give our blood it would be so good to give our blood for the revolution so a central leadership made up entirely of light-skinned elites who demanded subservience specifically to one bourgeois white man while encouraging their darkest-skinned rank-and-file to embrace death and defend said white man at all costs who of course would not put himself at any risk the shining path replicated the rigid social hierarchy of race and class of the very social order that they claimed to want to overthrow peru was clearly a ripe theater for revolution full of more than enough injustices to drive its marginalized peasants and workers towards violence especially with the very recent overthrow of a government that was taking actions to benefit them otherwise obviously a civil war of such scale could never have broken out but the way that the shining path took advantage of this righteous discontent to try and convert people into fanatical followers who pledged themselves to one specific person and who were ready and willing to give up their own lives for a quota of blood that he deemed must be fulfilled yeah that may not have been the best way to go about it and it gets worse you'll soon see on may 17 1980 the beginning of the shining paths armed insurgency was symbolically signaled by the burning of ballot boxes in a small town in ayakucho the timing of this to coincide with the return of civilian government was no coincidence that calculated that a newly elected government dealing with all the complexities of a democratic transition would be much easier to confront than a military one they were probably right largely unarmed in the beginning they started out by raiding mines and stealing dynamite from which they were able to stock up on more conventional weapons in this way they gradually arm themselves without any support from a foreign power or even other domestic parties all of whom that long since alienated with their sectarianism over the next couple of years the shining path gained significant influence across the countryside the weak or non-existent state presence in most areas allowed them to easily take over effective control of dozens of villagers at most they just had to kill or expel a couple of local policemen and that was it and the fact that they weren't being taken seriously by pretty much anyone actually ended up helping them adding the fact that bolande terry's government didn't trust the military who had you know just recently run a dictatorship so he was apprehensive about using them for an internal matter they were not deployed until the end of 1981 and it was really a perfect storm that allowed the shining path near free reign over the countryside but there was hardly no resistance maria tegi wrote his analysis five decades earlier and a lot had changed since in many places the hacienda system had been broken up by velasco's land reform the second largest in latin american history far more peasants now own their own land rather than laboring or renting from the gamonales and so many feudal landlords had been stripped of their power and peru had also become incredibly urban it was not like the china of the civil war era where 90 of the population was rural or the peru of the 1920s where the peasant class was still the majority by 1980 only 36 percent of peruvians still lived rurally but the shining path at least early on didn't adapt to these changes and so their modus operandi in every town was similar first they would entice students to join them at the various universities in the region then when those students returned home they'd work on softening up their town so to speak so that the population would be more predisposed to accept the organization when it finally arrived to establish direct control once they did establish direct control they would identify people as damonales or exploiters and arrest them along with the local authorities then they would publicly execute them and redistribute their land and wealth that also make promises to the population like that the military would not last long against them and swearing to defend the peasants if they showed up sometimes in places where the feudal lord still ruled this worked and the population willingly became supporters they had been stuck under the foot of the gamonales forever so the shining paths of rival and control legitimately improve their circumstances and their promises of protection and a better future won them over as supporters they found a fairly significant number of willing recruits from 1980 to 1983 it's estimated that they grew in number from an initial 200 to 300 to around 3 thousand but in other instances where the gamona estates had actually been dismantled they ended up wrongly identifying popular community leaders as gamonales and executing them against the protests of the residents they also didn't quite keep their promises in particular when the military or police showed up shining path members would often flee leaving the residents who they'd promised to protect defenseless as the state abused and killed them for being collaborators as you might expect these practices didn't exactly help them to win over the residence and the way that they imposed their rule with pervasive restrictions on the population and executions for even the most minor of slights didn't really help either the most infamous example of this happened in the town of lucana marca and it resulted in the shining paths most well-known massacre it's important to go into great detail regarding just what happened in lucanamarca because it's an emblematic example of a scenario that played out many times more in many other towns and because what happened there is often distorted because of this i have taken great care in reconstructing the course of events based on extensive corroborating eyewitness testimonies and physical evidence lucana marca is a small town in a district that is also called lu kanamarka in the province of juan casankos ayakucho located about 10 hours from the shining past original base at the university of omanga the entire district had a population of about 2500 with 500 or so in the town in question most of the population were indigenous peasants residents described the district as having benefited greatly from velasco's land reform so most farms were communal or owned by the people who worked them they were doubtlessly still poor but the landlordism that was fundamental to the control of the gamonales had been abolished there was no permanent police presence in the kanamarka the only presence that the state had there was occasional visits from the sinchies a heavily armed police anti-narcotics unit that had arrived in ayakucho to fight the shining path in 1981. the sinchis were incredibly corrupt and accountable to no one they would show up unannounced demand money and food from the residents then leave and if their demands were not met people would be punished with beatings until they were there was no one to complain to no one to ask for help what they said went this was the perfect situation for a revolutionary group to step in provide protection and be met with a receptive audience the peasants were already living very communally that already seen how this sort of thing could benefit them under the velasco government and they were actively being abused by state agents but still the shining path forced itself upon them after a number of previous shorter visits in december 1982 armed cadres arrived in santiago de la cana and definitively implanted themselves as the new local authorities declaring it to be a liberated zone free of state control initially most residents were supportive of their presence but this changed rapidly countless testimonies outlined the pervasive control that the shining path imposed on people's lives they forced people including children to join them restricted parties and gatherings including for traditional holidays banned peasants from leaving their farms in towns without permission impeded their ability to work and the trade that they'd relied on to survive yet they nonetheless lived off the town's harvest while doing no work themselves in lucana marca in the sendero times almost everyone was controlled they didn't let you leave your farm or travel to other places you could only leave the town with their authorization in those times they didn't let us work or take care of our livestock in the sendero times there were no celebrations they themselves celebrated carnival without the presence of the residents they sang songs against the state like down with the reactionary government yay for comrade gonzalo the next president i was 13 years old they made me join them they did so by force that take us to a room at 6 00 pm and teach us things like how to kill how to attack a town how to defend yourself with weapons all of those things they didn't teach us to express ourselves rather just to praise comrade gonzalo parties were very restricted you had to ask for authorization to hold customary celebrations they didn't work they only ate our food for example they stole our corn our potatoes and demanded money the sendero leaders did nothing around here in the afternoons they would just disappear they were the owners of the town no one could speak against them if they did they would be killed put onto the blacklist it was terrifying they forced the women to prepare food for everyone the people who didn't want to participate in their actions were considered disobedient snitches they would punish you by cutting your hair if you didn't attend their meetings in the plaza they said this is how we punish the disobedient the blackheads and the snitches as discontent quickly rose the shining path rapidly got harsher and harsher they executed multiple residents under flimsy pretexts like petty theft or for disagreeing with their flyers on the 29th of january 1983 just one month after arriving they killed the local justice of the peace leonardo misako it was for pretty much the most pity of reasons imaginable he had complained that they prohibited the town's anniversary celebration they killed mr leonardo mesaco because he spoke up about the town's anniversary he said who are you punks how can you prohibit our anniversary you have no right to appropriate our community's customs for yourselves that was all that the poor man said the shining path marked him for that the next day they called a meeting of everyone in the plaza and they took him from his house and dragged him there by his hands first they whipped him and he said what did i do to deserve being whipped i was drunk i could have said anything you can't whip me just for that then they shot and killed him i screamed saying oh my god and one of them turned and said to me shut up idiot we stopped screaming out of fear a teacher who witnessed the execution describes the same scene i was there with all of my primary school students we all had to go without exception we were all scattered around in a circle you could not disobey we had to listen to everything or they would not allow us to work maybe they even would have killed us soon after on the 17th of february the shining path killed the huang kahari family marciano 74 his wife wulochia 69 and their son-in-law teofilo they branded them as gamonales to justify the massacre but in reality it was revenge for a land dispute that long predated the sunderlo's arrival the shining path had installed the koritome brothers olagario nikonor and gilbert as their authorities in mukanamarka the three of them were locals allegario had been a student at a nearby university and while there he had joined the shining path their family had a long-standing grudge with the ankaratis over the ownership of a ranch both families were of similar wealth which is to say not much one witness notes the karita mays did this because the wankaaris had appropriated a property from them a ranch named kapiyayok this was an intergenerational dispute and a very complicated one at that the families were actually cousins oligario's full name was olagario koritome the fact that he used his position to resolve a long-standing community rivalry with murder is a great example of how the sudden arrival of the shining path in these isolated communities revived old disputes and divided people along those lines much more than political ones in a few other towns in the district people had already begun rebelling against shining path rule the killings of the wankaari family leonardo misaiko and others and the abusive authoritarian rule that had suddenly been imposed on them spurred the residents of luke kanamarka to take action too the people realized that the shining path was hurting the population the local judge said how are we going to live if they're just going to kill our people like this they will kill us all the only option that we have left is to rebel or capture them and deliver them as prisoners for this he was marked by the senderos so he slept far away in the caves he didn't show up any more in town after the death of the one guardi family we started to organize ourselves we met one night very quietly and agreed that we would rebel we organized ourselves because of the death of juan cardi but we had to wait for the right moment because we already knew that the senderos were going to execute more farmers and they were going to destroy a farm with 18 residents we agreed to capture and eliminate those subversives only the leaders though not the others first they tried to organize watches among themselves for self-defense but the shining path quickly found out about it and organized the public executions of the conspirators the senderos had called a meeting in the plaza on february 24th 1983. it was known that at this meeting they were going to execute the residents who had organized the watches when the residents realized this they sought help from the sinchies yup the same cops with a history of abusing them the shining path was so abusive and had failed so badly at endearing themselves towards that purported base that they pushed a bunch of peasants towards seeking help from awful thug cops one witness testified the people organized themselves and rebelled against the shining path in the kanamarka there was going to be a trial in the kanamarka where they were going to kill five people one of the town's people who knew about this travelled all the way to another town where some sinchies were stationed he said this can't be allowed to happen how many people are going to die here we need to ask for help we had already agreed that if there were going to be more executions we would tell the sinchies so he went and said to them today there's going to be a public trial and many people are going to die we ask you to help us the sinchies didn't believe him but he begged and so they told him that they would only come on one condition if they were not senderos for them to kill he would be killed instead that's how badly these people were stuck between a rock and a hard place they had to beg for help from unaccountable state agents who'd abused them plenty in the past and who seemed to have considered killing to be some sort of game he is one of the residents describing just how awful the situation [Music] was [Music] at the meeting on february 24th where the shining path planned to execute those who had tried to organize against them the sinchies arrived unexpectedly one witness gives an account of their entry showing how they were not exactly on the side of the residence when the sinchies were entering by a car someone informed the shining path and they fled the town the sinchis arrived closed the plaza and told everyone to leave then they asked where the terrorists were and said you have lied to us if you don't want to die bring them to us now we told them that this henders had already left we were afraid that the sinchies were going to kill us they responded here all of you are senderos and you will die now if you don't bring them to us another resident corroborates this [Music] mate the residents then directed the sinchies towards the sanderos and after a firefight between the two groups various senderos were killed soon afterwards on march 10th community leaders from lukana marca met with those of other villages in the district but had also rebelled against the shining part there they agreed to track down and arrest the local shining path leaders of whom they believed allah guardio to be the head on the 21st of march one of their patrols found and captured a laguardio in the mountains near town the community had become so divided that even one of oligario's own brothers baldomiro was involved in his capture the next day when word got out that allah guardia was being held prisoner residents took him to the plaza where he was brutally executed [Music] two weeks later on april 3 1983 around 60 shining path members arrived at lucana marca intending to annihilate its entire population in retaliation for the rebellion against them and the killing of oligardio they targeted two nearby farms and the town itself using machetes axes and firearms by the end of the day that murdered 69 people 18 were children under the age of 10 the youngest was 6 months old of the adults eight victims were elderly and 11 were women some of them pregnant more than half of the victims were incapable of defending themselves and represented no threat to perpetrators i'll let the survivors themselves [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] the autopsies of the victim's remains confirmed the eyewitness testimonies it was determined that the causes and methods of death of the 69 victims completely fits with witness testimonies the locations and trajectories of the wounds in all of the victims indicate that they were likely attacked while in an inferior position to the attackers and in a situation of defenselessness abimel guzman admitted in a 1988 interview with the shining puff's own newspaper that the attack had been planned and ordered by the central committee itself that is to say him his description of it is totally disconnected from reality he began by saying in the face of reactionary military actions and the use of armed patrols we responded with a devastating action lucana marca neither they nor we have forgotten it to be sure because they got an answer that they didn't imagine possible he saw the massacre at lucana marca as some sort of action against a military target rather than well a massacre of normal peasants including 18 children under the age of 10 like it actually was his mention there of armed patrols was a common justification that the shining path used to deem anyone they killed as effectively being a combatant whether it was true or not so let's stop for a second and talk about that the historical record that we just went over clearly shows that the residents of lokanamata organized themselves and any interaction that they had with state agents was apprehensive at best considering that they were threatened with summary execution by them in multiple instances that i cited at the time some isolated farming towns did already have what were known as rondas campesinos which translates as peasant patrols small groups of armed peasant militiamen with centuries of history but these groups were technically illegal and had nothing to do with the state in fact their primary purpose was something that the shining path should have approved of to protect peasant communities that had been abandoned by the state multiple governments including the one at the time of the massacre were actually hostile towards them and treated them deplorably lucana marca was not one of those towns that had pre-existing rondas they apparently weren't needed there since commonalism had already been dismantled the army did later in 1983 start encouraging peasants to form their own rondas though at the time they didn't actually do anything to help them do so and to be frank in the face of what had just happened in lokanamata it's perfectly understandable why indigenous peasants in isolated towns would have been terrified and tried to organize to defend themselves and that they did so is hardly a justification for mass murder the rendezvoir later finally officially supported by the state in 1985 while the government was undoubtedly hoping that they would become allies against the shining path and many rondas did fight them along with committing some very terrible atrocities of their own in reality their campaign for official recognition dated back decades long before the conflict was ever on the horizon for the shining path this state approval only served to legitimize the flimsy accusations that they'd already been using to execute whoever they wanted and all of that is irrelevant to lucana marca as it happened in april of 1983. let's get back to guzman's interview at lucana marca more than 80 were annihilated that is the truth and we say openly that there were excesses as was analyzed in 1983 but everything in life has two aspects our task was to deal a devastating blow in order to put them in check to make them understand that it was not going to be easy on some occasions like that one it was the central leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions that's how it was in that case the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people's fighters that we weren't the same as those that they had fought before this is what they understood excesses can be committed the problem is to go to a certain point and not beyond it because if you go past that point you go off course it's like an angle it can be opened up to a certain point and no further so guzman openly admitted his authorship of the massacre and he was if anything very proud of it he actually exaggerated the death toll i guess because for him that makes it sound more impressive and apparently thinks that it was a devastating blow to who exactly a bunch of indigenous peasants in an isolated village he clearly had an image of them in his mind as like literal soldiers in the army or something that's the only way that his assertions could make sense at that point he already seems to have been detached from whatever humanity he might have had the way he talks euphemistically to diminish the severity of what happened as merely in excess really shows that and even worse he concludes asserting that the problem with these excesses is just that you go off course that's all you know the only issue with a massacre is that it derails the plan yep to finish up on the marker the day after the massacre the residents killed ola guardio's parents in retaliation believing that they had asked the shining path to carry out the massacre in the space of about five months the shining path's arrival had just totally destroyed this isolated community they turn neighbor against neighbor taking advantage of pre-existing divisions and creating new ones and outright murdering people leaving a legacy of nothing more than death and suffering in a town full of peasants the very base of people that they were supposed to appeal to and serve the town is still irreversibly marked by what happened there in just the space of a few months back in 1983. practically every resident bears scars physical or mental lokanamarka is just one example of how the shining path contributed to the utter devastation of so much of central and southern peru you can't just walk into a neighborhood and immediately expect everyone to kneel to your rule and adhere to your standards and start killing people if they don't but that's what they did and they did it time and time again by the end of the conflict they committed 216 massacres many of them in similar situations peruvian filmmaker carlos gadenas summarized this all beautifully the shining path thought they were sparing a class war but in reality they were attacking an incredibly poor impoverished sector of society although there were some economic and social differences they all formed part of the same group trapped in poverty for generations the shining path came and created contradictions that didn't previously exist and fueled hatred between families that had at worst very old disputes over land and rather than like before where these disputes would be resolved through dialogue or judicially or perhaps be left unresolved the shining path put guns into people's hands bullets into their holsters and had them kill each other they spurred familial generation and neighborhood confrontations and definitively destroyed the country's social fabric rather than engaging in a war against the bourgeoisie the shining path more than anything pit people of the absolute lowest class status against one another so who are they actually and how popular were they there's not any super concrete data to those respects but the data that we do have shows an image very different to the one that they project at their very peak in 1992 the shining path is estimated to have had about 4 000 armed fighters and 50 000 supporters now those are certainly pretty high numbers but not that high even for example when weighed solely against the population of their home province ayakucho which had a population of nearly 500 000 in 1993 that's still nowhere near a majority and weighed against the nation's total population of 22 million and yeah they certainly did have the numbers to put serious pressure on the state and they did exactly that but that alone is hardly enough to claim that they represented the people they clearly didn't which makes sense considering just how many of the people they alienated 600 000 were displaced by the violence in just 10 years additionally i've seen figures thrown around like the shining path controlled 40 or 60 percent of the national territory this is very reductive in actual fact they were active in about 60 percent of it most of peru is very sparsely populated and couldn't really be said to have been under anyone's control so the notion that they control that much territory even with only three thousand to four thousand fighters is more than a little bit generous and even if we're very very generous and pretend that they did most of the population lived in cities that were very much not under their control peru was already highly urbanized at the beginning of the conflict with 64 living in cities and that had increased to 70 percent by 1992. anyway so whether someone was a supporter still doesn't give us a great sense of the opinion of the general population unfortunately there's no polls from the era that are simple questions like do you approve of the shining path or things like that there is one poll though of the urban poor in lima which asked whether respondents thought that the shining path punished the corrupt referring to their practice of assassinating people in lima's poor neighborhoods who ran local institutions to help the poor like soup kitchens or free milk programs on flimsy allegations of corruption the results showed that 32 percent for that they did while 41 did not and 25 didn't answer 32 is certainly a significant amount but it's a question about them acting as judge jury and executioner in poor people's neighborhoods ostensibly on their behalf and significantly more said no they're not that says quite a lot as their very claim to legitimacy rests on them representing the masses one might argue that since this pole was urban it's unfair to the shining path but lima had been mostly isolated from the worst of the shining paths atrocities while in rural areas the shining path were responsible for more atrocities than the state this situation was reversed in lima where the state murdered 2 000 people to their 800. in the capital the center of state control its repressive apparatuses were at their maximum efficiency and they were set loose on an incredibly dense population so i would argue that they would actually be more likely to perceive the shining path positively than rural people would and yet the senderos still weren't very popular and regarding the demographics of the organization the best indication that we have are surveys of shining path prisoners 29 of them have an indigenous first language which is significantly higher than the 19 of the general population but when you consider that they projected an image of a rural indigenous peasant base and recruited mostly from rural areas where they were also the most active this is actually a really low percentage inayakucho the center of their activity and their home province 64. of people speak quechua natively compared to 36 percent who speak native spanish so they're not very representative of the masses there so overall they're not quite what they were made out to be this was no simple peasant rebellion if anything the peasants rebelled against them much more than they were receptive i've glossed over a lot of the timeline here because frankly this video is already way too long and taking a close look at the organization itself is far more important than simply providing a dry chronological outline of what happened so i'm going to skip forward to 1992 a year in which a whole lot happened the shining path at that time was about at their strongest the government had become a full-blown dictatorship in response and its oppression was very much institutionalized it got even worse after the torata bombing in july where the shining path car bombed the busy limey intersection targeting civilians and killing 25 of them but it wasn't the state's best yield repression and terror that would bring the shining path down it was rather just old-fashioned detective work a special police unit tipped off by a former shining path member checked the garbage produced by an apartment in tokyo one of lima's most upscale neighborhoods it was producing more trash than it should have for the number of residents that it officially had they found medication for psoriasis a skin condition that guzman was known to have which was used as justification to get a warrant they then raided the apartment and he was there that was it there's so much about this that's just mind-boggling journalists had known since the 80s that guzman had a medical condition that made it practically impossible for him to live at high altitudes making it obvious that he had to be hiding out somewhere along the coast it was no secret it's part of why he left his professorship back in the 70s it had also long been known that the shining path was pretty much completely dependent on him i mean just from reading their own documents that much is clear yet rather than pursuing a strategy to track him down based off his information they terrorized and mass murdered people for more than a decade and how about the ridiculousness of the people's army pretty much just crumbling as soon as he was gone if ever the term cult of personality is adequate it's for an organization that claims to have been an unstoppable force representative of the masses but that was so dependent on one specific person that his capture swiftly resulted in their near-complete downfall shining path activity immediately dropped substantially eventually leading to the status quo of today where the organization numbers in the low hundreds all in all the shining path sucked peru in the 80s was ripe for a revolutionary movement that truly centered the masses that treated them with respect and humanity and instead it got a white savior with a god complex who led a terror campaign that utterly decimated them and aside from killing every other leftist who they came across also completely destroyed the credibility of the left in the country there's nothing good about them nothing to learn nothing to take away unless you need a precedent to tell you that it's wrong to mass murder the most downtrodden people in society i guess so during this video i haven't really talked about what the state did nor about alberto fujimori the most notorious criminal president in peruvian history he was a dictator at the time of guzman's capture he was the one who paraded guzman in that ridiculous prisoner outfit that you see in the intro i just realized looks kind of like this that was an accident by the way and he also took full credit for guzman's capture even though he had nothing to do with it and that's because well this video is already incredibly long so yeah i'm gonna have to make another one just for what the state did and particularly about fujimori when that'll be out i don't know to be honest this video has been very deflating it's not exactly a fun topic to deal with i haven't enjoyed writing it i haven't enjoyed researching it i haven't enjoyed filming it so before i tackle more of it i'm gonna need a bit of a mental break but until then i hope you at least find a little bit of solace in the fact that both guzman and fujimori are currently in prison hopefully for life for their crimes i'm gonna finish this with one more victim's testimony a very very famous one one that i think perfectly captures what the conflict was victims often note that they couldn't tell a difference between the shining path the military and of actors to many of them they were all just foreigners it was almost like they were in the middle of a war between two foreign occupying powers and no one has put that feeling into words better than primitivo kispi a victim of the military's massacre in nakamata in 1985 a town just 50 kilometers east of lucanamarca aquino thank you very much for watching this video which took me like an entire month to make if you liked it consider subscribing and checking out my other videos and if you really liked it and you've got the money to burn you could support me on patreon send me a one-time tip on kofi or become a member on youtube now i'd just like to thank all of my patrons and especially my 25 plus patrons tonga puruto neha super pancake man furta han jessie hosick robert dilling chubb pot a big mean cat mischief and finns dusty benny g brosnan and my 10 plus patrons nico del sesto diego assalvati industrial robot cincinnati brescigal aldrin lane thorne violet reign momoshin one trash boy marimer young trotsky crouton and baguette christopher strom insergente jess giles alcoin evan rothwell and jesse zaleski thank you bye

Channel: BadEmpanada

Views: 77,084

Rating: 4.8340321 out of 5

Keywords: PCP-SL, pcp

Id: OHqJDs3OuhQ

Length: 63min 43sec (3823 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Jmoterrab]

Excelent video. I just realized that groups like sendero luminoso still have copy cats in much of Latin America

[u/DefenderCone97]

As someone who loves crazy cults and stuff, this was a pretty insane episode to listen to. Pretty terryfing group.