Customer Reviews

Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 (Latin America Otherwise)

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"Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980 - 1995," by Editor Steve J. Stern is a collection of essays that vividly documents a revolution that only brought suffering and death. This five-part book traces the roots of the Shining Path from its heady beginning to the conquest that failed.

Part One is dry. However, Part Two & Three generate much more interest. I found Ponciano del Pino, Nelson Manrique, Orin Starr, Jo-Marie Burt and Patricia Oliart the best of the bunch. They crystallized the subject...bringing it to life and provided stimulating insights.

Shining Path started in rural Ayacucho in the late 1970's and eventually made its way into the urban centers, particularly Villa El Salvador outside of Lima nearly ten years later. Initially Shining Path was ethical and moral. The Founding Father of the movement Professor Abimael Guzman instructed his Indian followers to punish adultery, alcoholism, vagrancy, robbery and cattle rustling. Moreover, the young flocked to the revolutionary rhetoric of a "people's war."

Early on the Shining Path maintained good ties with the peasants in the countryside. However, this did not last for long because in 1983 - 1984 the armed forces implemented a brutal "dirty war" that forced the guerrillas away from traditional regions of support and into new territory where they too used fear and intimidation tactics against the local peasant population.

Eventually, the Shining Path went out of control...conducting terrible massacres against unarmed civilians and forcing children into its ranks. The tide turned against the Shining Path with the 1990 election of President Alberto Fujimori. The new president accelerated the organization of self-defense groups among the unprotected peasant population with the distribution of shotguns, rifles and handguns.

The unfortunate part of the Shining Path revolution was that the poor were trapped in violence from both sides. However, the true downfall of the Shining Path is that at the end they were nothing but ruthless terrorists who preyed on the poor.

Bert Ruiz

I have read many books on Sendero Luminoso. This is one of the best. Some of the contributers are genious. If you have any interest in the war in Peru from 1980 to 1995, you simply must read this book.

This book collects the thoughts of Peruvians and Peruvianists on the terrible decade of the 1980s - the most thorough and nuanced account of Sendero Luminoso I have read, with attention to many events in a variety of regions of the country. The reader really walks away with a sense of what this period was like for the people who lived through it.

stern does a great job in collecting essays that tell the story of the rise and fall of the shining path... I had mcuh fun reading this book.