Peru Shining Path History

Peru is a country long plagued by political violence. The Shining Path is by far the largest and most successful of Peru 's terrorist organizations. Shining Path initiated its first attacks against the Peruvian government in 1980. In the intervening years, it quickly became the most serious security situation that Peru faced. Few political movements, inside or outside of Peru, could match its fanaticism and extreme ideology. The Shining Path was extremely ruthless in its application of violence utilizing assassinations, car bombings, and arson as its instruments for political change. Few terrorist organizations have employed violence with the same determination, lack of discrimination and far-reaching effects as the Shining Path.

The

The study of Shining Path has been a topic of interest to many different scholars both in Peru and internationally for several decades. A large amount of research is committed to analyzing the origins of the Maoist terrorist organization in Peru. The study of Shining Path is critical in the understanding of the social and political compositions of modern Peru. The Shining Path began as a radical political movement in Ayacucho, Peru. The isolated geography allowed for peasant communities to work with local academics and other intellectuals to organize large quantities of indigenous people into an

The spread of communist and socialist ideas promising a social system where peasants would have the same opportunities as those in Lima was an extremely powerful one. Socialism and communism were seen as an alternate form of government that could end extreme social inequality and injustice against the indigenous peasant populations in Peru. (Stern, 1998) As such, understanding the ethnic and class dynamic is essential to understanding the spread of the Shining Path. Gustavo Gorriti states in his book, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, which Abimael Guzman took advantage of the social inequality and extreme economic disparities in Ayacucho to advance his cause. Gorriti goes on to affirm that the economic system in Peru together with unpredictable government institutions allowed Shining Path to expand and recruit like-minded people from the countryside to