International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 66

The Shining Path: An Important Resource for Terrorism Studies
the Shining Path pursued a strategy that sought to spark a civil war. Its death toll
during this period was around 35,000—an extremely high number, comparable,
for example, to that of the Sri Lankan LTTE or the Columbian FARC. In a second,
post-insurgency phase, the movement fractured into a number of groups that
carried out bombings, selective assassinations, ambushes, hostage-takings, and so
on. The death toll from these was far more modest, of the order of a few dozen
per year. Over the long term, however, they presented a nuisance, with numbers
comparable to those of failed insurgent groups like ETA (around 900 deaths), the
Red Brigades (around 360 deaths), the RAF/Baader-Meinhof Group (57 deaths),
Action Directe (12 deaths), or the FLQ in Quebec (1 death).
A contextual, geopolitical approach to terrorism allows us to better understand
what determines why some organizations that use this form of political violence
are more deadly than others and opens up avenues of thought that are very
relevant to current situations. In particular, we can enrich quantitative works like
that of Asal and Rethemeyer (2008), whose conclusions are difficult to generalize
due to the lack of reliable data.
First and foremost, however, the Shining Path—which began a “people’s
war” in Peru in 1980, and whose military and political avatars still exist today—is
a remarkable case study in terrorism. There are several reasons for this. First, the
movement’s origins date back to the 1960s, when the Sino-Soviet split led to a
clash within international communism between two very different strategic horizons.
One, taken by Russia, was founded on the ideal of peaceful coexistence.
The other was inspired by Maoist doctrines, including the idea that war could
be used to impose communism locally and/or globally. The Partido Comunista
del Perú-Sendero Luminoso emerged in the poor, isolated Andean region of Ayacucho.
Its leader was Abimael Guzmán, a former philosophy professor at the local
university, who came to be known as Presidente Gonzalo. It resulted from a series
of splits and purges, and its insurgent practices broke sharply (and violently) with
other groups on the Peruvian left, particularly the Maoist movement (Navarro
2010). The model of the “people’s war,” which combined rigid Maoist orthodoxy
with hints of Andean messianism, also differed from the various Latin American
adaptations of the Castro (or foco) model, associated with Che Guevara, theorized
at the time by Régis Debray (1967). By 1980, the Castro model had shown itself
to be practically ineffective, whether in the form of rural guerrilla warfare (Peru
in 1965, Bolivia in 1967, etc.) or urban guerrilla warfare (Tupamaros, the ERP in
Argentina, etc.) 1 Through the exceptional historical depth it offers, the Shining
Path provides a valuable opportunity for terrorism studies, since, over the course
of several decades, it made use of multiple forms of insurgent action, both violent
1 For primarily polemical reasons, such insurgencies have often been labelled “terrorist” (see, for
instance, Butler 1976). As we will see, by conflating them with guerrilla warfare, the distinctive
character of the genuine terrorist actions carried out by these organizations is diluted. This created
a lasting obstacle to properly understanding such actions.
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