International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 70

The Shining Path: An Important Resource for Terrorism Studies
called a discipline) whose conditions of production (in civil and military research
centers, private and not-so-private businesses, and, more rarely, in universities) are
often dependent on implicit political requirements. 3 We should take into account
first and foremost databases, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, and
potentially also anthologies, handbooks, and histories of terrorism.
Using this analytical framework, we can now assess some recent publications
on the SP, not in general terms, but in terms of their value for understanding
terrorism—that is, by relating them to the major works that provide, in some
sense, a baseline for specialized research on the question.
Most recent contributions have looked at the history of the Shining Path. In
particular, these include a new attempt at a general overview (Ríos and Sánchez
2018), which offers only a few novel contributions, in spite of the considerable
number of sources and texts now accessible. To understand its scope, we can use
the following periodization of the SP’s history, at least as a working hypothesis:
1. 1960s–May 17, 1980. Ideological and organizational construction of the SP.
2. May 17, 1980–end of 1982. Partial takeover of the rural Andes, centered
on the Ayacucho region, through attacks on the (few) police stations in
the area, and the selective assassination of local state officials and common
law criminals. The Peruvian state, which was in the midst of a democratic
transition, underestimated the insurgency. The police were tasked with repressing
it but proved ill-equipped and poorly motivated. To a large extent,
attempts to terrorize them succeeded.
3. 1983–mid-1980s. The intervention of the army. Its approach was inadequate,
and its practices sometimes amounted to state terrorism. The SP expanded
toward the northern Andes, urban centers, and the coca/cocaine-producing
zones of the Upper Huallaga Valley (a zone of ceja de monte in the eastern
Andes, whose valleys are part of the Amazon system).
4. 1985–September 12, 1992. The SP gradually loses influence in rural Andean
regions, primarily because of peasant resistance. To a large extent, this involved
the establishment of rondas campesinas with the support of the army,
which was beginning to adopt counterinsurgency practices better suited to
the nature of the conflict and the physical and human geography of the regions.
At the same time, the SP’s strategy of encircling cities by occupying
the surrounding countryside led to an increase in its terrorist actions in cities,
and especially in Lima. This period ended with the capture of Abimael
Guzmán on September 12, 1992.
3 For an overview of English-language terrorism studies, see Schmid (2013). Studies in English far
outweigh those in any other language in terms of volume.
61