Sendero Luminoso

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Communist Party of Peru
Partido Comunista del Perú
Flag of Sendero Luminoso.svg
Party leader Abimael Guzmán
Alignment Marxist-Leninist - Maoist
Colours) red
International connections Revolutionary internationalist movement

The Communist Party of Peru - on the Shining Path José Carlos Mariáteguis ( Spanish Partido Comunista del Perú - por el Sendero Luminoso de José Carlos Mariátegui ), better known as the Shining Path ( Sendero Luminoso ), is a Marxist-Leninist and Maoist party and guerrilla organization in Peru .

The organization emerged in the late 1960s from a student movement at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in the Peruvian Department of Ayacucho . The group's guerrilla activities sparked civil war-like conflicts in Peru that went on for over a decade, killing nearly 70,000 people, the majority of whom were Quechua-speaking rural populations.

The EU has the organization on its list of terrorist organizations .

Surname

The party refers in its name to the Peruvian politician, journalist and writer José Carlos Mariátegui , who died in 1930 and who founded the Partido Socialista del Perú , the successor organization of which is the Communist Party of Peru.

history

Sendero Luminoso first appeared in the late 1960s through political agitation at the University of Ayacucho. Its founder and leader, philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán , had toured China during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and under this impression began to gather supporters among the students. Ayacucho was one of the poorest provinces in Peru. The poor situation and poor development opportunities of the impoverished population in the Andean highlands and their meager living conditions were never fundamentally improved by the various governments in Lima. The opening of the education system in the 1970s raised high hopes for an improvement in the social situation among the predominantly indigenous population, but these were often disappointed: With an indigenous appearance and without the necessary relationships, one could often not find a job despite a university degree. This and the neglect of the highland regions gave the Sendero a certain approval when it went underground with a few attacks in the early 1980s. His political goal from the beginning was the complete overthrow of the existing social order through a people's war.

Armed fight

Areas in Peru with activities of the Sendero Luminoso (as of 2012)

While after the end of the military dictatorship in 1980, the majority of the left-wing parties joined forces in the Izquierda Unida (IU) alliance and took part in the elections, the Sendero Luminoso called for an election boycott and instead declared armed struggle. In contrast to many other guerrilla organizations, the Sendero did not go straight to combat, but first built an organization in secret. For several years fighters were recruited and organized in carefully planned cells. Guzmán, the leader of the movement, went underground and commanded the fighters through an ingenious network of couriers and dead mailboxes. It wasn't until these preparations were completed that they struck. In the spring of 1980, as one of the first actions, they burned the ballot boxes in a small village near Ayacucho. Attacks on police stations and villages followed. It is characteristic of the functioning of secrecy that these actions were initially not recognized by the government as coherent, but interpreted as isolated acts of sabotage. It was only relatively late, when the individual cells had long been involved in open combat, that the organization behind it was even noticed.

The first political incumbents to be murdered by the Shining Path included community leaders of Uchuraccay (Alejandro Huamán) and Waychao in Huanta Province in late 1982. On December 29, 1982, the provincial government declared a state of emergency and deployed military units in the area. The ideology and practice of the Senderists were of a radicalism that was previously unknown in Latin America. Abimael Guzmán, who let himself be called "Presidente Gonzalo", demanded absolute commitment to the cause. Since they lacked firearms, the rebels carried out their attacks mostly with explosives, which they made from stolen explosives and which often threw the projectiles with a sling at their victims or opponents. In addition, all sorts of cutting and stabbing weapons such as machetes or improvised spears were used.

In the areas controlled by Sendero, fighters were often recruited from the population. This happened partly under threat of violence, partly out of ideological conviction. For the army, on the other hand, every farmer in the highlands was considered a potential terrorist. In the remote regions of the mountainous country, there were numerous massacres of the mostly indigenous rural population. Both the guerrillas and the military punished the villagers' cooperation with their opponents. Numerous people were tortured, murdered or abducted. One of the massacres committed by Sendero Luminoso was that of April 3, 1983 against 69 farmers in Lucanamarca . In the course of 1983, 135 villagers died in Uchuraccay after a massacre of 9 journalists, 57 of them women, mostly by the Sendero Luminoso, some also by the Peruvian armed forces.

A preferred target of Shining Path assassinations were activists from the political left , including Cirilo Meza Porta , communist mayor of Tantamayo district ( Huánuco region ) on November 1, 1984 , Jorge Mungia of the Communist Youth in Huancayo on May 18, 1988 and on September 19, 1989 the communist Fermín Azparrent Taipe , Mayor of Huamanga (Ayacucho) for the Izquierda Unida . The acts of terrorism led to mass refugee movements from the affected regions to Lima. As a result, the Sendero expanded its radius of action more and more.

In Lima he controlled the slums with a dense network of informers and sympathizers, carried out bomb attacks, especially on the electricity supply, and assassinations of activists from other left-wing organizations; so was María Elena Moyano , a leader of the Municipality of Villa El Salvador , was assassinated on 15 February 1992 by Sendero Luminoso by a bomb attack. A major annoyance was the Maoists also in the times of terror especially in some Quechua -Gegenden Andean fast-growing Protestant churches, which is why the Shining Path carried out several brutal attacks against evangelical Christians, including a massacre of 31 service users a Pfingstlerkirche in Ccano in La Mar province in February 1990 and the murder of the pastor and translator of the Bible into Chanka-Quechua , Rómulo Sauñe Quicaña , in 1992.

By 1990 half of the country was already part of the Sendero Luminoso area.

Arrests and disarmament

Two years after his inauguration, Peru's President Alberto Fujimori launched a coup d'état against his own government with the help of the military. With the help of the secret service and the military as well as the arming of vigilante groups (Comités de Autodefensa) in the affected areas, but also through a policy of economic and social development, it finally succeeded in smashing the Sendero bit by bit. In addition, the military shifted from a policy of brutal repression, which often punished entire villages for allegedly supporting the guerrillas, to one that sought to convince the rural population of the cause of the government. For the first time, officers who spoke Quechua and were often dressed in the traditional clothing of the peasants were sent to the villages on a significant scale . This and the enormous brutality of the rebels, who often massacred entire villages as part of retaliatory measures, meant that the guerrillas in rural areas, which had previously offered them protection, increasingly lost the support of the population. In September 1992, a special European skin ointment that Guzman had ordered for a skin disease was used to track down his hiding place in Lima. Abimael Guzmán , who was still directing the fighters in rural areas, and other leading figures (including José Arcela Chiroque alias "Ormeño", Florentino Cerrón Cardozo alias "Marcelo", Jaime Zuñiga alias "Dalton") of the groups Sendero Luminoso and MRTA were arrested . The Peruvian government finally disarmed a large number of the fighters through a "repentance law" (Ley de Arrepentimiento), which was, however, subject to the condition that those affected expressed their regret for their involvement with Sendero and disclosed known information about the names and whereabouts of other broadcasters. Through this amnesty, 6,400 rebels surrendered their weapons by the end of 1994.

After his arrest, Guzmán offered to cooperate with the government, which led to the separation of a small group from the organization, which wanted to continue the armed struggle under the name "Sendero Rojo". At the end of the 1990s, however, only around 100 people (estimated) were still active.

On September 14, 2011, the Peruvian government declared a 60-day state of emergency in the province of Leoncio Prado and the districts of Cholón and Monzón . The reason she cited was the activities of the former members of Sendero Luminoso in the regions. These are supposed to pursue drug trafficking and other criminal activities such as illegal logging.

The Peruvian government announced in August 2013 that it had killed the guerrilla leaders, Orlando Borda Casafranca and Martín Quispe Palomino, in a commando operation in the vicinity of Llochegua .

On July 27, 2015, government forces liberated 26 children, ten women and three men from a Sendero Luminoso camp in the Valle de los ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAE) region. The hostages, many of them members of the Asháninka , had to work in “production camps”, do field work and raise cattle. A week later, soldiers rescued eight more adults and seven children from the violence of the Shining Path (VRAE). These actions, slave camps, and mercenaries can be attributed to the faction that resides in the VRAE and is referred to by the former party leadership as revisionists and anti-Maoists.

Work-up

After Alberto Fujimori's resignation, a commission of inquiry was set up to deal with the human rights abuses committed by Sendero Luminoso, MRTA, the military and the secret service since the 1980s. In its final report submitted in 2003, this Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y de Reconciliación) estimates the total number of deaths in the Sendero War at almost 70,000.

The Commission also concluded that Sendero Luminoso was primarily to blame for the outbreak of the conflict and for all human rights violations committed during this period; however, she also accused the García and Fujimori governments of systematic human rights violations. There are no guarantees that the organizations and institutions on both sides will keep their commitments to act on the recommendations of the Commission. However, various associations have been formed in civil society that see their task in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the recommendations.

literature

  • Carlos Iván Degregori: Harvesting Storms: Peasant "Rondas" and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho. In Steve Stern (Ed.): Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995. Duke University Press, Durham / London 1998. ISBN 0-8223-2217-X .
  • Martin Koppel: Peru's Shining Path: Anatomy of a Reactionary Sect. Pathfinder, 1994.
  • Jean-Michel Rodrigo: The third Sendero: neither Shining Path nor Fujimori, the alternative of the Peruvian popular movements. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 1994. ISBN 978-3-85869-090-6 .
  • Gustavo Gorriti: Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru. University of North Carolina Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8078-4676-7 .
  • John M. Bennett (Ed.): Sendero Luminoso in Context: An Annotated Bibliography. Scarecrow Press, 1998.
  • James F. Rochlin: Vanguard Revolutionaries in Latin America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder / London 2003. ISBN 1-58826-106-9 .
  • Lewis Taylor: Shining Path. Guerrilla War in Peru's Northern Highlands. Liverpool University Press, 2006, ISBN 1-84631-016-4 .
  • Salomón Lerner Febres , Josef Sayer (Hrsg.): Against forgetting: Yuyanapaq. Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Peru. Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7867-2720-0 .
  • Sebastian Chávez Wurm: The Shining Path in Peru (1970–1993). Conditions for the success of a revolutionary project. Böhlau, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-20720-5 . (See also: Univ. Diss., Hamburg 2010).
  • Jesús Cossio, Luis Rossell, Alfredo Villar: The Shining Path - Chronicles of Political Violence in Peru 1980–1990 . bahoe books, Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3-903022-68-3 ( graphic novel based on the results of the truth commission).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quechua of the Peruvian Amazon ( Memento from November 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Common Position 2009/468 / CFSP of the Council of 15 June 2009 on the update of Common Position 2001/931 / CFSP on the application of specific measures to combat terrorism and the repeal of Common Position 2009/67 / CFSP , accessed on 20 June 2009 . August 2019
  3. ↑ Decision (CFSP) 2019/1341 of the Council of 8 August 2019 updating the list of persons, associations and entities to which Articles 2, 3 and 4 of Common Position 2001/931 / CFSP on the application of specific measures to combat of terrorism apply and for the repeal of Decision (CFSP) 2019/25 , accessed on August 20, 2019
  4. ↑ Goedeking, Ulrich, v. Oertzen, Eleonore: Peru. Munich 2004 (Beck'sche series countries), ISBN 3-406-50457-4 , p. 99 f.
  5. ↑ AKUF Uni Hamburg, War in Peru ( Memento from August 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Goedeking / v.Oertzen 2004, pp. 100ff., 148
  6. ↑ Goedeking / v. Oertzen 2004, pp. 100-102
  7. ^ Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación : 2.35. El Asesinato de Fermín Dario Azparrent Taipe (1989). Lima 2003, pp. 343-349.
  8. ↑ Violencia política en el Perú 1980–1988 . DESCO Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo, Lima 1989, p. 115.
  9. ^ Fermín Azparrent, el “wirataka” ayacuchano . Partido Comunista Peruano, September 6, 2014.
  10. ↑ Ricardo Valderrama Fernández, Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez: Desplazados por la violencia política en el Perú: 1980-2000 . In: Martin Lienhard (Ed.): Expulsados, desterrados, desplazados. Migraciones forzadas en America Latina y en Africa . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-86527-608-7 , pp. 157-170.
  11. ↑ AKUF ( Memento from August 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ Goedeking / v.Oertzen 2004, pp. 118f.
  13. ^ Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación : 3.3. La iglesia católica y la iglesia evangélica . Lima 2003.
  14. ↑ Peruvian Repentance Law ( Memento of July 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ AKUF, Armed Conflict in Peru ( Memento from August 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ Peru imposes a state of emergency. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . September 14, 2011, accessed September 14, 2011 .
  17. ^ Government reports death of two leaders of "Shining Path" , Spiegel online, August 13, 2013.
  18. ↑ The slave state of Comrade José
  19. ↑ Goedeking / v. Oertzen, p. 132