[Marxism] Sendero Luminiso - fair or foul?

[Jon Baranov]

Dear Lou and anyone else,

Sorry to revive this thread, but would you say that the Sendero Luminoso generally  does not practice nefarious violence and harsh ideological intimidation against civilians (as opposed to militia)? You hinted the answer in a short citation in your original article, but with so much talk of SL's "brutality", I'd like to know more ... without having to read a book....

What is their record in the "liberated" areas - is there evidence of  bloody and arbitrary "Stalinist" methods? Do they have absolute majority support in all areas?

I haven't a clue - if anyone has studied the sendero, please post your findings!

Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote: 
>I just read a piece by Gary Leupp in the 1993 issue of the Monthly Review. 
>He says that that there is little evidence that Sendero Luminoso engages 
>in indisriminate violence against civilians. It almost excusively targets 
>government officials, police and counter-revolutionary  'people's 
>militias'. Does anyone remotely agree with this view?
>
>
>   I searched Amnesty International for a few minutes (not serious 
> research!) and found mostly documentation of Sendero's terror against the 
> state and nothing SPECIFIC about terror against peaceful civilians. On 
> wikipedea (an infallible scholarly source!) I found specific mention of 
> massacres of women and children and assasinations of moderate left 
> political organizers that most likely had nohing to do with state brutality.
>   Most left newaspapers seems to concur that SL has a weakness for 
> perverse and large scale violence people who are harmless, but not quite 
> on their side.
>
>   Basically, I know nothing about the SL. What do you think of them and 
> where did you get your info?
>
>   Thanks,
>   Jon

Shining Path

There has been an abysmal failure on the part of mainstream Marxism in the 
United States to engage with Peruvian Maoism on its own terms. Journals 
like the Monthly Review and NACLA have written about the human rights 
aspect of the struggle, while paying scant attention to the underlying 
theoretical issues. We sometimes forget that the Shining Path is in a war 
with the Peruvian state and not the American left and its allies in Peru. 
We should not sweep these issues under the rug, but neither should we 
neglect the Maoist analysis of the Peruvian class struggle. Since these 
ideas have won the allegiance of massive numbers of the most exploited and 
oppressed peoples on the continent, they are certainly worth a closer look. 
It is my goal in this post to do exactly that.

The social base of the guerrillas is primarily Quechuan Indian, but the 
Maoist leadership of the Peruvian Communist Party has tended to discount 
this aspect of the struggle. It does, however, identify the agrarian crisis 
as key to the Peruvian revolution. This problem implicitly addresses Indian 
needs, since land hunger has been the primary social contradiction of 
Peruvian society for the past 400 years.

The Communist Party of Peru--dubbed the "Shining Path" (Sendero Luminoso) 
by the bourgeois press and its leftist opponents--got its start in the 
1960s. Anibal Guzman, a philosophy professor at the University of Ayacucho, 
decided to construct a new revolutionary movement in Peru, one that 
combined the ideas of Mao Tse-tung and José Carlos Mariátegui. From Maoism 
it would draw upon the strategy of "People's War," that envisioned 
encircling the cities from the countryside. From Mariátegui it adopted the 
analysis of Peru as a country that was in the grips of semi-feudal 
relations. While it was nominally a modern bourgeois democracy, it still 
had failed to achieve genuine national independence and land reform, the 
hallmarks of the class bourgeois-democratic revolution.

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/sendero.htm

--

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