People's War

Variants and Responses

Thomas A Marks, Paul Rich

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351050814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Far from being an anachronism, much less a kit-bag of techniques, people's war raises what has always been present in military history, irregular warfare, and fuses it symbiotically with what has likewise always been present politically, rebellion and the effort to seize power. The result is a strategic approach for waging revolutionary warfare, the effort "to make a revolution." Voluntarism is wedded to the exploitation of structural contradiction through the building of a new world to challenge the existing world, through formation of a counterstate within the state in order ultimately to destroy and supplant the latter. This is a process of far greater moment than implied by the label "guerrilla warfare" so often applied to what Mao and others were about. This volume deals with the continuing importance of Maoist and post-Maoist concepts of people's war. Drawing on a range of examples that include Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, the collection shows that the study of people's war is not just an historical curiosity but vital to the understanding of contemporary insurgent and terrorist movements.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Revolutionary leadership as necessary element in people’s war: Shining Path of Peru

David Scott Palmer

ABSTRACT
Though it is well understood that all internal upheaval within a polity is a consequence of agency interacting with structure, the importance of the former has perhaps become too pushed to the rear. In reality, as demonstrated by the case of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, even cases which seem most determined by structural factors, in practice remain problematic, absent necessary revolutionary leadership. This leadership in turn, can make mistakes just as it guides successes.

Much that is written concerning mass mobilization insurgency – people’s war – remains derivative and incomplete. It is derivative in that few any longer grapple with the actual works they purport to cite. It is incomplete in that the mechanics of mass politics remain increasingly less understood in Western societies given to out-sourcing democracy.

People’s war remains a bracing corrective. Far from being the trite episode implied in most official literature – ‘guerrilla warfare by well-behaved peasants’ – it is the epitome of armed politics, a strategy for mobilizing the masses in support of revolutionary aspirations for a new societal ordering. Thus, it is leaders gazing at society, assessing imperfections, and advancing ideological solutions. It is followers being exhorted or compelled to participate in the realization of the solution. Violence is but one way forward, and it takes place alongside a host of other (often nonviolent) ways.

There is, then, as has always been the case, enormous danger in viewing past cases of people’s war as quaint episodes of the Cold War. To the contrary, they are the very essence of the political process accompanied by violence to carve out the political space necessary for ideological action. Thus, there are lessons that are timeless. Nothing illustrates this more than the case of Shining Path in Peru.

Ironically, Peru (see Figure 1) in the 1980s appeared to provide infertile ground for the emergence of an insurgency threatening the state.¹ It, after all, was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy with significant representation of Marxist left parties. It could not be classified as authoritarian, dictatorial, or repressive. Yet radical Maoist ‘people’s war’ emerged within democratic political context and expanded over time to include wide swaths of the countryside as well a significant urban presence. Even though rural areas had high levels of extreme poverty, and the insurgency concentrated its actions in these parts of the countryside, the revolutionary spark did not originate among the populations there. It was brought to them by outside agents who saw themselves as the revolutionary vanguard with a vision of a better and more equitable society based on the scientific application of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist principles.²

Figure 1. Peru. Source: Available at: http://www.zonu.com/imapa/americas/Peru_Shaded_Relief_Map.gif (accessed 4 March 2017).

This is significant because many underestimate the capacity of a small group of determined leaders, totally convinced of the rightness of their cause, to pursue a people’s war involving acts of terrorism in spite of generally unfavorable objective conditions. This suggests that the revolutionaries’ own initiative or voluntarism may offer a better explanation for levels of political violence than structural factors such as type of government, economic or social system, or levels of poverty.³

Conversely, would-be revolutionaries are unlikely to win on their own. For success, they must be able to count on a government that pursues inappropriate and erroneous policies to respond to their threat. In short, revolutionary terrorism designed to force putative beneficiary acquiescence is counterproductive unless it occurs in combination with serious, continuing, and multiple mistakes by the government.⁴

Origins of the insurgent movement

Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso or Sendero) was born in the 1960s in an impoverished highland department, Ayacucho, 48 hours overland from the coastal capital of Lima. Its 566,000 people, 90% Quechua speaking, lived in isolated poverty.⁵ It was logical, analysts concluded, that they would respond to the call for people’s war declared in 1980 by the Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariátegui (the father of Peruvian Marxism), or PCP-SL, and that their pent up anger would often take horrific forms, including torture and mutilation of terror victims. Sendero, in other words, was judged a logical outgrowth of its environment.⁶

In fact, this explanation foundered upon larger realities. Peru’s national conditions were not those that should have led to insurgency in the 1980s. The national economy had expanded almost continuously from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. Peru in 1980 was returning to democracy after 12 years of reformist, not repressive, military rule (1968-80) that nationalized major foreign investments, established relations with the socialist world (especially the Soviet Union, which became Peru’s chief source of military aid and advice), and carried out an extensive agrarian reform.⁷ Furthermore, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, the Marxist left was both legal and the second largest political force. Illiterates (mostly indigenous) could vote. There seemed to be sufficient political space within the system for the resolution of grievances, however profound. Even so, Sendero chose this moment to begin in Ayacucho its people’s war against the system.

What was to become by the 1980s ‘the world’s deadliest subversive movement’,⁸ first appeared in Ayacucho in 1962 in the presence of Abimael Guzmán Reynoso. Taking up his first job as a university instructor, he served initially as a philosophy professor in the Education Program of the recently reopened (1959) National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH – originally founded in 1677). Initially a member of the Stalinist wing of the mainstream, Soviet-oriented Communist Party of Peru (PCP), then of the breakaway Maoist party, Red Flag, established after the Sino-Soviet split in 1963, Guzman formed the PCP-SL between 1968 and 1970.⁹

In Ayacucho, Guzmán’s organization seemed little more than ‘coffee house’ radicals limited to university politics.¹⁰ Further, commitment of its members to action among the populace dovetailed neatly with the university’s own orientation toward service. The school’s various academic programs were tailored to meet the specific needs of the highlands and its Indian population. Nearly three quarters of the student body in the 1960s were Quechua-speaking natives of the region, for whom Spanish was a second language.

As they were trained to return in service roles to their communities, especially as teachers, they were indoctrinated by Guzmán, the first director of the university’s teacher training school, and other PCP-SL members. As the university, with just 550 students and 40 faculties in 1962, grew to approximately 4,500 students and 200 teachers by the early 1970s, Guzmán emerged as the institution’s personnel director (1971-74). As such, he was able to stack the deck and use the time to develop the cadre and organization of Sendero.¹¹

Ironically, all of the top party leadership, including Guzmán himself and the original Central Committee of the PCP-SL, were outsiders to Ayacucho and did not speak Quechua. Faced with the suffering of the downtrodden, however, they threw themselves into the effort to prepare for a Maoist revolution. By April 1980, when they declared people’s war, the party numbered at most 150 to 200 militants but had a network of sympathizers in the Ayacucho region and in some of Peru’s other public universities.

Their first revolutionary act was to burn a ballot box in a small Ayacucho district capital on the eve of Peru’s first national elections in 17 years. This seemed an inauspicious beginning. A decade later, however, political violence had caused about $10 billion in property damage and over 20,000 deaths. By the time the insurgency died down in the mid-1990s, deaths and disappearances had exceeded 69,000 and property damage, up to $25 billion.¹²

Latin American university traditions

Such a trajectory demands greater examination of the role of leadership – of voluntarism – in this case. A logical point at which to begin is with the larger intellectual context that produced the minds involved.

The Latin American university has long played a major role in the preparation of generations of political leaders and has served as a center of social protest as well. A tradition going back as far as medieval Spain and Portugal defined the university student as one who is there to be educated to serve his family and society but also to protest against social evils. As a result, institutions of higher education in the Iberian Peninsula as well as its diaspora, most especially Latin America, have long been havens for challenges to the status quo, generally protected by this centuries-old principle of inviolability from interventions by the military or police forces of the state.¹³

As education shifted from control by the Catholic Church to control by the state in Latin America during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, student opposition to social and political forces gathered momentum. This change from religious to public higher education was part of a larger political process in almost every country of the region that pitted longstanding Conservative traditions originally brought from Spain and, to a lesser degree, Portugal, against more modern Liberal theories from Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Back to the future – people’s war in the 21st century
• 1. Revolutionary leadership as necessary element in people’s war: Shining Path of Peru
• 2. People’s war antithesis: Che Guevara and the mythology of Focismo
• 3. FARC, 1982–2002: criminal foundation for insurgent defeat
• 4. Was FARC militarily defeated?
• 5. Critical ingredient: US aid to counterinsurgency in Colombia
• 6. A double-edged sword: the people’s uprising in Ghazni, Afghanistan
• 7. The North Caucasus: from mass mobilization to international terrorism
• 8. Bolivia, a new model insurgency for the 21st century: from Mao back to Lenin
• Index