The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency

FIVE: To Defend the Mountaintop: Initial Peasant Resistance to Shining Path

c h a p t e r f i v e To Defend the Mountaintop Initial Peasant Resistance to Shining Path O n 22 January 1983 a group of Huaychainos walked into the Civil Guard station in Huanta City. They had made the long trek from their high Andes village through a tortuous landscape of ravines, crags, and plains. It had been two and a half years since Shining Path launched its revolution in Chuschi, and by now Huanta police had received their share of complaints from peasants regarding missing and murdered persons. But the Huaychainos had not come to report another murder by guerrillas; they were there to report the killing of seven Senderistas, by the villagers themselves.1 The counterrebellion in Huaychao altered the historical trajectory of the community, region, and country. Just as the ILA would forever earn Chuschi a spot in Peruvian history as the symbolic birthplace of the Shining Path insurgency, the Huaychao event symbolized peasants’ violent rejection of the guerrillas, ushering in a new phase in which civilians would become protagonists in the counterinsurgency.2 Before long, it seemed as if every prominent journalist, politician, military commander, scholar, and human rights advocate was weighing in on what became known as the Huaychao linchamiento (lynching).3 President Fernando Belaúnde Terry praised the event as an act of heroic patriotism that would forever alter the course of the civil war.4 Others speculated that Peruvian security forces had compelled the peasants to betray the insurgents.5 Still others interpreted the counterrebellion as self-defense, a last resort by villagers to protect themselves against Shining Path atrocities.6 This chapter complicates the conventional narrative by highlighting the effect that local histories and indigenous cultural understandings had on Andean peasants’ decision to support the counterinsurgency. I begin with a brief overview of the national and international context in which Peru’s 168 • to defend the mountaintop counterinsurgency militias developed. Next, I take an in-depth look at the counterrebellion in Huaychao. From there, I discuss how Huaychainos’ decision to mobilize against Shining Path fit within the local history discussed in previous chapters. The chapter concludes on a comparative note, examining the extent to which Huaychao’s civil war trajectory reflected that of other communities that resisted Shining Path early on. The Peasant Counterrebellion in Context Peru’s counterinsurgency militias reflected a broader historical trend. In 1965 the Colombian government authorized the formation of armed self-defense units to combat the significant gains that the guerrillas were making in the countryside.7 At the end of the following decade, El Salvador ’s first “death squads” emerged under the auspices of the Salvadoran security forces in the fight against the armed Left.8 A similar development took place in Guatemala during the early 1980s, where peasant-dominated civil patrols operated in tandem with the Guatemalan military to comb the countryside for guerrillas.9 Nor were paramilitary groups a purely Latin American phenomenon. In the early 1970s as many as 20 percent of Africa’s nation-states reported the existence of civilian militias.10 As was the case in many of these countries, the roots of Peru’s counterinsurgency patrols can be traced to the state’s inability to maintain public security in the countryside. As I discussed in chapter 1, some Andean communities had already begun experimenting with forms of extralegal justice before the civil war began. The counterinsurgency militias can thus be seen as a wartime extension of this broader social movement. Peru’s counterinsurgency militias even appropriated the name of the original vigilante patrols: rondas campesinas.11 The peasant counterrebellion coincided with a new counterinsurgency strategy by the Peruvian state. The Armed Forces took control over the state’s counterinsurgency effort in December 1982. The Naval Infantry quickly established military bases throughout Ayacucho, prompting many an astute observer to ask what business the navy had in the highlands to begin with. In any event, the infantry had already assumed control over Huanta by the time the Huaychainos reported the linchamiento to the police . Naval forces established a base in Carhuahurán in August 1983, placing the 600 families living in the town and its 8 annexes under the control of 36 infantrymen. The navy remained in charge of the counterinsurgency to defend the mountaintop • 169 before handing over its responsibilities to the Peruvian Army in 1985. At times, two of the three branches, such as...