The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru (review)

The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru. By Gustavo Gorriti. Translation and Introduction by Robin Kirk. Latin America in Translation/en Traducción/em Tradução. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Notes. Glossary. Index. xxiiii, 290 pp. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $24.95.

The emergence of the Shining Path in Peru during the 1980s was unprecedented not only for that country but also for Latin America as a whole. Few such groups have ever managed to cause so much damage, death, and hardships; fewer still, perhaps, have demonstrated the ability of an extreme ideology to manifest itself as a political movement.

The literature that attempts to explain the origins and trajectory of the Shining Path is enormous, yet ultimately incomplete in many ways. For example, just how Abimael Guzmán was able to create and maintain his organization, and how and why the Peruvian state had so much difficulty in combating the movement, remain puzzling questions that perhaps may never be answered satisfactorily. However, to the degree that these questions will continue to be addressed, they will henceforth be addressed only with reference to Gustavo Gorriti's remarkable book, now available in English.

Gorriti's book is perhaps not the first book for the neophyte to read on the Shining Path. It assumes a certain amount of knowledge about late-twentieth-century Peru and indeed about the Shining Path itself, and makes no attempt to be a primer on either topic. However, for anyone with some background, the book offers remarkable insights into a whole range of topics. Gorriti describes in great detail the extraordinarily complex nature and organization of the Shining Path, providing glimpses of the logistical problems the movement faced and the solutions it developed with only rudimentary communications. His reconstruction of the party's development and emergence in 1980 as a group dedicated to violence, frequently for its own sake, is painstaking. Likewise, his discussions of the Peruvian state, of its various intelligence agencies and of their leaders and their failings and shortcomings, demonstrate Gorriti's abilities as a gifted investigative journalist. The state's multiple and often fruitless responses to the threats of the Shining Path (intelligence gathering, ridicule, legal proscription, militarization) emerge clearly throughout the book, as does the state's overall inability to comprehend the scope and seriousness of the movement in its early days. His reconstruction of events--the disappearance of government files on the eve of the 1980 Belaúnde administration, the infiltration of state police and bureaucratic agencies by Shining Path operatives and sympathizers--is highly detailed, convincing, and continually fascinating.

Gorriti is a master at wringing everything possible from original sources. The book repeatedly analyzes Shining Path documents in minute detail. Such analysis reveals, for example, again and again how and why continuous, mandatory self-criticism was crucial in the movement's success as well as in Guzmán's ability to maintain rigid control over every aspect of his creation. Gorriti's willingness to take Shining Path documents seriously also helps him explain such esoteric points as the relationships between political and military actions, and the dominance of the former over the latter, within all aspects of the movement. The bloodthirstiness of the Shining Path comes across as never before in Gorriti's account of "the Quota" (pp. 98 ff.).

The book is not a narrative or chronological history in the usual sense, and for some readers Goritti's style of jumping from one topic to another might impair the book's overall unity. But the enormous value of Gorriti's depth of knowledge and his intimate acquaintance with all facets of the movement, internal as well as external, overwhelm any such quibbles. Robin Kirk's translation is simultaneously faithful to the original and a success in its own right. All in all, a superior piece of work that deserves...