When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story by Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2016 woman, who is little known outside of Cuba. Political leanings aside, Randall ’s book is essential to readers looking to educate themselves, expand their knowledge on or consider a more unorthodox narrative on either Haydée Santamaría or 20th -century Cuban history. Silvia M. Roca-Martínez Department of Modern Languages,Literatures and Cultures The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina WHEN RAINS BECAME FLOODS: A CHILD SOLDIER’S STORY. By Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez with the collaboration of Yerko Castro Neira, trans. by Margaret Randall. Foreword by Carlos Iván Degregori. Introduction by Orin Starn. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, p. 128, $19.95. Originally published in Spanish in 2012 under the title Memorias de un Soldado Desconocido: Autobiografía y Antropología de la Violencia, this extraordinary , beautifully-written autobiography tells the story of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who joined the Maoist Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement at the age of 12 as a resident of the region of Ayacucho where the terrorist group was born. The Shining Path, alternatively known as the Communist Party of Peru, operated in the 1980s and 1990s as a violent organization which attempted to bring Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Peru. The four primary chapters of When Rains Became Floods illustrate four separate periods of Gavilán’s life: his adolescence as a Shining Path guerrilla , his stint in the military, his brief time in the Franciscan convent, and the year 2007, when he returned to Ayacucho to revisit with introspection the scenes of his childhood and guerrilla days. In the first chapter, Gavilán divulges his reason for joining the Shining Path in 1983—he sought to follow his brother Rubén, who he believed was fighting for social justice. From a Quechua-speaking peasant family, Gavilán quickly received an education in the ways of guerrilla warfare. He describes openly how he watched and sometimes participated in not only the massacres of peasants , but also the murder of comrades for “crimes” such as falling asleep during guard duty. This chapter ends with March of 1985, when he was captured by government forces; amazingly, his life was spared by a kind lieutenant, and he soon became one of the soldiers against whom he and his comrades had been waging war. The second chapter, titled “At the Military Base,” describes Gavilán’s life as a soldier within the Peruvian military. Here his education continued, both in military tactics and academically, as he was allowed to attend school. He served as a guide for the military and a source of information concerning the Shining Path, and he eventually reached the rank of sergeant. After seven years, however, he met a group of religious missionaries from the Congregation of Jesus Verb and Victim. One of the 434 Book Reviews nuns suggested that he turn to the priesthood, which led to another reversal of fortune for him. He left the military with the hope that he might “do something for those who had nothing,” and soon joined a Franciscan convent, which is the subject of the third chapter. (64) During this period he continued his education, though he soon decided upon yet another change of fortune –he decided to leave the religious life to “live in the world like any ordinary person” and become a peasant farmer (85). Instead , he went on to study anthropology. The book closes not with the story of his university-level education, however, but with his 2007 journey to the places of his childhood and adolescence as a Shining Path guerrilla, remembering as he travelled the hunger and brutality he had experienced as well as the camaraderie, the loved ones and the enemies. As he ends the book, he projects for the reader a sort of timelessness upon what he sees. That is, warfare and brutality occurred, but life on the greater scale continues on in rural Peru as it has for centuries. All in all, this is an important book not only for those readers, the general and the academic reader alike, interested in the Shining Path or the modern history of Peru, but also for those interested...