We are reminded by this extremely valuable and rare personal testimonial how little we know about the great rural awakening that roiled Peru from the late 1950s to the 1980s. One of the least-known but nonetheless major figures of this period was Manuel Llamojha Mitma, a self-taught, Quechua-speaking comunero from the heart of impoverished Ayacucho who rose to lead the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) from 1962 to 1973. Unlike his better known, wealthier and whiter activist counterparts like Hugo Blanco, Abimael Guzmán, or Luís de la Puente, Llamojha emerges in this highly unusual autobiography as Gramsci-like, a local, organic intellectual in the remote community of Concepción. His inspiring story of lifelong struggle against the entrenched and exploitative forces of sierra gamonalismo is expertly contextualized by Jaymie Patricia Heilman, whose own work on traditional pre-Sendero violence in Ayacucho serves to further illuminate Llamojha's moving narrative.
Manuel Llamojha's struggle for change paralleled Latin America and Peru's half-century of revolution, which began in the late 1950s and 1960s with the rural awakening that led to peasant mobilizations and land invasions seeking to upend the repressive hacienda system. It continued in the 1970s, when General Velasco Alvarado's state sponsored agrarian reform from above undermined and hobbled the left and the peasant movement with bitter disputes and infighting on how to respond to their own collectivist, long-sought goal for agrarian change. This conflict ultimately doomed the CCP; Llamojha was unable to prevent its split into three warring factions. Nevertheless, he persisted in his fight, but was sent reeling during the 1980s and 1990s when the extreme violence unleashed by the Shining Path (SP) and the armed forces exploded in the internal armed struggle that almost toppled the state.
We follow this gripping story of travail and turmoil through Llamojha's simple, but heartfelt narrative, guided by Heilman's skilled interviewing, as it unfolds on multiple fronts—local, regional and international. It moves surely, detailing his travels from community and regional union organizing activities and those he undertook to Lima and government agencies, doggedly taking his carefully worded typewritten petitions for redress from the enclosure, oppression, and violence committed against his fellow Ayacuchan campesinos. His reputation rose to a high point in 1962 when he was elected Secretary General of the CCP, which ultimately led to trips abroad to Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China. Eventually he was deposed from the CCP leadership, which then unraveled. The internal armed conflict that followed imperiled not only his continued work on behalf of the peasantry, but also his personal safety and that of his family.
This intensely personal oral history recounted in the rich Andean tradition of storytelling reveals much about this period of social and political upheaval, from the shattering of the hacienda system, the beginnings of the great internal migration and urbanization, and endemic poverty and racism on to the agrarian reform, the politics of the Cold War and the splintering of the New Left. The perspective of this extended interview, moreover, is from the rare vantage point of an indigenous leader who devoted his life to the cause of freeing his peasant countrymen from the yoke of oppression. It is indeed a unique and worthy contribution that helps fill a large void in the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century.
