Drawing from sources in departmental archives and field interviews, Ricardo Caro Cárdenas has two goals. The first is understanding how Sendero Luminoso, and its Maoist revolutionary violence, take root in Huancavelica, an indigenous department in central Peru that is poorly studied compared to neighboring Ayacucho where Sendero originated. The second is exploring the world and ideological orientation of Justo Gutiérrez Poma, a campesino leader who joins Sendero and becomes a mid-level leader responsible for executing the group’s military strategies. We do not know much about this middle range of Senderistas, and Caro offers Gutiérrez Poma as a representative figure whose trajectory “condenses” the experience of indigenous leaders entering Sendero militancy. Along the way, we learn about grassroots campesino organizations that emerged, fractured, and fought for indigenous autonomy against both state organizations intent on organizing agrarian reform their way and leftist parties coveting indigenous campesinos as potential adherents.

The three chapters of Part One narrate the story of the Departmental Federation of Communities and Campesinos of Huancavelica (FEDECCH), a campesino organization which Caro argues became the main vehicle for the department’s campesino identity and political demands in the 1970s. FEDECCH avoided the revolutionary agendas of governments and parties and worked instead to advance the campesinos’ own immediate communal interests (256). The book’s second part follows the political biography of Gutiérrez Poma. The final three chapters outline the actions of leftists in the early 1980s and detail the growing presence and revolutionary violence of Sendero Luminoso in Huancavelica.

Born on February 28, 1950, Gutiérrez Poma was a member of the youth wing of a government-aligned campesino organization before joining FEDECCH, where he rose to Secretary General. But when FEDECCH turned away from Gutiérrez Poma’s more radical demands for indigenous autonomy, he and other “dogmatics,” many of whom were aligning with various Maoist parties, chose the armed struggle. Gutiérrez Poma, who had resisted partisan identification throughout his public life, made his choice based on a personal recruitment, following the most effective local leftist militants, many of whom joined Sendero (202). He reappeared in 1982 as “Santos,” leading a Sendero column, and eventually returned to his birthplace in 1984 and assassinated its authorities. After surviving a 1985 military ambush that destroyed his column, he disappeared.

The biographical focus on Gutiérrez Poma is an exciting aspect of this study, though one that is not fully realized. Part Two’s five chapters follow an organizational and political history of the groups involved, instead of continuing with Gutiérrez Poma’s biography. In part, this is a problem of sources—Caro has to speculate about Gutiérrez Poma’s ideas and potential motivations from the memories of others and a handful of written statements. Although understandable given the context, this lack of evidence about the man and his ideas is not enough to support the book’s ambitions to explore the “sociabilities, spaces, and times” of Gutiérrez Poma’s context or his “intellectual, emotional and symbolic needs” (21). For instance, we cannot learn much about his “radical” vision of indigenous community autonomy. We learn that for him, autonomy meant expelling extra-community authorities and not paying taxes (155). He considered indigenous communities the “trenches of the popular war”—as both the base of political action and the ultimate resource nourishing it. Campesinos themselves needed to lead (138–9). In his last statement before joining Sendero, he argued that indigenous communities had to be “defended from a state perceived as an oppressor, unjust, and foreign” (200). But any deeper understanding, and the cultural aspects of what such indigenous autonomy implied for him, remain unknown.

Nonetheless, as a political history of the Huancavelican left, the book paints a harrowing picture of how Sendero crashes like a wave over the department. It is a detailed institutional history of the jostling groups hoping to organize, mobilize, and defend campesino interests at this pivotal juncture. It ably pieces together the convoluted ties among people, parties, and organizations that formed as Sendero swept through the mountains of Huancavelica.