Carlos Iván Degregori (1945–2011) was a great Latin American public intellectual who will be remembered, above all, for his incisive analytical portrait of the politics of insurgency. This book, his final work, is about the rise and fall of Peru's violent Maoist political party, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL). Published in Spanish in 2010, it was then modestly restructured and translated by a group of his close friends in the United States so as to reach a wider, non-Peruvian audience. Seven essays are brought together in two sections: ‘The War that Surprised Us’ (why SL happened) and ‘Harvesting Storms’ (why SL failed). The book is prefaced by an insightful and affectionate introduction by Steve Stern underlining the innovativeness of Degregori's approach and placing his thinking in a wider context.
Interestingly, most of the essays in the book had a long period of gestation; in some cases, their first appearance goes back to the early 1990s. This is illustrative of Degregori's struggle to find a way to convey and analyse what was taking place in his country. It reflects the pitfalls faced when seeking to account for political violence (for a time Peru's record of human rights abuse was worse than that of any other country), the elusiveness of the object of study and the need to question and reinterpret what lay beneath the discourse in order to arrive at a critical standpoint. As a scholar and journalist, Degregori constantly engaged in dialogue and debate; he travelled and he listened. With a background in anthropology, he could also draw on personal experience when working at the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayacucho, at the time when SL was emerging. He looked for the telling example, the revealing instance, so he could puncture myths about SL, expose mistaken identities and critique false assumptions purveyed in superficial descriptions and simplistic judgements. His great achievement was to move analysis away from what Stern, in his introduction, terms ‘the Orientalist temptation’. Degregori, he writes, demonstrates an uncommon capacity for demystifying the Shining Path phenomenon, while refusing to reduce the problem to a handful of demonic actors or focus on the history of violence and racism in Peru at the expense of bypassing a specific understanding of the origins and inner culture of SL.
In the essays we find a series of arresting images which continue to provide footholds for further reflection and analysis. Degregori presents the leader of SL, Abimael Guzmán, as a ‘cosmocrat’, and his party, after the ideological hardening and the organic cohesion of its early cadres, as ‘a sort of dwarf star’. This was ‘the coldest’ of all the versions of Marxism that arose in Peru, yet it had been ‘faith’ which had moved its war machine. The party drew in young people who had reached university; they were ‘the ones with eyes’ but modernity had come to them ‘in loose threads, in snippets, in fragments’. They believed they had found what they were looking for ‘in this rigid ideology that claims to be the sole truth and gives them the illusion of absolute coherence’. In the countryside, however, the party remained ‘in limbo’. Senderistas were ‘the last children of the Age of Enlightenment who, two hundred years down the road, lost in the Andes, ha[d] converted science into religion’.
In the first essay Degregori shows how in the 1980s the two adversaries, SL and the Peruvian military, had treated the civilian population of the Andean region, especially the indigenous peasantry, with equal disdain and brutality. Then, jumping to 1992, he analyses Guzmán's attempt, after his capture, to do a deal with President Fujimori, an act seen by the party faithful as incomprehensible ‘sacrilege’. In the second essay, Degregori focuses on why SL had proved such ‘an elusive object of study’, relating this to various factors: surprise, fragmentation, postcolonial distancing and fear. Research on Andean societies had suffered many blind spots. One stemmed from indigenismo (Peru's variant of Orientalism), which still offered an ‘exotic and essentialist vision of indigenous peoples’; a second was the failure of social scientists to enquire into the dark side of Peruvian modernity and the enduring effects of unfinished, destructive modernity projects; and a third was the failure to see the crisis unfolding in small and medium-sized towns where SL ideologues were actively recruiting.
In the third essay, Degregori focuses on how a community of discourse was constructed, seeing this as key to an understanding of how SL transformed itself from ‘a tiny, marginal provincial group, into a “war machine” that would play a decisive role in Peruvian political life’. A careful reading of four party texts reveals the emergence of Guzmán as narrator-prophet-teacher, the consolidation of myth and the transformation of discourse as ‘it penetrates into the unknown territory of the hallucinatory’. The final essay on origins explores the ‘Revolution by handbook’ and the effects generated by heavily slanted Marxist-Leninist texts that were flooding Peru's universities in the 1970s. These presented social science as a ‘closed system of universal truths, a common sense that appealed to the principle of authority’, allowing waves of young people entering universities in the 1970s to reaffirm themselves in a social world that continued to discriminate against them. As Degregori underlines, SL emerged as an intellectual and educational programme as well as a political-military project, with Guzmán claiming to possess ‘the truth’.
In the essays on why SL failed, Degregori teases out the ways in which party logic and violent strategy were found to be increasingly at odds with peasant logic. As the party set about constructing ‘the new power’ and a peasantist utopia, the ‘fault lines’ became ever more apparent. An earlier resistant adaptation on the part of rural communities turned to opposition. Yet SL's leaders and party faithful were caged in the ‘total identity’ that the party had constructed, and for a long time failed to recognise the significance of the proliferation of armed peasant militias (rondas) and the new relationship that the peasantry had developed with the military. The project in which SL was engaged, to change reality so that it fitted an idea, shattered. In a brief epilogue written shortly before his death, Degregori talks of the gulf between the official narrative and silenced memories, and the work of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation of which he was a member. His concern with the politics of memory was prescient, and his voice within this public debate is profoundly missed.
