A security threat confronts the West from the world's gray areas—regions where control is shifting to half-political, half-criminal transnational powers, such as Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Sendero Luminoso's vision, organization, and action program provide a new Marxist-Leninist-Maoist model for reforming political actors operating in other gray areas. Until the Sendero Luminoso insurgency is seriously addressed at the strategic level, the causes and consequences of such insurgency will continue to threaten Peru and perhaps other parts of the hemisphere and the world.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Comité Central del Partido Comunista del Perú , Desarrollar la guerra popular sirviendo a la revolución mundial (Lima: Comité Central del Partido Comunista del Perú, 1986), pp. 82-88.
2.
idem , “El documento oficial de Sendero,” in Partidos políticos, ed. Mercado.
3.
See also Communist Party of Peru, Central Committee, Interview with Chairman Gonzolo (San Francisco: Red Banner Editorial House, 1988).
4.
4. Quoted in Gustavo Gorriti, “The War of the Philosopher-King,”New Republic, 18 June 1990, p. 22.
5.
5. Guzmán, “Discurso del Dr. Guzmán.”
6.
6. This and other assertions regarding Sendero organization and the general plan are based on a series of interviews conducted from October 1989 through July 1994 (hereafter cited as author's interviews).
7.
7. Author's interviews. A good discussion of the five stages of Sendero's original general plan is found in David Scott Palmer, “The Sendero Luminoso Rebellion in Rural Peru,” in Latin American Insurgencies, ed. Georges Fauriol (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1985), pp. 67-96. A primary document, however, is Bases de discusión.
8.
8. Author's interviews.
9.
idem , Shining Path: A Case Study in Ideological Terrorism, no. 260 (London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, Apr. 1993), pp. 1-2, 23-26.
10.
10. This and other assertions found in this section of the article are based on author's interviews.
11.
11. Simon Strong, “Where the Shining Path Leads,”New York Times Magazine, 24 May 1992, p. 35.
