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Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980

Online ISBN:
9780804775786
Print ISBN:
9780804770941
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980

Published:
23 July 2010
Online ISBN:
9780804775786
Print ISBN:
9780804770941
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, this book is a long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant, but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. The book reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

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