The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru (Latin America in Translation/En Traduccion, Em Traducao) | 
 enlarge | Author: Gustavo Gorriti
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 69985
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0807846767
Dewey Decimal Number: 322.50985
EAN: 9780807846766
ASIN: 0807846767
Publication Date: February 22, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks
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Product Description
First published in Peru in 1990, The Shining Path was immediately hailed as one of the finest works on the insurgency that plagued that nation for over fifteen years. A richly detailed and absorbing account, it covers the dramatic years between the guerrillas' opening attack in 1980 and President Fernando Belaunde's reluctant decision to send in the military to contain the growing rebellion in late 1982. Covering the strategy, actions, successes, and setbacks of both the government and the rebels, the book shows how the tightly organized insurgency forced itself upon an unwilling society just after the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime.One of Peru's most distinguished journalists, Gustavo Gorriti first covered the Shining Path movement for the leading Peruvian newsweekly, Caretas. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and an impressive array of government and Shining Path documents, he weaves his careful research into a vivid portrait of the now-jailed Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmn, Belaunde and his generals, and the unfolding drama of the fiercest war fought on Peruvian soil since the Chilean invasion a century before.
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 Not for beginners, uneven, but valuable testimony November 6, 2004
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
The book by Gorriti I call an account rather than a history, because it conveys the movement in medias res, published in 1990 as the SL prepared to assault the capital, well before the 1992 capture of Guzman and the persecution of Gorriti. In a 1998 preface, he briefly describes how, when president (elected in 1990) Alberto Fujimori staged a coup in 1992, he was arrested for his investigational journalism into the president and his `Creole Rasputin'-right before the arrest of Comrade Gonzalo. Gorriti managed to escape, files spirited out of the country too, and wound up in Panama working for its paper La Prensa. There, in 1996, he again faced his enemies as that government threatened him after he exposed a campaign financed by a Colombian drug cartel. He lived in his office for weeks, so as to foil police plans for his deportation. He emerged victorious, determined to uphold-in what he calls `cosmetic democracies', a free press.
At the time Gorriti compiled his tale of the SL, he had intended it as part of a three-volume work on the Peruvian Communist Party and its many alphabet-soup off-brands. This shows, as I was instantly immersed into a detailed narrative of unions, strikes, police machinations, and bureaucratic-to me-trivia. The book is probably not the first place to go for a quick introduction to the situation into which Sendero Luminoso stumbled. Gorriti clearly addresses an audience more familiar than I was with his country. Still, the gifts of his journalistic verve carried me through pages of departmental decisions into powerful chapters that highlighted the deadly nature of Guzman's millenarian blend of Lenin, Marx, Mao, and messianic apocalypse that plunged-literally-much of his nation into darkness and resulted in at least 70,000 deaths, half of these at the hands of those who claimed to liberate the people from their imperialist oppressors. Half of these at the hands of those who claimed to protect the people from their revolutionary oppressors.
This is Gorriti's achievement. Eschewing the glib slogans of the left and the harsh vows of the right, he tracks the rise of the Shining Path from a few students tossing dynamite-a commodity readily nicked from the mines-to police reprisals and the spread of societal breakdown across the Andes and into, as the book ends, the edges of the city. What the history lacks is a context for foreign readers into which Guzman and his ilk can be placed. Not even his birthdate is given; we know nothing here about his early schooling, what kind of a doctor he was, or how Jose Carlos Mariategui founded the PCP, apparently in the 1930s. This information, which any academic editor would insist upon in a conventional manuscript, is, I assume, assumed by Gorriti not to matter or to be common knowledge to his Peruvian audience. Robin Kirk (who has written a lefty's view of Peru, The Monkey's Paw) translates what, given my knowledge of Spanish, I presume carries the uneven rhythms of the original prose, with its leaden `he said, she said' reports from within the corridors of power as well as its nearly cinematic vignettes of attacks and reprisals from the front.
Given these drawbacks, nonetheless, the uneasy mixture of dry minutiae about police intelligence sloshes against a potent additive. Excellent analyses of Sendero rhetoric and the emergence of his death cult demolish naive leftist praise for this deadly insurgency; on the other hand, the reprisals that the Senderos provoked and received resulted in innocents being taken with the guilty--and the two sometimes becoming blurred.
The energy with which he describes the attacks by the guerrillas on the Ayacucho police stations, the torture of suspects, the funerals of officers and cadets, the rain on a tin-roofed shanty where a teenaged girl guerrilla shows her interviewers the marks of her abuse by her captors: all of these vignettes unforgettably inscribe themselves on your memory.
(Edited from a review article, "No Escape from the Anthill" at the on-line Belfast journal The Blanket)
 Definitive Account of Shining Path May 28, 2003
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Gorriti's account of how Abimael Guzman and his astoundingly savage cohort found enough followers to convulse Peru for a decade is detailed and authoritative. It is also wonderfully free of the dense prose and meandering sentences which plague so much serious writing on Latin America. This book is indispensable for anyone attempting to understand how savage Maoism found purchase in the Andes.
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