If memory serves, it was 1991. My girlfriend and me had been dreaming of travelling across America for a long while, and were finally ready to get bus tickets for the first leg, from Venezuela to Colombia. The idea was to continue to Ecuador, Peru and Chile, ending up in Argentina to visit my family. About that time Sendero Luminoso made the news in Caracas. They intercepted a bus, got all tourists out, and machine gunned them. We knew that at travelling America by bus we were to encounter guerrillas, as I had in Colombia. We were prepared to pay a fee for passage, the so-called “revolutionary tax”. But guerrillas were not meant to kill tourists. At the end we chickened out, bought plane tickets to Ecuador (which we did cross by bus), and another round of plane tickets to Argentina.
I re-read the paragraph above and find that it is hard to convey the unbelievable level of violence of Shining Path. Also, the level of absurdity of many of their actions. After all, I am writing about 30plus years later, and for many this is ancient history. I myself might not have remember it, without having bounced into a little paragraph in one of the newspapers I read, comenting that Abimael Guzman died 11 september, still imprissoned. He was the leader and creator of Shining Path. To him goes the credit of having hang, back in the eighties, dead pigs from lamp-posts in the streets of Lima, with posters saying that Den Xiaoping was a son of a bitch. Take a moment to process that. Sendero Luminoso believed that China was betraying the true revolutionary path set up by Mao, so it accused Den Xiaoping by hanging dead pigs (an ancient chinese insult) in the streets of the capital of Peru. Also to him goes the credit of having made his guerrillas independent of Cuban financing. He thought that Che Guevara was a clown, so he did not buy weapons from Cuba. Sendero Luminoso guerrillas killed with stones and machetes, until they took weapons from the police and the army. Frequently they burned individuals after having them publicly courtmartialled.
I am south american, and I am certainly a left winger. It does stand to reason that, at least at some point of my life, I should have kept sympathies with one or another guerrilla movement. After all, even my name is in honor of Inti Peredo, the second in command to Che Guevara during his last, and fatal adventure in Bolivia. Yet I haven’t sympathized with guerrillas, ever. Perhaps I came too late to the whole political thing, when guerrillas had already lost their romantic luster. Perhaps having been ejected from the country that I born as consequence of the dirty war fought against armed lefties by the government made me an early skeptic of the use of violence to further political agenda’s. Perhaps I don’t like to kill people. I don’t really know.
Yet right before Abimael Guzman was captured, in 1992, it wasn’t clear that Sendero Luminoso would not take over the government of Peru. Following the maoist playbook, they got to dominate about two thirds of rural Peru, and had gathered forces in the slums surrounding the capital, Lima. What amazes me the most is that today, thirty years later, all that violence seems so far away. Can you really imagine a successful revolutionary movement that hang dead pigs in the lampposts of your city? Or that kills random turists? And that is actually capable of taking over the government? For all what matters, can you imagine a guerrilla movement that keeps control of mayor pieces of the country side for forty years, as it happened in Colombia? Probably you can’t. But seeing that the pacification of the FARC, that colombian guerrillas, occurred only few years ago, what should amaze us is that our lives are so far away from those levels of violence.
Looking at recent history, it isn’t normal to live without killing each other.
Inti, I went to a Biodanza Movement marathon in Machu Picchu in 1993, walking by the Inca Path from Cuzco in 4 days. Afterwards, we stayed in Aguas Calientes, at the foot of Machu Picchu's mountain, before we headed back to Cuzco by train. Along all roads and trails there were signs of warning about Sendero Luminoso. Actually, when arriving at Lima, before going to Cuzco by plane, we toured the city and the opportunity of passing by a street in which these terrorists explode a bomb. The "crater" was impressive. The whole pavement was destroyed living a hole of about 10 m of diameter, and 2 m depth. Buildings facades surrounding that street were also destroyed. Fortunately, we were lucky in not meeting any of these revolutionaries. Unfortunately, similar guys have now taken Venezuela and I am stuck, somehow, here...