Though the Shining Path movement claimed to fight for indigenous communities and the poor of Peruvian society, the Maoist organization ultimately furthered postcolonial legacies of paternalism and abuse of indigenous Peruvians. Despite offering openings to women not only as members but positions of leadership, and initially recruiting some indigenous groups, by the end of the Shining Path’s tenure as an active threat to the Peruvian state, indigenous and peasant communities in the highlands had organized rondas autonomously to remove Shining Path militants from their own villages and towns without military pressure.[1] Indeed, the Shining Path’s paternalistic and violent treatment of indigenous communities reflected postcolonial legacies of racism and a lack of comprehension of the dynamics of Indian society.
Beginning with the establishment of the Aristocratic Republic, coastal whites created a state without indigenous suffrage and deliberately perpetuated colonial labor and racial relations, privileging the coastal regions at the expense of the mostly Indian highlands. Once firmly established, subsequent Peruvian governments retained the structure. The rise of indigenismo among progressive Peruvian intellectuals in the 1920s was an attempt to democratize the Peruvian political system by recognizing the importance of Indian culture as a source for national identity.[2] Unfortunately, the predominantly non-indigenous intellectuals spearheading the movement saw themselves as protectors of Indians, predicated on Indian inferiority, as they required assimilation into broader society, education, and handling under the leadership of radical intellectuals opposed to political centralization.[3] Similarly, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria American, or APRA, which also emerged during the 1920s, focused on workers on the northern coast, thereby neglecting the much larger issue of land reform and Indians.[4] However, APRA began the university reform movement in Lima and Cuzco, centers of the future Shining Path, which claimed legacy of both José Carlos Mariátegui and APRA’s leftism.[5] Claiming the legacy of Mariategui, who believed Indians could lead the socialist revolution because of their tradition of “primitive communism,” Shining Path leadership saw indigenous communities they claimed to fight on behalf of as “masses” that would overflow the enemy on demand, not as equals.[6] Thus, the Shining Path insurgency carried on the contradictory legacies of the indigenist intellectual movement of the 1920s and the divisions within the Peruvian left that made land reform and improving the lives of indigenous peasants more difficult.
Of course peasants in the highlands had resisted their economic exploitation autonomously since the colonial period. During the 20th century, peasants invaded lands of elites, petitioned governments for land reform, and sought employment in the Lima and other cities.[7] Class differentiation also developed during this period, with many indigenous men finding work in mining and other industries, opening the door for some to eventually accumulate land and “the proletarianizing” of village populations in the 1930s for others.[8] This led to conflicts within village communities as the working poor and agrarian families “called on traditional reciprocity and subsistence ideology as their only weapons in a changing class struggle” and “the emerging entrepreneurial sector, wishing to take advantage of new production and market opportunities, attempted to push forward the commodification of all property and village relationships.”[9] An agrarian bourgeoisie eventually developed as a result of the privatization of communal land, the commodification of private and communal labor that occurred because of migrant labor and class differentiation, and growing integration of peasant society into the national economy and political system, which illustrates the historical agency and dynamism of Indian populations. The Shining Path’s perception of indigenous communities as untouched by societal change and overlooking class differentiation and other great changes that had come to the highlands by 1980 ignored the historical agency and complexities of life in the highlands. Like the indigenist intellectuals, Shining Path claimed to fight for the destitute peasants, but revealed them to be outside agitators with no appreciation for the nuances of Indian reality.
Moreover, Peruvian military-imposed agrarian reform and social revolution also failed for its undemocratic and paternalistic relationship to indigenous communities. Under Juan Velasco Aldvorado, between 1968 and 1975, the dictatorship endeavored to stop land invasions by redistributing land through government-controlled programs such as the Sociedades Agrarias de Interes Social and the Estatuo de Comunidades, which promoted communal agrarian production cooperatives.[10] Due to military-enforced agrarian reforms assumptions of a static indigenous population, and attempts to force reform without letting peasants decide for themselves, agrarian reform only succeeded in redistributing 7.4% of total arable land.[11] Once the military began the process for democratization and legalizing leftist parties, the Shining Path acted against the political system, due to Abimael Guzman’s belief that “True reform lay in toppling the system and extirpating its remains.”[12] In order to ensure that the electoral system would fail the Peruvian left, Shining Path declared armed struggle against the state on the day of the 1980 election, the first with universal suffrage, by burning ballot boxes in Ayacucho successfully weakening the chances for leftist coalitions to win at the national level.[13] The Shining Path’s adoption of violent means against indigenous communities mirrored that of the military, and the colonial legacy of violence used to subordinate indigenous peoples as well.
Shining Path’s relationships with Indian communities and towns during the zenith of their struggle also demonstrate an outright violent or paternalist approach to indigenous peasants. Initially supported in central Ayacucho, the extreme military repression and indiscriminate killings of civilians, in addition to the Shining Path’s brutal murders of suspected peasant traitors, led to their loss of popular support by the middle of the 1980s.[14] While the Shining Path’s practice of dividing indigenous communities by aiming at the younger generation succeeded because of youth discontent, the people’s trials against local elites alongside contradictory violence against the communities they claimed to fight for led to self-organized rondas within the community to force the Shining Path out.[15] Indeed, peasant resistance to Shining Path militants was natural, especially since Shining Path rule led to authoritarian living conditions, akin to concentration camps where the peasants who resisted were subjected to extreme violence and murder, leading to an ethnic discourse in which peasants were believed to be too ignorant to understand Shining Path’s revolutionary project.[16] Soon Shining Path were forced into Peru’s Amazon region, where the group worked with drug cartels and forced Ashaninka indigenous peoples into joining the Movement, effectively ruling the area like a concentration camp.[17] Before driven away to the jungle, Shining Path endeavored to force children into the war, conscripted entire families, and led to multiple massacres of civilians.[18] Under Shining Path repressive Peoples’ Committees, peasant children were reared by the state for brainwashing, family structures and communal organizations were replaced by revolutionary organizational structures, and religious practices were banned. Furthermore, Shining Path leadership deliberately misinformed the masses about the progress of the movement and murdered infirm and sick living in their regions.[19]
The internal weaknesses and failure of Shining Path to maintain popular support in Ayacucho during its long armed struggle stems from a postcolonial legacy of violence, paternalism, and racism. The movement’s leadership perception of indigenous communities as savage chutos ensured it would not last, since the indigenous communities were dynamic communities with class differentiation, Protestantism, and increasingly integrated into the national political and economic system. Like the intellectuals who espoused indigenismo and the military, Shining Path did not allow those living under their yoke freedom of religion and directly challenged their family, social, and political institutions, which had already changed dramatically as a result of a decades-long process of social change wrought by migrant labor and peasant mobilization in land invasions on estates. Shining Path’s refusal to recognize and support indigenous resistance on and according to indigenous terms, instead of imposing Maoist ideology and using violence and fear to control them, ensured peasant resistance to Shining Path would spread and the organization’s loss of local support in the countryside doomed their plan for revolution.
[1] Robin Kirk, The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 182.
[2] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 10/18/2011.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robin Kirk, The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 174.
[7] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 10/20/2011.
[8] Florencia E. Mallon, Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1880-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 267.
[9] Ibid., 305.
[10] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 10/25/2011.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Robin Kirk, The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 174.
[13] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 10/27/2011.
[14] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 11/1/2011.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ponciano del Pino H., “Family, Culture and ‘Revolution:’ Everyday Life with Sendero Luminoso,” in Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 160, 162.
[17] Florencia E. Mallon, Lecture 11/1/2011.
[18] Ponciano del Pino H., “Family, Culture and ‘Revolution:’ Everyday Life with Sendero Luminoso,” in Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 171.
[19] Ibid., 186-187.
No comments:
Post a Comment