Before the Shining Path Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1980 [Hardcover]

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,Before the Shining Pathis the first 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. Heilman reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

By comparing the politics of two rural districts in Ayacucho over 85 years, the author provides the first in-depth historical perspective on the appeal of the Shining Path, Peru's Maoist revolutionary movement . . . Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, this lucidly written work deserves a wide readership . . . Highly recommended. This book is a thought-provoking intervention in the historical debates on political participation, protest, and violence in the Peruvian sierra throughout the twentieth century . . . I highly recommend Heilman's book for students and scholars of Peruvian history, peasant movements, and political violence, as well as practitioners of archival and ethnographic methodologies. This book examines the vibrant twentieth-century political history of rural Ayacucho, the region where Shining Path militants launched a bloody armed struggle in 1980. Jaymie Patricia Heilman has provided us with much needed data and interpretation that enl³‡