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Paths of Terrorism in Peru-4

The document discusses the history and impact of the Shining Path (PCP-SL) in Peru from 1980 to 1998, detailing its violent insurgency against the state and the resulting casualties, particularly among rural Quechua-speaking populations. It highlights the ongoing legacy of terrorism in Peru, where the term continues to be used politically to suppress dissent and stigmatize critics, particularly those from indigenous backgrounds. The author notes the lack of historical context in understanding the Shining Path's violence and its detachment from Peruvian historical narratives.

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Paths of Terrorism in Peru-4

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17

The Paths of Terrorism in Peru

Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries*
c e c i l i a m é n d e z

‘The most important thing which can be done immediately towards

stopping lynching is to gather all the facts of lynching and give them the
widest publicity’
W. E. B. Dubois, 1916

The Paths of Terrorism: A Preliminary Framework

In Peru, the term ‘terrorism’ is unequivocally linked to the Communist Party
of Peru-Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL), best known in English as the Shining
Path and in Spanish as Sendero Luminoso (SL), or simply ‘Sendero’.1 Formed
in 1970 as a splinter of another Maoist communist party, the PCP-SL took up
arms in 1980 to unleash the bloodiest and most lengthy insurgency recorded
in Peru’s modern history. The ‘time of terrorism’ refers to the years from
1980 to approximately 1998, in which Sendero launched their so-called
‘people’s war’ (guerra popular) with the ultimate goal of taking over the
state and establishing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The insurgency
took the form of attacks on infrastructure, such as electrical towers, bridges
and emblematic buildings (from embassies to shopping malls), individual

* José Carlos Agüero, Elena Aronova, Ricardo Caro, Richard English and Juan Pablo Lupi
provided insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Roberto Young, Ingrid
Maza and Pilar Ramírez Restrepo provided crucial assistantship. Carlos Aguirre,
Fernando Bryce, Guillermo Fernandez, José Miguel Munive and Ricardo Portocarrero
generously shared their time and knowledge. I am grateful for the inspiring discussions
at the Cambridge History of Terrorism 2019 Workshop at Queen’s University Belfast. I also
thank the University of California Humanities Research Institute for a Fall 2019 residen-
tial fellowship; in particular, I thank Can Aciksoz, David H, Anthony III, Javier Arbona,
Shana Melnysyn, Diana Pardo Pedraza and Daphne Taylor-García for their valuable
feedback.
1 They most commonly signed simply as PCP, vindicating their Communist political
allegiance, and did not like to be reduced to ‘Sendero’. In this essay I use Sendero (or SL)
at times, as a concession to the scholarship and common parlance, but I also adopt PCP-
SL to emphasise their identity as a political party and the ideological roots they claimed.

420

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use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108556248.017
The Paths of Terrorism in Peru

assassinations, massacres and ‘popular trials’ that included summary execu-

tions and exemplary punishments. The latter were especially prevalent in
peasant villages of the south-central Andean highlands of Peru, particularly
the department of Ayacucho, the cradle of the movement. Sendero targeted
a diverse array of people and social groups, from low-ranking policemen and
military officers to elected civilian authorities such as city mayors and peasant
community authorities, leaders of political parties, grassroots community
leaders, merchants and, ultimately, anyone who dared to oppose their
dictates. Though they were initially supported by groups of radicalised
youth from public universities, and the impoverished peasantry of the south-
central Peruvian Andes, peasants started turning against Sendero early on,
and ended up becoming its foremost victims. Because of their systematic
attack on all forms of organised society, some have described SL as the
opposite of a social movement. Others have likened it to Cambodia’s
Khmer Rouge, in the light of their authoritarian ideology and methods, and
their agrarian-based self-sufficient communist utopia.
Unlike Peru’s previous twentieth-century armed insurgencies, the Shining
Path war encompassed virtually the entire national territory, but was most
devastating in the south-central Andean highlands, home to a majority of
Quechua-speaking peasants, particularly in the department of Ayacucho,
where it all started. According to the 2003 Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC – Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación) Report, nearly
70,000 people were killed or disappeared in the conflict, the majority of them
(54 per cent) at the hands of the Shining Path, 1.5 per cent at the hands of
another armed insurgent group, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac
Amaru (MRTA), while the Armed Forces, paramilitaries and peasant patrols
or ronderos were responsible for around 37 per cent of the remaining victims.
Among them, nearly 29 per cent correspond to the Armed Forces.
Approximately 75 per cent of the victims were rural, mostly illiterate, poor,
and spoke Quechua or other indigenous languages as a mother tongue.2 The
population of Ayacucho was decimated. According to the late anthropologist
and former TRC member Carlos Iván Degregori, ‘If the ratio of victims to the
population of Ayacucho were extended to the whole country, the violence
would have resulted in 1,200,000 dead and disappeared.’3

2 Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe Final, Perú: 1980–2000 (Lima, 2003), Vol.
1, p. 56 and Vol. 8, pp. 246–8.
3 C. I. Degregori, How Difﬁcult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999
(Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), p. 46. The ﬁgures of the TRC have been
disputed by S. Rendón, ‘Capturing Correctly: A Reanalysis of the Indirect Capture–

421

Today, the scars of the war are likely to be unnoticed by foreign visitors
and a younger generation of Peruvians. Major cities, starting with Peru’s
capital, Lima, are bustling with shopping malls, gourmet restaurants, lux-
urious hotels and fast-food chain restaurants bearing typical US brand
names. A celebratory mood that takes pride in the country’s economic
growth, tourist attractions and culinary riches has taken over since the first
decade of the twentieth century, making references to the recent past of
political violence an uncomfortable truth that many have preferred not to
look at.4
But this national celebratory mood belies scars of violence that run deep. On
the one hand, there is the staggering figure of the ‘disappeared’. Calculated at
around 20,000, it continues to grow. In 2003, the TRC identified 3,023 clandestine
burial sites (by 2016, 2,244 have been exhumed), but the figure is now 4,000, and
new sites continue to be reported, which suggests that the death toll estimated
by the TRC may be conservative.5 Considering both deaths and the ‘disap-
peared’, the figures greatly surpass those reported for the 1960s–80s dictatorships
of Chile, Argentina and Brazil put together.6
On the other hand, there is the discursive legacy of the ‘time of terrorism’,
which has powerfully affected language, politics and policies, determining the
limits of what can be said – or not – in public. The defeat of Sendero’s
terrorism has not put terrorism to rest. On the contrary, at times it seems that
‘terrorism’ is invoked more often now than when the insurgency was in full
swing. For, even though SL was disbanded as a political organisation shortly
after the capture in 1992 of its main leader and founder, Abimael Guzmán
(alias ‘Presidente Gonzalo’), his wife Elena Iparraguirre, the second in

Recapture Methods in the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Research

and Politics 6/1 (2019).
4 This celebratory mood is superbly analysed in G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chavez, La
Nación Celebrada: Marca País y Ciudadanías en Disputa (Lima, Universidad del Pacífico/
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2019).
5 Interview with Ricardo Caro, officer in charge of the Dirección General de Búsqueda de
Personas Desaparecidas (DGBPD, General Directorate for the Search for Disappeared
People of Peru’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights), Lima, 13 August 2019, and
emails exchanged in August 2020. On the figures of the exhumed burial sites, see Equipo
Forense Especializado (EFE), Ministerio Público, Fiscalía de la Nación website, www
.mpfn.gob.pe/iml/efe/, accessed 15 August 2020.
6 Between 1973 and 1989, in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship there were 3,065
dead or disappeared. In Argentina during the military junta from 1976 to 1983, the
dead and disappeared amounted to nearly 30,000 people, and in Brazil’s military
dictatorship of 1964–85, the military was responsible for 421 assassinations and
‘disappearances’ of political adversaries of the regime. See A. Benites, ‘La dictadura
militar brasileña causó 421 muertos y desaparecidos’, El País, 13 November 2014,
https://elpais.com/internacional/2014/11/14/actualidad/1415926043_376239.html.

422

command in the party, and other high-ranking commanders – who are

serving prison sentences – the ‘threat of terrorism’ is invoked by conservative
politicians and media with such virulence and frequency that people unfamil-
iar with Peru could be led to believe that it is in fact a live threat.7 The
accusation of being a ‘terrorist’ is routinely brought up to crush political
opponents, criminalise social protest, censor critical opinions and delegitim-
ise any discourse calling for change, a scenario that replicates itself in other
countries in the region, especially those that have passed through armed
conflicts, such as Colombia. Even human rights activists can be dubbed
‘terrorists’, which is quite ironic, considering that Guzmán disparaged the
discourse of human rights, which he deemed to be part of ‘bourgeois
ideology’. There is even a (racially tinged) neologism for the insult: terruco,
which conflates the ideas of ‘terrorist’ and ‘Indian’, as historian Carlos
Aguirre has insightfully analysed.8 The term reflects the stigma attached to
people who were actually, ironically enough, the majority of Sendero’s
victims. But because the cradle of the insurgency was also the department
with one of the highest percentages of Quechua-speaking peasants – who are
usually referred to in Peru as indios or indígenas (this is not necessarily a self-
assumed category), they were often forced to put up with the stigma, even
when most of the troops of the armed forces that repressed alleged and actual
Senderistas shared with them the same linguistic and social characteristics
and phenotypes. The PCP-SL’s highest commanders themselves, though,
including Guzmán, were rather mestizos or whites from the privileged
provincial elites.9 The noun terruco, in turn, brought with it a new verb:
terruquear, or to call someone a terruco, and provides a good example of the
way in which labels associated with terrorism are ethnicised. Yet, in contrast
to cases in which the label of ‘terrorist’ is usually attached to those whom
the mainstream deems foreigners – as happens in the US with Muslims
and ‘Arab-looking’ people – in Peru the prime suspects were Peruvian
themselves, especially if they were Quechua-speakers (or spoke
a Spanish infused with Quechua or other indigenous languages’ phonetics),

7 When in 1992 Abimael Guzmán was captured he called for a ceasefire. Although much
of the party was disbanded, several of his former followers continued in arms until
approximately 1999. Currently, some detachments are still active in the eastern rain-
forest mountains of south-central Peru, a region known as VRAEM, but their fight is no
longer ideological; they are engaged in the lucrative business of cocaine production and
trafficking.
8 C. Aguirre, ‘Terruco de m. . . Insulto y estigma en la guerra sucia peruana’, Histórica 35/
1 (2011).
9 Aymara and Quechua are the most widely spoken but not the only languages of pre-
Hispanic origin in Peru.

423

and poor.10 In recent years, terruqueo has democratised its targets. Anyone
who is critical of power, regardless of physiognomy or class, can be subject to
terruqueo.11

***
The literature on the Shining Path insurgency – from its outbreak in 1980 to
the beginning of its downfall in 1992, and into the 2000s ‘post-conﬂict’
period – is good and abundant. There are outstanding accounts of the
early stages of the uprising and its roots, such as those by Carlos Iván
Degregori and Gustavo Gorriti, studies on the peasant patrols (rondas) that
fought them, SL’s development in urban areas, and increasingly more
works focusing on memory and the post-war aftermath. With notable
exceptions, such as Jaymie Patricia Heilman’s Peru Before the Shining Path,
scholars generally do not venture into the longue dureé to understand the
Shining Path and its particular commitment to violence.12 Let me suggest
two main reasons for this absence.
One is Sendero’s own detachment from Peruvian historical referents.
Unlike other well-studied terrorist and revolutionary organisations world-
wide, Sendero does not make historical claims to the past or vindicate Peru’s
historical ﬁgures in search of legitimacy, even though their own name pays

10 See C. Méndez, ‘Obama y Humala: ¿Nacionalismo o Democracia?’, Lamula.pe,

15 December 2011, https://lamula.pe/2011/12/15/obama-y-humala-democracia-y-
nacionalismo/lamula/.
11 For example, linguist Virginia Zavala was recently subject to terruqueo for stating that the
‘groups of power’ establish the hegemonic way of speaking Spanish, but that it was not
the only correct way to do so. See V. Zavala, ‘Sobre la discriminación lingüística, el
“terruqueo” y los grupos de poder en el Perú’, Lamula.pe, 13 May 2020, https://virginia
zavala.lamula.pe/2020/05/13/castellanos-en-el-peru/virginiazavalac/.
12 For some important works on the Shining Path see C. I. Degregori, Qué difícil es ser
Dios: El partido comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso y el conﬂicto armado interno en el Perú,
1980–1999 (Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013); G. Gorriti Ellenbogen, Sendero:
Historia de la guerra milenaria en el Perú (Lima, Apoyo, 1990); C. I. Degregori, J. Coronel,
P. del Pino and O. Starn, Las rondas campesinas y la derrota de Sendero Luminoso (Lima,
IEP, 1996); J. P. Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980
(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010); P. del Pino, En nombre del gobierno. El Perú
y Uchuraccay: Un siglo de política campesina (Lima/Juliaca, La Siniestra Ensayos/
Universidad Nacional de Juliaca, 2017); C. Tapia, Las fuerzas armadas y Sendero
Luminoso: Dos estrategias y un ﬁnal (Lima, IEP, 1997). For a comprehensive compilation
in English see S. Stern (ed.), The Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru
1980–1995 (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998). Regarding the longue dureé
approach, J. L. Rénique in La voluntad encarcelada (Lima, IEP, 2013) sees the PCP-SL
as part of a ‘radical tradition’ that he traces back to the progressive liberals of the second
half of the nineteenth century, but his analysis is focused on intellectual and political
history rather than ideology or political practice.

424

tribute to José Carlos Mariátegui, the celebrated Peruvian Marxist thinker of

the early twentieth century. The ‘Shining Path’ alludes to their following of
‘the shining path’ of José Carlos Mariátegui.13 Yet, unlike Sendero’s rigid
interpretation of Marxism, Mariátegui’s vision of Peru’s socialist future was
shaped by his vison of Peru’s pre-Columbian Andean society and its agrarian
communal roots. Be that as it may, the references to Mariátegui that had
marked Sendero’s internal discussions in the 1970s, as they struggled to
differentiate themselves from the rest of the left, faded to the background
as they launched their long period of armed struggle in 1980. Henceforth, the
word of Abimael Guzmán, their leader and founder, became the bible of the
movement. Guzmán, a philosophy professor from the Universidad de
Huamanga, in Ayacucho City in the south-central Andes of Peru, fashioned
himself as the ‘fourth sword’ of the world revolution (after Marx, Lenin and
Mao), and relished the personality cult the party lavished upon him as
‘Presidente Gonzalo’, his nom de guerre. His ideological script was referred
to as pensamiento guía (the ‘guiding thought’).
More often than not, if the PCP-SL spoke of history, it was in the abstract
terms of the laws of historical materialism and class struggle: the exploitation
of men by men that had been going on for millennia, and history as
a succession of ‘modes of production’ with communism as the ﬁnal stage.
In their view, Peru in the 1970s was a feudal society not unlike China of the
1930s, an overwhelmingly rural country with a large peasantry. Accordingly,
if history mattered in their vision of communism, it was more that of China
than Peru. They exhibited a particular admiration for Mao, borrowed heavily
from his ‘people’s war’ and guerrilla tactics and the idea of strangling the
cities from the countryside, though, admittedly, they were not alone in this,
as Maoism exerted a special allure among the Peruvian left. The absence of
referents to Peruvian history in Sendero’s conceptualisation of the revolution
goes in tandem with their ideological rigidity and disregard for social organ-
isations and movements, which other leftist parties sought to court. As
Degregori put it: ‘A fundamental characteristic of Sendero’s activity is [its]
disregard for grass-roots organizations: peasant communities, labor unions,
neighborhood associations. These are all replaced by generated organisms –
that is, by the party that decides everything.’14

13 Rénique, La voluntad encarcelada discusses Mariátegui’s inﬂuence in Sendero at length.

See also D. Asencios, La ciudad acorralada (Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2016).
14 C. I. Degregori, ‘A Return to the Past’, in D. S. Palmer (ed.), The Shining Path of Peru,
2nd ed. (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), p. 57.

425

Not surprisingly, their ideology was just as devoid of nationalist rhetoric and
drives, a feature that sets Sendero apart from other Latin American leftist armed
groups of the twentieth century (Marxist or not), which were highly nationalistic,
as were most world revolutions of the twentieth century, if one follows Benedict
Anderson (pace Marx) – from José Martí to Fidel Castro in Cuba, from Augusto
César Sandino to Farabundo Martí in Central America, from the Tupamaros in
Uruguay to the Montoneros in Argentina. All embraced nationalism. All
denounced national elites (or ‘comprador bourgeoisies’) that colluded with
foreign invading or interventionist powers. Unlike those movements (including
Peru’s own coeval of Sendero, the MRTA), Senderistas never wrapped them-
selves in the national ﬂag. Theirs was, unmistakably, the red ﬂag of the hammer
and the sickle. To be clear, Sendero did embrace the ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric
that was common to the left in the continent during the 1960s and 1970s, but this
never translated into nationalism, references to the soil or the national past.
Likewise, unlike other armed movements in the twentieth century worldwide,
the PCP-SL did not claim to vindicate any racial or ethnic identity, nor did they
raise racial or ethnic questions, though in this they were no different from the
rest of the left in Peru and most of Latin America at the time.
Without national heroes to emulate, Senderistas saw themselves as ‘the
initiators’, as Abimael Guzmán proclaimed in a speech announcing the start
of their ‘armed struggle’.15 He envisioned Peru as the centre of the ‘authentic’
communist world revolution, one which Deng Xiao Ping’s China had
allegedly betrayed. This is no small detail. The year in which the PCP-SL
launched its ‘armed struggle’, dead black dogs bearing a piece of paper that
read ‘Teng Siao Ping’ appeared hanging from electrical light poles in Lima. If
there was history, then, it was not Peruvian; it was the history of global
communism. And it was in the future more than in the past.
The second reason why scholars have tended to keep their analyses of Sendero
within rather constrained chronological boundaries, I will argue, may have to do
with the nature of the violence that they elicited. Indeed, Sendero’s violence was
so openly reckless, and so seemingly gratuitous, that suggesting possible parallels
with previous insurgencies or civil wars in Peru became taboo, and may even be
subject to a ‘soft’ censorship (as I can witness in relation to my own work). Truth
be told, Sendero was a fundamentalist organisation built around the cult of
personality of Abimael Guzmán, which punished disloyalty with death. But the
lack of empathy they elicited, in comparison to other armed insurgencies that
took up arms in Latin America in the past century, may be attributable less to

15 The most detailed account of Sendero’s origins is in Gorriti, Sendero.

426

the violence per se than to the fact that it was a deliberate strategy built into the
party’s ideology, not a last resort. The political context of their birth is import-
ant if we are to understand this. Sendero rose up in arms not to fight
a repressive military dictatorship – like most Latin American revolutionary
movements of the twentieth century – but to boycott an emerging democracy.
They launched their war at the precise moment in which the country was
transitioning to a democratic regime after twelve years of military dictatorship.
Significantly, their first insurgent act was the bombing of the ballot boxes in the
village of Chuschi, in the department of Ayacucho, on the eve of the presiden-
tial elections of May 1980. To consummate the irony, this was the first
presidential election of the twentieth century in Peru in which illiterate people
were allowed to vote; the detail is especially significant in a country where
elections are mandatory. Their target, in other words, was not a particular
regime, but democracy itself. This fact, in turn, explains why their violence had
to be so reckless. Their attacks were meant to elicit a level of repression that
would justify branding the state as ‘fascist’. Such a situation, in turn, they
hoped, would leave Peruvians no choice but to opt between them, Sendero,
and the state. This is the way in which the PCP-SL hoped to create the
‘conditions for the revolution’. Accordingly, it not only ordered its militants
to kill but expected them to die – or give a ‘quota’ in blood – for the party.16
Likewise, this is why Sendero broke with the rest of the left, which decided to
take, instead, the electoral path.

***
Much has been written about the place of violence in the PCP-SL’s ideology.
Not unlike a fundamentalist religious organisation, they believed in the
‘purifying’ effects of bloodshed and cultivated a mystical relationship to
violence, as Gustavo Gorriti early noted. Carlos Iván Degregori, for his
part, suggested that the leadership’s messianic zeal coexisted with an ‘excess
of reason’, or an adherence to Marxist dogmas as ‘scientiﬁc truth’. As he put
it: ‘They are the last children of the Enlightenment who, two hundred years
later and isolated in the Andes, ended up converting science into religion.’ Or,
‘their vision, that sought to be absolutely scientiﬁc, became exceedingly
emotional, offering its members a strong quasi-religious identity’.17

16 Ibid.
17 Degregori, ‘Return to the Past’, pp. 55–6. See also Gorriti, Sendero. Later on, sociologist
Gonzalo Portocarrero used the concept ‘reasons of blood’ to describe the combination
‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ elements in Sendero’s ideology, inspired by Remo Bodei’s theories.

427

My goal in this essay is not further to examine this ideological distinctiveness,

for which there exists an ample and superb literature. It is, rather, to understand
where the violence that Sendero turned into such a rigid ideology came from.
I start from the premise that the top-down violence that Sendero exerted was not
precisely invented by them; it was already built into the pre-existing Peruvian
social fabric. What Sendero did, I would suggest, was to turn this violence into
ideology. I build in part on Carlos Iván Degregori’s provocative thesis that, upon
the breakdown of the latifundia regime in the southern-central Peruvian Andes
following the 1969 agrarian reform, the Shining Path ﬁlled the void left by the
oppressive landowners, or mistis (a Quechua term for mestizo, or white), also
known as gamonales. They exploited peasant labour and exerted upon them
forms of violence not unlike those that tend to be labelled ‘terrorist’, in complicity
with or with the acquiescence of provincial and local authorities such as prefects,
sub-prefects, governors, police and judges. Degregori likens the mixture of
violence and paternalism that mistis displayed in their relationship with ‘their’
Indians – and the racism inherent in it – to the hierarchical structure of the
Shining Path. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, in turn, traced Sendero’s
disdain for the very indigenous peasants they sought to attract to an entrenched
pattern of ‘silent racism’ among twentieth-century Peruvian intellectuals, or
a sense of intellectual and cultural superiority that traverses the whole ideological
spectrum.18 With these considerations in mind, I proceed to take terrorism out of
the Shining Path’s exclusive compartment to trace its genealogy in Peru’s
republican history, starting with the story of its naming. The argument is
presented in three parts.
In the ﬁrst place – because terrorism is a term with its own history and terrorist
actions are not the exclusive purview of non-state actors – I start by tracing the
term ‘terrorist’ in the early nineteenth century, before it was used to designate the
violence carried out by rebels in arms and when it was used to refer almost
exclusively to the violence and abuse of power by states and statesmen, particu-
larly in reference to monarchical or authoritarian regimes. The opposite of
a terrorist was often a liberal. Nowhere is this clearer than in 1867, when a so-
called ‘law of terror’ was debated in Congress. This case constitutes the second
part of our analysis. The ‘law of terror’ was a draft law presented to the national
Congress by three landowners (hacendados) of the southern department of Puno,
which aimed at violently and militarily suppressing a wave of peasant uprisings in

See G. Portocarrero Maisch, Razones de sangre: Aproximaciones a la violencia política, 2nd ed.
(Lima, Fondo Editorial de la Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2012 [1998]).
18 Degregori, Qué difícil; M. de la Cadena, ‘Silent Racism and Intellectual Superiority in
Perú’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 17/2 (1998).

428

the region. Even though the ‘law of terror’ is a misnomer, as it never became law,
due in great part to the fierce opposition of liberals and an emerging pro-Indian
and pro-peasant-rights movement, the debate it elicited vividly illustrates the
degree to which liberals effectively instrumentalised the term ‘terrorism’ to
denounce the violence inherent in a system of exploitation of peasant labour
and the dispossession of their resources. Lastly, I will discuss two key moments in
the history of the Peruvian APRA Party (PAP), which at various points in its
trajectory was deemed ‘terrorist’: the dictatorship of Luis M. Sánchez Cerro
(1930–3), and the governments of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero and Manuel
Odría (1945–56). APRA, an acronym for Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana (American Revolutionary Popular Alliance) was founded by Víctor
Raúl Haya de la Torre in Paris, in 1926, while he was in exile. A centre-left political
organisation of international scope, APRA fashioned itself as a revolutionary and
‘anti-imperialist’ alternative to communism. In an effort to repress APRA and
other opposition forces, the government passed the 1932 Emergency Law. This
law remained in force until 1945 but reverberated into the late 1940s, when, most
likely for the first time, the state resorted to the term ‘terrorist’ in its search for
a new legal framework to quell APRA and political dissent more broadly. In the
final analysis – and without belittling the violence of the repression of the peasant
uprisings of 1867 and 1868 – I will attempt to show that, as the state’s repressive
apparatus consolidated in the course of the twentieth century, it became more
able not only to increase the level of violence it exerted over its citizens but to
legitimise violence through law, thus nurturing a growing spiral of violence and
disbelief in state institutions which may, in turn, help shed further light on the
PCP-SL’s formation, and its legitimacy in the eyes of a significant group of
Peruvians.
A few cautionary words may be in order before we continue. Insofar as (as
mentioned above) comparing the PCP-SL insurgency with prior political
upheavals in Peru is a taboo of sorts for Peruvians, I am aware that my longue
durée approach, and my attempt to understand terrorism from multiple angles,
may be interpreted as a justification (or ‘relativisation’) of SL’s cruelty and
violence. It is not. To talk about state violence and terror is not to condone anti-
state violence and terror. It is to put things in perspective. For, as historian David
Andress has brilliantly analysed in his study of the Terror in the French
Revolution: ‘. . . in the cold light of history, the Terror, is not, has not been,
a unique aberration’.19

19 D. Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York,
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), p. 7.

429

Considering that I am only decades, and not centuries away from some of
the themes to be studied, my task is even more daunting than Andress’s.
Sendero is still a threat in the minds of some generations of Peruvians in
a way that the French Terror in France is not, and its destructive legacy runs
deep: it is political, physical, emotional, ideological, juridical, cultural. But
precisely because (unless you embrace the party’s ideology) its ideological
justiﬁcation of violence is not self-evident, considering they had alternative
political paths, a deeper exploration into the history of the violence that may,
in turn, allow us to understand Sendero’s violent path is necessary.

Liberals Versus Terrorists

Let us turn to the early nineteenth century, a time when ‘terrorism’ was
used mainly to describe the violence of states or statesmen. By the 1820s
most former colonies of the Spanish Empire in America had become
national states following bloody independence wars that put an end to
300 years of European rule. Warfare did not recede quickly, though, as
the former colonies continued to be embattled in internal and external
wars for the control of the emerging national states and the shaping of
national boundaries. Instability notwithstanding, newspapers proliferated
with the new freedom of the press, and became a natural place for the
expression of political ideas and debates. Newspapers followed world
events very closely, particularly those of Europe, often reprinting and
discussing political and historical documents. Our impressionistic look at
Spanish American newspapers from the 1830s to the 1870s suggests that
‘terrorist’ had Robespierre’s Reign of Terror as its main referent.
Nevertheless, subsequent events in France, and Europe more broadly,
imprinted new political meanings on the term.
At ﬁrst glance, references to terrorism do not seem to be bound to
a speciﬁc ideology so much as to a form of exercising violence through fear
by powerful caudillos (political bosses) and ‘tyrannical rulers’. But, at a time
when political outcomes were decided in battle, it was hard to say who could
be free of the charge of being a ‘terrorist’. The enemies of Marshall Andrés de
Santa Cruz, leader of the Peruvian–Bolivian Confederation (1836–9), claimed
that his power derived from ‘the terrorism and bayonets of his three numer-
ous armies’,20 while others considered that ‘the slogan of his administration

20 El Comercio, 18 October 1839. The words belong to Manuel Bulnes, a member of the
Chilean military who allied with Santa Cruz’s enemy, Mariscal Gamarra, to defeat the
Confederation.

430

was terrorism’.21 Nonetheless, the same charges could have been brought
against his nemesis, Marshall Agustín Gamarra, a famed authoritarian presi-
dent of Peru, who opposed Santa Cruz’s free trade policies, and was backed
by Lima’s conservative elite and the government of Chile. Moving to the Río
de la Plata region, we find slightly different examples. Members or sympa-
thisers of the Unitarian Party, who tended to be (socially conservative)
liberals, referred to Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of the province of
Buenos Aires and leader of Federalist Party, as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘terrorist’.22
Indeed, his reputation as such was well established in his time, as witnessed
by the short story by Esteban Echeverría, eloquently titled ‘The
Slaughterhouse’ (‘El Matadero’), a direct reference to the Rosas regime.23
Yet Rosas and Federalism were popular among gauchos and poor peasants.
Earlier on, during the wars of independence, and also in the Río de la Plata, in
the region corresponding to present-day Uruguay, José Artigas, caudillo and
guerrilla leader whose political programme included agrarian reform, was
also referred to as a ‘terrorist’ by his political enemies.24 One might be
tempted to deduce from these examples that ‘terrorist’ referred to politicians
who favoured social causes, or ‘Jacobins’ of sorts, but this was not necessarily
the case. Rosas, for instance, embraced Catholicism as a central tenet of his
party’s identity. What is significant here is that those deemed ‘terrorists’, far
from being on the fringes of politics, were for the most part rulers, statesmen
or aspirants to such roles.
In the 1850s and 1860s a clearer ideological pattern emerges. Even though
one can find occasional associations between terrorists and liberals,25 what
becomes increasingly common is their opposition: ‘terrorist’ as the antithesis
of ‘liberal’. Liberals of different hues labelled their opponents as ‘terrorist’:
from conservatives to partisans of the monarchy, to godos (a derogatory term
for Spanish or conservative), ‘enemies of freedom’, and adherents to tyran-
nical rule. In 1851, an author who signed as ‘El Indígena’ in the Peruvian
newspaper El Comercio referred to a columnist whom he charged with

21 El Peruano, 1 January 1840.

22 El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 30 December 1839 and 13 March 1841. See also J. Rivera
Endarte, Rosas y sus opositores (Montevideo, Imprenta del Nacional, 1843), p. 210.
23 ‘El Matadero’ was allegedly written in the late 1830s, but it was only published
posthumously, in 1871. See E. Echeverría, ‘El Matadero’, Revista del Río de la Plata 1
(1871).
24 Letter from ‘the government’ to Belgrano, 26 April 1819, Ms. Archivo General, cited in
‘Páginas históricas de la Independencia de Argentina por Bartolomé Mitre . . . La
guerra social, 1819 (continuación del capítulo XXVII)’, reproduced in La Nación 7/
1892, 21 September 1876.
25 See for example, the Mexican newspaper El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 10 June 1875, p. 2.

431

despising Indians as ‘terrorist and godo’.26 Into the 1860s, the association
between terrorists and monarchists deepened, coinciding with European
imperialist recolonising ventures in America, among them the French invasion
of Mexico that resulted in the re-establishment of the monarchy (1862–7), and
Spain’s invasion of the Peruvian coasts in 1866. In this context, Mexican liberals,
who tended to identify themselves as republican, ﬁercely opposed the mon-
archists as ‘terrorists’. In April 1863, for instance, the liberal newspaper Siglo
Diez y Nueve published reports decrying the violence and ransacking committed
by the partisans of Napoleon III, who invaded the city of Aguascalientes under
the cry ‘Up with religion and France’. The writer claimed that the chusmas
(vulgar people) were emboldened by their ‘terrorist fame’ and blamed the
‘French tyrant’ for the misery ravaging the city and especially the working
poor.27 A few years later, historian Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán denounced ‘the
forces and terrorism that the Spanish have availed themselves of to subjugate
us’ in Peru, in reference to the 1866 reconquest attempts.28

The ‘Law of Terror’

But it is Peru of the 1860s that provides what may be the starkest example of
liberals’ use of the term ‘terrorist’ to attack reactionary politicians and the
violence they promoted. On 8 May 1867, three congressmen, who were also
hacendados in the southern department of Puno, drafted a law meant to
suppress with brute force a wave of peasant unrest in that department and
dissuade further rebellions. Five days later, on 14 May, the draft law was
published in Peru’s main newspaper, El Comercio, stirring a debate, mostly
against the legislators’ initiative. The following day, another newspaper, El
Nacional, published one of three consecutive editorials against the proposed
law, entitling all three columns ‘The Law of Terror, the Indians’.29
Henceforth, other commentators popularised the term, speaking of the
terrorist attitude of gamonales and partisans of the project of law and the
terrorist methods and practices aimed at exterminating Indians. Liberal
public opinion criticised the proposed law so ﬁercely that one of the three
congressmen who had drafted it withdrew his signature from the proposal,

26 El Comercio, 16 April 1851. Article signed by ‘El Indígena’.

27 El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 30 April 1863, p. 3.
28 M. F. Paz Soldán, Historia del Perú independiente: Primer periodo, 1819–1822 (Lima, 1868),
p. 27.
29 Reprinted in E. Vásquez, La rebelión de Juan Bustamante (Lima, Juan Mejía Baca, 1980),
pp. 341–51.

432

and it was ultimately rejected by both the Government Commission and the
Legislation Commission in Congress. There is no record that the draft law
ever passed, against what historiography has long assumed.30
What was at stake? In the course of 1866, as the demand for wool increased
in the international market, peasants in the department of Puno, in the
altiplano region bordering Bolivia, rich in pasture lands, felt an increasing
pressure to sell their lands. Before the incursion of British traders in the
region, peasants had owned most of the land in Puno and traded their wool at
provincial fairs.31 But as the demand for their lands soared, hacendados sought
to enlarge their estates as well as get further control over the wool markets at
the expense of the peasants. What made the situation untenable for the latter
was a head tax (contribución personal) imposed by the government early in
1866, in part to compensate for the losses caused by the recent war against the
Spanish invasion. In theory, the contribución personal applied to all adult men,
but in practice it fell on indigenous peasants’ shoulders, evoking the spectre of
the colonial ‘Indian tax’ abolished in 1854.32 Peasants felt the brunt heavily and
protested by attacking and taking over ofﬁces of governors, prefects and sub-
prefects – that is to say, the local authorities in charge of the collection of
taxes – and in some cases demanding that they be returned to them.33 Other
grievances denounced included an alleged ‘property tax’ enforced illegally by
the department’s prefect, which forced all peasants who owned land to pay
tax in exchange for a land title of no legal value.34 This conjunction of factors
became explosive in a society that had been enduring structural exploitation
for centuries. Even though prohibitions against unpaid labour existed as early

30 For the ruling of the two congressional committees, see ‘Dictamen relativo a la
proposición sobre los indígenas de Puno’, No. 24049, 9–21 May 1867, ff. 163–7,
Archivo del Congreso de la República de Perú, Lima (ACRP). On the congressman
who withdrew his signature from the proposal, Federico Luna, see ‘Actas de las
Sesiones del Congreso Constituyente, Cámara de Diputados’, 20 May 1867, p. 432
(ACRP). On the historiography on the Puno rebellion, see Vásquez, La rebelión;
M. Gonzales, ‘Neo-colonialism and Indian Unrest in Southern Peru, 1867–1898’,
Bulletin of Latin American Research 6/1 (1987); N. Jacobsen, ‘Civilization and Its
Barbarism: The Inevitability of Juan Bustamante’s Failure’, in J. Ewell and
W. Beezley (eds.), The Human Condition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century
(Wilmington, DE, Scholarly Resources, 1989); N. Jacobsen and N. Domínguez, Juan
Bustamante y los límites del liberalismo en el Altiplano: La rebelión de Huancané (1866–1868)
(Lima: Servicios Educativos Rurales/SER, 2011); C. McEvoy, ‘Indio y nación: una
lectura política de la rebelión de Huancané, 1866–1868’, in C. McEvoy (ed.), Forjando
la nación: Ensayos de historia republicana (Lima, Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica del
Perú/The University of the South, Sewanee, 1999).
31 Gonzales, ‘Neo-colonialism’; Jacobsen and Domínguez, Juan Bustamante.
32 Jacobsen and Domínguez, Juan Bustamante, p. 54. 33 Gonzales, ‘Neo-colonialism’.
34 Vásquez, La rebelión, pp. 388–93.

433

as the first colonial legislation, unpaid Indian labour was the norm in
Andean society, the reason for the accumulation of wealth by many non-
Indians and even essential for the state and public services to operate:
community peasants were expected to work for free on tasks ranging
from public works to serving as domestic servants in the houses and offices
of authorities and as porters, jailers and servants of mayors, priests and the
hacendados themselves. Peasants were even expected to give their children
as servants to local authorities, who in turn gave them as ‘presents’ to
people they wanted to be on good terms with.35 In theory, peasants could
vent their grievances in courts, and many chose to do so. In practice,
though, they could hardly win any legal battle. Since many, if not most
peasants were monolingual Quechua- or Aymara-speakers, language bar-
riers added to class and racial discrimination, and the collusion of judges
with hacendados and local and regional authorities prevented them from
ever winning a case in court.36
The so-called ‘law of terror’ aimed to give legal legitimacy to this status
quo, and it seemed particularly intent on denying peasants the right to
property, for, in addition to punitive violence, it prescribed the dispossession
of their lands. The lawmakers justified their stance by arguing that the
peasant rebellions, rather than resulting from legitimate grievances, were
the product of a ‘caste war’ (guerra de castas) ‘poorly extinguished in 1814’, and
which had to be rooted out.37 This is a remarkable statement. The reference
alludes to the 1814–15 Cuzco Rebellion, which was part of Peru’s wars of
independence against Spain, thus showing the extent to which that fight
was experienced by a privileged sector of the provincial elite of Puno as an
affront to their privileged (white/mestizo) status (casta somehow blending
race and status). Additionally, the draft law argued that the rebels destabilised
‘public order’ and threatened the ‘life and property of the inhabitants
of the Republic, which are under the government guarantee’. Yet, indigenous
peasants clearly did not count as ‘inhabitants of the republic’, to judge
from how the proposed law referred to their lives and property. Article 2
authorised the Executive to deport ‘in perpetuity . . . to the inhabited points
of the [rainforest] mountains of Carabaya the communities or parcialidades
of Indians that have shown themselves to be the most sanguinary and

35 J. Bustamante, Los indios del Perú (Lima, J. M. Monterola, 1867), p. 9; Gonzales, ‘Neo-
colonialism’; A. Flores-Galindo, ‘República sin ciudadanos’, in Obras Completas, Vol. 3.1
(Lima, Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, 2005).
36 Gonzales, ‘Neo-colonialism’; Jacobsen and Domínguez, Juan Bustamante.
37 ‘Dictamen’, ACRP, ff. 165r and 166r.

434

deﬁant’,38 while establishing that their lands be sold at public auction, thus
revealing the extent to which the rapaciousness for peasants’ lands was
a drive behind the lawmakers’ intentions. Finally, and no less contentiously,
the proposed law called for the deployment to the region of an army division
‘made of the three branches’ and the establishment of martial courts for the
‘instigators and ringleaders of the insurrectionist Indians’ (Articles 1 and 2).
Lastly, it prescribed the same measures for similar cases that may eventually
take place in other parts of the republic (Article 7).39
It was not hard for the two Congressional Commissions that discussed this
draft law to debunk each one of its arguments, in a remarkable – legal and
political – defeat for the hacendados of Puno. The Commissions’ rulings
alleged that the draft law infringed upon the division of powers, going
beyond the functions of Congress, and questioned the legality of martial
courts, deportations and the deprivation of anyone of their property as a form
of punishment. Hence, they condemned the idea of perpetual deportations as
much as the selling of the deported peasants’ lands, because ‘no one can be
dispossessed of their property except for the juridically proven public good or
owing to a condemnatory sentence in a criminal trial conducted according to
law’.40 Most importantly, the Government Commission decried the punitive
sprit of the draft law, as it considered – in tune with most liberal commenta-
tors – that the peasants’ rebelliousness was justiﬁed: ‘The uprising of the
indígenas’, it asserted, ‘has as a main cause the mistreatment that over long
centuries, one could say, all their lives, they have been victim of.’41 They
considered that conciliatory methods would yield better results, and went on
to draft an alternative law offering amnesty to the indigenous rebels who
surrendered.
The forcefulness of the congressional commissions’ rulings, added to the
criticism of the liberal press, ultimately caused the proposed law to founder,
yet the alternative conciliatory legislation seems not to have come to fruition
either. In the meantime, peasant unrest continued in Puno, while the gov-
ernment of Mariano Ignacio Prado was besieged by conservative military
uprisings, prompting a new civil war that eventually forced him to resign. At
this point, Colonel Juan Bustamante decided to join the peasant uprisings.
Bustamante was a Puno trader, former congressman, former prefect and sub-
prefect, world traveller and a liberal-minded advocate of indigenous rights.
Scholars contend that Bustamante joined the uprisings to defend the besieged

38 Ibid., f. 165v. Emphasis in the original. A parcialidad was a form of communal

organisation in the Andes.
39 Ibid., ff. 165–6. 40 Ibid., f. 16rv. 41 Ibid., ff. 166v–167r.

435

reformist President Mariano Ignacio Prado in the ongoing civil war. But they
also agree on his credentials as an honest and indefatigable intellectual and
public servant. Amidst the turmoil of 1867, Bustamante founded the Friends
of the Indians Society, an organisation that denounced the exploitation and
abuses committed against Andean peasants, usually called indios, or indígenas,
and advocated for their rights. It was the first institution of this kind in Peru.
He ultimately met a tragic death as he and his rebel armies were captured by
the Prefect’s forces in the town of Pusi, in the province of Huancané, in Puno,
where seventy-one peasants were crammed into one or two small rooms,
which were eventually set on fire. Those who did not die asphyxiated were
shot to death. Bustamante was forced to take the cadavers out, then he was
hung upside down, naked, from a tree in the public square, where he was
flogged and decapitated. It was 3 January 1868. A bloody percussion ensued in
the rebel towns. Sixty-five rebels were taken prisoner and deported to the
rainforest of Carabaya by orders of a military commander after receiving 200
lashes; among them were apparently national guards that had joined
Bustamante. Several others died as a consequence of the floggings.42
The tragic end of Juan Bustamante and the Puno uprising shows that even
though the ‘law of terror’ did not pass in Congress it was enacted in practice.
The rebellion was put down by dint of terror and military force, including
executions without trial and deportations. There are several important points
to take from this story for our historical analysis of terrorism, and the first one
has to do with the use of the term itself. ‘Terrorism’ was used as the most
effective term to decry local state agents’ violence and hacendados’ violence
against peasants. The three editorials published in El Nacional in mid-May
1867 under the title ‘The Law of Terror – The Indians’ described it as
the ‘terrorist project of the three congressmen of the Puno department’.
The columns constituted, as did many other similar publications in the press
at the time, a call to fight back against the systemic exploitation that
indigenous peasants were subject to at the hands of prefects, sub-prefects,
governors and priests. Nearly a year after the publication of those editorials,
and with Bustamante already dead, a member of the Friends of the Indians
Society, Antonio Riveros, a supporter of Bustamante, addressed a public letter to
the Friends of the Indians Society shortly after having been released from prison,
in which he resorted to the term ‘terrorist’ four times when describing those
abuses at length. He argued that the repressive measures of the ‘Pacification

42 Numbers and versions of the facts differ somewhat. I have tried to strike a balance
between the following: Jacobsen and Domínguez, Juan Bustamante, p. 61, and Vásquez,
La rebelión, pp. 205–9, 326–9 and 363.

436

Campaign’ laid bare a wish to exterminate Indians – a theme that comes back
again and again in liberal indictments. Said campaigns, he claimed, ‘initiated
terrorism against them [the Indians]’; he described, at times with proper names
and places, crimes such as forcing them to work without pay, the stealing of their
property, including cattle, and a host of other arbitrary aggressions. Like
Bustamante and other liberals in the Friends of the Indians Society, Riveros
asserted that peasants were being punished for the crime of defending their right
as citizens. As he put it: ‘Indigenous citizens are chastised . . . only for aspiring to
equality before the law, for the right to keep their interests so that they are not
ransacked and their persons not sacrificed to extermination.’43 After the ‘pacifi-
cation’, he asserted, ‘terrorism has reached its height’.44
But what exactly did Riveros, and other pro-indigenous liberals, mean by
terrorism? As one can glean from his letter and its larger context, terrorism did
not just refer to the violence – physical or otherwise – that state authorities
inflicted upon peasants; it referred to the authorities’ capacity to coerce them to
abide by their will by dint of threats. Terrorism alluded, in other words, to the
systematic use of fear against a population that had little way of defending
themselves, in order to take advantage of their resources and labour,
a veritable labour regime. For example, if a peasant refused to comply with
the forced, unpaid labour demanded by a prefect or other authority (say, building
fences, ploughing the land or working as porters), or with the low price a mestizo
offered to pay for their wool or other products, they could be threatened with
floggings, with taking their children away from them and giving them to
authorities or politicians, or with taking away their cattle, a practice known as
rebeque.45 And because, as already mentioned, peasants had no easy way of
defending themselves in court, these threats were effective.
But terrorism was something more; it constituted ‘a way of living’, in
Riveros’s keen sociological observation, a habit (costumbre) that became
entrenched in the absence of laws which corrupt authorities had no interest
in enforcing, their preaching to the contrary notwithstanding. ‘In these
places’, he lamented, ‘there are no laws but habits acquired velis nolis [whether
you want it or not], and fighting and pacification are carried out to re-establish
them’. He added that in other towns ‘the same abuses are starting by dint of
terrorism, which has reached its height’.46 He went on to note that some
authorities lived off terrorism because they had lost their own means of

43 Letter from Antonio Riveros to the Secretariat of the Friends of the Indians Society, El
Comercio, 18 March 1868, cited in Vásquez, La rebelión, p. 332.
44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., pp. 332–3. 46 Ibid., p. 332.

437

subsistence due to their own misdemeanours, in a statement that helps us further

understand the pervasiveness of the practice, as well as its economic base.
Importantly, to the threats already described, it is necessary to add one
more: the threat of being accused of being ‘revolutionaries’, ‘insurgents’, or
caudillos or ringleaders of the rebellion.47 Tragically, as Riveros witnessed,
‘such a loathsome system’ was so entrenched that peasants themselves began
using it against other peasants, so that ‘if one of them wants treacherously to
seize the land from another, he accuses him of being a revolutionary, and the
authority, upon hearing this slanderous accusation, humiliates the latter
without a trial and without seeking the truth, and in this way the former
succeeds’.48 This means that the terrorist system put in place by authorities
and local bosses to the detriment of peasants in the wake of the Puno
rebellion had the capacity to contaminate the entire social fabric, a problem
that resonates to this day, as the TRC noted of the Sendero Luminoso’s
terrorism: ‘its “peasant war” against the state turned, in many cases, into
confrontations between peasants’.49
Ultimately, the Puno case reinforces the association of ‘terrorism’ with
state terror and conservative positions, in clear antagonism to liberalism,
a pattern that we observed earlier in our analysis of the nineteenth-century
press. It showcases a radical liberalism with a socially progressive agenda that
antagonised local state agents and local bosses’ terrorism. Significantly, the
authorities who condemned or repressed the rebellion did not call the rebels
‘terrorists’, even when the so-called ‘law of terror’ accused them of instigat-
ing violence in the form of a ‘war of castes’. They could be called ‘savages’
and ‘uncivilised’ (even by liberals), but not terrorists. Words such as ‘insur-
gents’, ‘revolutionaries’, ‘rebels’ or ‘insurrectionists’ were more common.
This lexical order was to be flipped in the course of the twentieth century,
in tandem with strategies to repress APRA and the Communist Party and
organised labour first, and Senderista violence later. Terrorism progressively
ceased to be used to describe state terror in Peru (whether identified with
monarchic absolutism, and tyrannical rulers, or exploitative provincial
authorities colluding with hacendados). Rather, it now fell into the hands of
the state to determine not only who was to be called terrorist but who was to
be tried as terrorist. Terrorism became a question of law. And law’s enact-
ment required a more solid repressive apparatus than that which existed in
the nineteenth century. Hence, although in 1867 a proposed law meant to put

47 Ibid., p. 333. 48 Ibid.

49 Comisión, Informe, Vol. 8, p. 247. For examples of such cases, see Del Pino, En nombre.

438

down peasant unrest in Puno by dint of blood and fire could not pass in
Congress, in 1932 the ‘Emergency Law’ meant to put down APRA by similar
means did pass, even if it was forced into Congress by the Executive power.
The methods that the state used to repress the 1866–8 Puno rebellion were
used again, but perfected to fight APRA, including martial courts, executions
without trial, military force, suspension of constitutional rights. But this time
around violence was legitimised by law. Yet, paradoxically, as state terror
magnified, the idea of a terrorist state, or terrorist rulers, faded from the
language. ‘Terrorist’ was applied increasingly to revolutionaries or insurgents
that fought the state. In the grammar of politics, what started as an adjective
became a noun. But the process was neither overnight nor uniform.
This resemanticisation of ‘terrorism’ from a term associated with the state
to a term associated with insurgencies against the state was due to a complex
set of factors that started to take shape around the mid-twentieth century.
Some were international factors, such as the Cold War, McCarthyism, the
birth of the Doctrine of National Security, the US training of Latin American
militaries; all contributed to reinforcing the technologies to fight insurgencies
along with their legitimating discourses. But the basis of it all was the
strengthening of state institutions and the state’s increasing capacity to
claim the monopoly over ‘legitimate violence’, to use Max Weber’s famous
formula, that is to say, the state’s control of the repressive apparatus. With
more power at its disposal, the state was not only more able to dictate
legislation instrumental to the repression of armed insurgents (and political
opponents), but, along with that, and most importantly, to determine when
terrorism was law, and when was it breaking the law. The professionalisation
of the armed forces was central to this process. In Peru it started in 1895, in the
aftermath of the last civil war of the nineteenth century, when a professional
army and military schools were established with the help of a French military
mission. This process cemented military institutions, delimiting the bound-
aries between civilians and militaries that had remained blurry for most of
the – civil-war-plagued – nineteenth century. During that time, armed
insurgencies (with the participation of both the military and civilians) were
a routine path to state takeover.50 But with the coming to power of a series of
consecutively elected civilian presidents, a period Jorge Basadre called the
‘Aristocratic Republic’ (1895–1919), armed insurgencies aiming at state take-
over had more difficulty in being accepted as routine. This does not mean

50 C. Méndez, ‘Militares populistas: Ejército, etnicidad y ciudadanía en el Perú’, in

P. Sandoval (ed.), Repensando la subalternidad: Miradas críticas desde/sobre América
Latina (Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2009).

439

they ceased to exist but that they would have a harder time achieving
legitimacy.51 In this new political context, different terms came to be used
for armed insurgents, as their methods were progressively delegitimised; one
of them was ‘terrorist’.
In this way, ‘terrorist’, a term suggesting violence, was transferred lexically
from state to non-state actors, paradoxically, when the state increased its
capacity to exert violence. This point is crucial, for, as we shall see, legislation
concerning terrorism as a crime was made from its inception with speciﬁc
political groups in mind, tacitly excluding state actors. What I am trying to
suggest, I think, is that the history of terrorism cannot be separated from the
history of the power to name it.

The Peruvian APRA Party: Between Ballots

and Bullets
Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre founded APRA’s ﬁrst international cell in Paris,
in 1926, while in exile. The Peruvian branch of the party, known as PAP
(Peruvian APRA Party), was only formed in 1930, in the aftermath of the fall
of the corrupt dictatorship of Augusto B. Leguía, the president who had sent
a young Haya de la Torre into exile in 1923.52 Haya was a prominent student
activist and one of the leaders in the movements for workers’ rights that
Leguía repressed. The Peruvian APRA Party (henceforth referred to simply
as APRA) had since its inception engaged simultaneously in armed actions
and electoral politics but, as historian Iñigo García-Bryce rightly noted,
historians tend to downplay the former.53 It is not a glorious side of its
history. APRA was responsible for the assassination of a standing Peruvian
president, Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, in April 1933 (following an assassin-
ation attempt by an APRA militant the previous year), and the assassination

51 C. Méndez, ‘La Guerra que no cesa: Guerras civiles, imaginario nacional y la formación
del Estado en el Perú’, in C. Thibaud et. al. (eds.), L’Atlantique révolutionnaire (Bécherel,
Les Perséides, 2013), p. 385.
52 I. García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and
Latin America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2018). See also
M. Giesecke, La insurrección de Trujillo, jueves 7 de julio de 1932 (Lima, Fondo Editorial
del Congreso del Perú, 2010).
53 Except, perhaps, one may add, when it comes to the Trujillo insurrection of 1932, which
has been thoroughly studied by Giesecke herself. See García-Bryce, Haya, and
Giesecke, Insurrección. See also G. Thorndike, El año de la barbarie, Perú 1932, 2nd ed.
(Lima, Mosca Azul Editores, 1972). For accounts written by former militants on Aprista
insurrections, see V. Villanueva, La sublevación aprista del 48: Tragedia de un pueblo y un
partido (Lima, Editorial Milla Batres, 1973); A. Villanueva and P. Macera, Arrogante
montonero (Lima, Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2011).

440

of the editor of Peru’s main newspaper, El Comercio, and his wife in 1935. Later
on, in 1947, two Aprista militants were convicted for the assassination of the
editor of another important newspaper, La Prensa.54 In 1948 APRA, in alliance
with navy officers, launched a coup against the democratically elected
government of Manuel Bustamante y Rivero, a former ally. Although the
coup did not succeed, it helped to precipitate a military dictatorship shortly
after.
APRA’s terrorism has been recognised but not analysed by historians. One
of the few to speak bluntly about it was Peru’s major historian of the republic,
Jorge Basadre. He defined APRA as a ‘typical product of World War I’. After
summarising its myriad of influences and the ideological evolution of APRA –
ranging from Bolshevik communism to German national-socialism, to
China’s Kuo Ming Tang (from whom, Basadre claims, Haya adopted the anti-
imperialist platform), to the Mexican revolution and its indigenista and
agrarian agendas – he notes:
At times it showed some terrorist and direct action aspects of rapturous
groups of Eastern Europe or the Middle East, such as the Romanian ‘Iron
Guard’ or the Iranian ‘Islam Fadayam’, a framework that can be explained
and in part justified due to the persecutions it was subject to and which the
passing of time has erased.55
Basadre was right. Whereas, on the one hand, the APRA of the early years
did defend the principle of insurrectionary violence, its violent paths were
enhanced by the persecution, censorship and brutal repression its militants
endured from the party’s inception up to the mid-1950s, when it abandoned
its revolutionary stance to form a pact with conservative forces. To under-
stand APRA’s early commitment to revolutionary violence we must go to
where it all began: APRA’s fierce confrontation with the Unión
Revolucionaria party (UR) and its founder, Army Colonel Luis Miguel
Sánchez Cerro. Sánchez Cerro rose to the presidency through a coup that
ousted then president Augusto B. Leguía, who by 1930 was ruling as
a dictator, his government marred by corruption. Sánchez Cerro’s coup
proved to be very popular, and he subsequently sought to legitimise it in

54 A recent study by a journalist claims that the men convicted were not likely the
authors, but does not discard the involvement of the APRA in the assassination of
the editor. E. Rúa, ¿Quién mató a Graña? Crimen político y golpe de estado (Lima, self-
published, Industrial Gráﬁca San Remo, 2018).
55 J. Basadre, Apertura: Textos sobre temas de historia, educación, cultura y política, escritos
entre 1924 y 1977 (Lima, Ediciones Taller, 1978), p. 465, cited in Rénique, La voluntad
encarcelada, p. 35.

441

a general election held on 11 October 1931. Sánchez Cerro won by a wide

margin, 50.7 per cent over 35.4 per cent to his closest contender, APRA and
Haya de la Torre. Significantly, it was the first national election in which
direct popular vote was enforced.
But Apristas did not concede defeat. Alleging fraud, they contrived
a variety of strategies to take power. Haya explicitly called for violence.
The harangues he addressed to his militants from the city of Trujillo, on the
northern coast of Peru – APRA’s bastion – on the very day of Sánchez Cerro’s
inauguration, are hard to differentiate from those Abimael Guzmán would
address to his own followers almost half a century later: ‘More Aprista blood
will run. The immortal list of our martyrdom will grow, the terror will begin
again its hateful task.’56 On that very day, Apristas set off bombs in Lima.
Days before, APRA had staged a blackout in the same city, leaving it in
darkness, not unlike Shining Path would recurrently do in the 1980s.57
Concurrently, Apristas made plans for a more massive insurrection. On
5 December 1931, they launched a number of coordinated uprisings in various
parts of the country, which drew considerable support. Participants included
agricultural workers, the middle classes and disgruntled army and police
personnel. They seized public offices such as telegraph stations, municipal-
ities and police headquarters and staged strikes, all of which contributed to
destabilising the government.58 ‘In the insurgent towns, half of the popula-
tion was involved’, states historian Margarita Giesecke.59 But it was the
Trujillo insurrection, which broke out on 7 July 1932, that sealed APRA’s
fate as a proscribed and persecuted party for years to come. That day, a group
of a hundred APRA militants, among them agricultural workers, army
licentiates, students, port workers and members of the ‘special guard’ of
Haya de la Torre (who was then in jail), led by an APRA cadre known as
‘Búfalo Barreto’ and the schoolteacher Alfredo Tello, stormed the military
headquarters of the city, causing over fifty deaths, most of them soldiers.60
After their successful capture of the headquarters they proceeded to establish
a revolutionary government in the city, while other armed columns took
over the nearby sugar estates (a bastion of APRA militancy) and armed
movements were sparked in neighbouring provinces and departments.
Sánchez Cerro’s response was swift and brutal. He deployed a war machinery
comprising all three branches of the armed forces: the air force, the army and

56 V. R. Haya de la Torre, Construyendo el Aprismo, pp. 172–5, cited in García-Bryce,

Haya, p. 60.
57 García-Bryce, Haya, p. 60. 58 Giesecke, Insurrección, pp. 195–235. 59 Ibid., p. 210.
60 Ibid., pp. 269–72.

442

the navy. This included 7,046 troops, one warship, two submarines and ‘a
squadron of seven airplanes and hydroplanes’.61 The first airborne bombs
were dropped in a packed main square of the city where people were
celebrating the revolution. Bombs also targeted the headquarters where it
all began, a hotel, a theatre, a hospital and the nearby port of Salaverry, while
the army surrounded the city.62 Never before had the republican state
deployed such war machinery against its own civilian population.
García-Bryce notes, ‘Trujillo’s residents witnessed one of the first civilian
bombings in history, predating the more famous Guernica bombing in
Spain.’63 The bombing continued over the following days, showing the
government’s resolve to exterminate Apristas, or ‘Aprocommunists’ as they
were often called. Those who could escape the city fled to the countryside in
the Andean highlands, and continued resisting. Things soured further for
Apristas when government forces found the lifeless bodies of a group of
military and civil guard (police) officers and soldiers showing horrific signs of
violence, including mutilations, in the city’s prison.64 Although APRA never
acknowledged the crimes, they gave the government the perfect pretext for
doubling down on the repression. Apristas were chased, sometimes taken
from their homes, subjected to martial courts, or simply executed without
trial, en masse. Approximately 400 men were executed in the pre-Columbian
archaeological city of Chan Chan, on the outskirts of Trujillo, from 12 July to
16 July, according to Giesecke.65 In less than a week, the government had
recovered control of the city. But Sánchez Cerro did not live long enough to
enjoy his bloody success. The following year, a young Aprista militant shot
the president to death as he was leaving Lima’s hippodrome. A new military
dictatorship took power until 1939. After a brief amnesty, in 1933, APRA went
underground again.
The bloody events in Trujillo marked decades of Aprista persecution and
shaped the party’s martyrdom identity in a considerable way. They also
inaugurated a long-lasting rivalry between APRA and the army. The legal
framework that Sánchez Cerro’s government created in his war against
APRA also had important repercussions. Of particular salience was the
‘Emergency Law’ tailor-made to ‘exterminate’ APRA, in the words of
Giesecke. The Executive drafted the law and submitted it to Congress for

61 García-Bryce, Haya, p. 64.

62 Giesecke, Insurrección, pp. 286–7; García-Bryce, Haya, p. 64. 63 Ibid.
64 The exact number is disputed. Some say they were 34 or 35, but Margarita Giesecke in
her thorough research came up with 52. See Giesecke, Insurrección, pp. 294–5.
65 Ibid., p. 311.

443

debate on 8 January 1932, but no debate took place, as the sessions were
interrupted by armed law enforcement agents that had apparently broken
into the building. Aprista congressmen protested, to no avail. The minutes of
that day’s session in Congress show some gaps, and a courageous dissenting
legislator’s minority opinion attests to the use of force. The Executive
promulgated the law the following day.66 The ‘Emergency Law’ was almost
a verbatim copy of a law that the triumphant Republican government had
recently passed in Spain, as Basadre noted. By virtue of this law a permanent
‘state of exception’ ensued, suspending many constitutional rights. The law
was sweeping against all opposition. It decreed the suspension of their posts
for state officials who questioned the government; it restricted the right of
political and social gatherings, censored opinion, authorised suppression of
publications, ordered the requisition of both legally and illegally owned arms;
it imposed fines, confinement and even expatriations to opponents. Prior to
that, Sánchez Cerro had passed other laws that went even further, such as
a ‘state of siege’ establishing martial courts to try civilians, and dissolving
workers’ unions controlled by APRA.67 In short, state repression did not just
target violent insurgency and terrorist attacks but also unarmed opposition,
and even organised labour, an attitude that the succeeding governments
continued to embrace, if not perfect. Ultimately, APRA’s fate was sealed in
the Constitution of 1933 promulgated by Sánchez Cerro, which outlawed
‘political parties of international organisation’.68
Yet neither in the legislation nor in other official documents issued under
Sánchez Cerro does one find the term ‘terrorist’. Apristas were most com-
monly referred to as ‘Aprocommunists’, or ‘Communists’ (even though at
that time Peru had its own Communist Party, which competed with APRA
but could never rival it in size or strength). One possible factor to explain this
absence is the multiplicity of violent rebellions facing the government. APRA
was the most visible, but hardly the only armed group conspiring against
Sánchez Cerro; many more rebellions occurred, and the overwhelming
majority of them came from within the army itself. Allegedly, as many as
twenty-six military uprisings took place between 1930 and 1933 (including
one in 1933 in which APRA colluded with a general to overthrow the
president).69 Indeed, whereas the state’s repressive apparatus had grown

66 ‘Expediente Ley de Emergencia, Iniciado el 29 de diciembre de 1931, Terminado el 9 de

enero de 1932, Ley No. 7479’, Congreso Constituyente de 1931, 16 ff., ACRP, Lima.
67 El Peruano, 26 November 1930. 68 García-Bryce, Haya, p. 14.
69 Giesecke, Insurrección, interview with Víctor Villanueva, former Aprista militant,
former army ofﬁcer and historian.

444

considerably, the state was still weak, the ruthless deployment of military
might in Trujillo notwithstanding. In fact, one may say that that spectacle of
war was an expression of fear more than force, as the government was hardly
in control of the country.
The discursive transformation of Apristas and Communists into terrorists
would take a few more years and bloody events. The saddest part of the story
may be APRA’s own self-destructive path, which is no small thing to say,
considering it was the largest, best-organised, and most important party in
the history of Peru. In 1947, two alleged Apristas assassinated the editor of La
Prensa, Francisco Graña. Subequently, La Prensa and El Comercio published
successive headlines denouncing terrorists’ plots, and the discovery of bombs
and explosives, all linked to Apristas. These were not mere inventions, or not
all were. APRA did plan serious attacks with explosives and was getting
armed.70 On 3 October 1948, APRA, backed by sectors of the navy, took over
the fortress of Peru’s main port, Callao, in an attempt to overthrow President
José Luis Bustamante y Rivero. But Bustamante was not a dictator, he was
a former democratic ally. The insurrection – or coup – which took some two
hundred lives, was quickly put down by the army but it left the already fragile
government of Bustamante on the brink of collapse. Bustamante y Rivero,
a centre-right moderate civilian, had run for president in a broad, momentous
coalition that included APRA. Once in power he declared amnesty and
repealed the Emergency Law, thus ending at least fifteen years of persecution
of Apristas. But APRA was not content merely to play a secondary role.
Having won the majority in Congress, it aspired to control or at least have
a larger dose of power in the Executive (laws at that time had not allowed
APRA to run with its own presidential candidate).71 The short-lived demo-
cratic coalition led by Bustamante did not take long in falling apart. Besieged
from within, by APRA, which activated both its legal and armed branches,
and by members of his own cabinet, its days were numbered. On
27 October 1948, merely three weeks after APRA’s failed coup, General
Manuel Odría, Bustamante’s own Minister of the Interior, backed by the
army, deposed Bustamante in a new coup, putting an end to a significant,
albeit short-lived, democratic experiment. Odría was a fiercely conservative,

70 El Comercio (Lima), October, various issues, 1948; La Prensa (Lima), October and
November, various issues, 1948.
71 For this interpretation, see García-Bryce, Haya. For a different interpretation, see
J. Lossio and E. Candela, Prensa, conspiraciones y elecciones: El Perú en el ocaso del
régimen oligárquico (Lima, Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica del Perú, Insituto Riva
Agüero, 2015).

445

pro-US and anti-communist army general. His government inaugurated one

of the most repressive dictatorships in twentieth-century Peru, enthusiastic-
ally backed by the oligarchy (1948–56). A new era of persecution of Apristas
was unleashed, and it was to be the last one, as the party would soon abandon
its revolutionary stance to co-govern with the most conservative political
forces, obstructing the very reforms that it had once called for.72 And it is
under Odría that the discursive making of Apristas, comunistas and labour and
peasant organisations as terroristas started to come into effect.
Odría outlawed APRA and the Communist Party, and on 1 July 1949 he
promulgated the ‘Law of Internal Security of the Republic’, which sought to
punish all forms of ‘sociopolitical crime’ including ‘terrorist acts’. This was, in all
likelihood, the first time that the term ‘terrorist’ was imprinted into law, though
still as an adjective. Its reach was enormously wide, from ‘propagating false news’
to ‘adhering to foreign doctrines’ to attacking military and government person-
nel, public buildings and facilities, to fomenting illegal strikes and ‘unrest in
unions, workplaces or schools’. Sentences ranged from fines to expatriation
and the death penalty.73 According to this law, in stark resemblance to Sanchez
Cerro’s legislation, defendants would be tried in martial courts and summary
trials, bypassing the judicial system and expanding the role of the police, which
led to a host of arbitrary actions. Even though the law was abolished at the end of
Odría’s term, military jurisdiction did not cease to be expanded, even under
constitutional regimes, in the apt analysis of jurist Diego García-Sayán.74
In a public speech given a few weeks after the passing of the ‘Law of
Internal Security of the Republic’, Odría evoked again the legal figure of
terrorism, this time as a noun. Appealing to the Geneva Convention, he
defined terrorism as a ‘crime against democracy’, equivalent to genocide. His
strange logic (don’t forget he was a dictator) was intent on persuading the
international community not to give political asylum to Haya and other
Apristas.75 Odría’s targeting of Apristas and Communists as terrorists was

72 An exception was the first term of Alan García (1985–90), the first and only Aprista to
make it to the presidency. He adopted a centre-left discourse, but his government,
marred by corruption, brought the country to one of its worst social and economic
crises.
73 ‘Decreto-Ley 11049’, 1 July 1949, Archivo Digital de Legislación del Perú (ADLP), www
.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/Documentos/Leyes/11049.pdf.
74 D. García-Sayán, ‘Perú: Estados de excepción y régimen jurídico’, paper presented at
the seminar ‘Regímenes de Excepión en los países de la region andina’ (Lima, 1986),
pp. 6–10.
75 ‘Mensaje a la nación del presidente del Perú, general Manuel A. Odría Amoretti’, 27 July
1949, p. 5, ADLP, www.congreso.gob.pe/Docs/participacion/museo/congreso/files/
mensajes/1941-1960/files/mensaje-1949.pdf.

446

significant because it was profoundly political. It was not just about – or not
even principally about – fighting violent crimes so much as curbing the very
possibility of social and political change, as the text of the Law of Internal
Security suggests. Timing is important here. Odría’s rule coincided with the
Cold War and post-Second World War climate, when the US backed dicta-
torships that committed themselves to fighting (real or imagined) commun-
ists. Not coincidentally, with Odría the army achieved greater political clout.
All this happened within the framework of the Doctrine of National Security,
when fighting internal enemies and ‘subversives’ reached new levels of
sophistication.
Later on, the military governments of 1968–80 created another new legal
figure, ‘the state of emergency’, which was incorporated into the
Constitution of 1979 (enforced in 1980) thus ‘constitutionalising’ the states
of exception, which entailed suspending a great range of constitutional rights,
to cite Garcia-Sayán again. At this point, on 17 May 1980, the PCP-SL
unleashed its violent insurgency and the constitutional government of
Belaúnde, who came to power shortly after, through the first presidential
elections held after twelve years of military dictatorship, promulgated the
first ‘antiterrorist’ law in 1981, explicitly to fight the PCP-SL. Shortly after, he
expanded military jurisdiction over civilians even further by abdicating
democratic authority and delegating all powers to ‘politico-military com-
mands’ in the zones declared to be in a ‘state of emergency’, charging them
with the responsibility of fighting the PCP-SL and the ‘control of internal
order’ more broadly. Thus, ironically, whereas the ‘politico-military com-
mands’ were established – unconstitutionally, according to García-Sayán –
during the military dictatorship of 1968–80, it was Belaúnde’s democratically
elected government who gave them constitutional legality and a full range of
powers. This situation further disempowered civilian authorities such as
judges, state attorneys and prosecutors in the zone declared to be in emer-
gency, as their jurisdiction was taken over by military personnel.76 The ‘dirty
war’ was unleashed, and with it tens of thousands of people were killed in the
name of the nation, mostly poor, peasant and illiterate, without having been
subject to any hearings, other than summary trials with either the armed
forces or the PCP-SL, if at all.
The coup of Alberto Fujimori on 5 April 1992 introduced an even more
expansive antiterrorist legislation that severely curtailed the rights of defend-
ants in the processes of detention, interrogation and trial by establishing that

76 García-Sayán, ‘Perú’, 13.

447

the identity of the magistrates remain secret (the famous ‘faceless judges’,
inspired by Italy and Colombia); by granting the National Police free rein to
‘intervene without any restrictions’ in the investigation process;77 and by
allowing the armed forces, yet again, to try civilians accused of terrorism
according to military law.78 As a consequence, thousands of innocent people
were convicted.
With the return of democracy in the 2000s, some of the most controversial
articles of Fujimori’s 1992 law, such as the martial courts to try civilians and
the faceless judges, have since been nullified, but his ‘antiterrorism’ legisla-
tion is otherwise in force and continues to be expanded, more recently to
restrict the rights of citizens who have completed their sentences and have
been released from prison.79 Importantly, as jurist Carlos Rivera points out, if
there is a constant in the antiterrorist legislation since 1981 it is ‘the absence of
a clear, precise and concrete definition of what act can be considered as
terrorism’, as a consequence of which, Rivera goes on, ‘it is very easy to
encompass any fact or act against people or property as terrorism’.80 This
point is crucial, with the caveat that this fuzziness does not start in 1981 but in
1949, when Odría first sought to sanction terrorist acts as a special type of
crime ‘against the organisation and internal peace of the republic’.81 So,
rather than an aleatory problem, this very fuzziness may be at the heart of
what makes conceptualising terrorism as a distinctive crime such a powerful
political weapon. The fuzzier the definition, the easier it is to use it publicly to
disqualify a person or an act.
It should not come as a surprise that dictatorships such as those of Odría
and Fujimori would indulge in such legislation. But the fact that the demo-
cratically elected, constitutional governments that have ruled Peru since 2000
have kept such an open definition of terrorism should be a matter of concern.
As the TRC reflected, ‘the antiterrorist legislation has generated a culture of
emergency and a practice of the exception as the rule’ that puts the ‘reason of

77 Decreto-Ley No. 25475, 5 May 1992, Article 12, ADLP, www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/

Documentos/Leyes/25475.pdf.
78 Decreto-Ley No. 25659, 12 August 1992, ADLP, www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/Docum
entos/Leyes/25659.pdf.
79 Ley No. 30794, 18 June 2018, ADLP. The title of this law is telling: ‘Law that establishes
as a requirement to provide services in the public sector not to have sentence for
terrorism, apology of terrorism and other crimes’.
80 C. Rivera Paz, ‘Ley penal, terrorismo y Estado de derecho’, Quehachacer 167 (July–
August 2007), p. 2.
81 After listing a wide range of acts that could qualify as such (some of which we described
above), a clause adds that ‘those who undertake any terrorist act in a way that has not
been foreseen by the aforementioned dispositions’ also commit such a crime. Decreto-
Ley 11049, Chapter II, paragraph g.

448

state’ above juridical security.82 With this in mind, and considering the
Peruvian state record in human rights violations (not by random chance is
former president Alberto Fujimori serving a prison sentence for his responsi-
bility in a number of such crimes), one wonders why the concept ‘terrorism
of state’ never gained acceptance in Peru, as it did, for instance, in Argentina,
Brazil or Chile after their ‘dirty wars’. One possible explanation (in addition
to the fact that the PCP-SL’s distinctively cruel methods have drawn most of
the attention to them) may have to do with the fact that, for most of the
duration of the conﬂict, Peru was ruled by democratically elected, constitu-
tional regimes (1980–92), not dictatorships like those countries, thus demand-
ing more subtle explanations. Yet, it is precisely under those regimes that
most human rights violations at the hands of the state were committed, as the
TRC concluded.83

Final Thoughts
In his book Persona, poet and historian José Carlos Agüero, winner of Peru’s
National Literature Prize, questioned the widespread tendency in Peru to
refer to the period of the PCP-SL insurgency as ‘the time of terrorism’.
Among other things, Agüero protested the singular. He did not mean to
deny Sendero’s terrorism as much as vindicate the right of, among others, his
parents, who were both militants of the PCP-SL, to be remembered as
something other than terrorists, perhaps as human beings. Most importantly,
Agüero intimated that singularising terrorism in Sendero Luminoso led to
the forgetting of the terror of the state that killed both his parents without
a trial, among thousands of other Peruvians, most of them poor peasants, not
Senderistas.
Agüero’s reﬂections are in tune with the ‘pluralistic’ approach to
terrorism that I have proposed in these pages. As we have seen, terrorism
in Peru derived from multiple sources and existed in different times,
almost as a constant in its national history. Why, then, reduce its analyt-
ical scope to the recent past and a single terrorist entity? Why use the term
only according to the state prescription, especially knowing that the
state’s historical trajectory has been anything but democratic, even
under elected democratic regimes? And knowing, moreover, that ‘terror-
ist’ has been deployed not only for juridical reasons but also political ones,
to curb and crush social protest, organised labour and even discussion

82 Cited in Rivera Paz, ‘Ley penal’, p. 8. 83 Comisión, Informe, Vol. 1, p. 171.

449

about social change? Why, then, be surprised that after decades of ‘ruling
by abandonment’ – to borrow Jaymie Patricia Heilman’s expression –
something other than a terrorist political organisation would come to
fashion itself as the solution?
And yet, this is only part of the story. For, as responsible as the state
may be for abandoning its citizens to the forces of terror – its own,
and those of self-proclaimed twentieth-century revolutionaries – the
state is made of people, who are in turn part of a society where it all
converges or, rather, where it all springs from. So, a ‘pluralistic’
approach does not simply entail recognising the different sources of
terrorism but also patterns. Along with authoritarian patterns that
traverse the terroristic practices of state agents, political parties and
hacendados that we have analysed in the preceding pages, there is also
a pattern of racialised social hierarchies that have made some sectors
of the society more likely to be on the receiving end of the various
terrorist violences. This brings us back to De la Cadena’s notion of
‘silent racism’, and Degregori’s hypothesis that Sendero’s ‘racist con-
ceptions and sense of superiority with regards to indigenous peoples’84
reproduced those of the exploitative mistis they replaced in the rural
highlands of Ayacucho. Nevertheless, as we have seen in our analysis
of the terrorist labour regime that was at that basis of the wool export
boom in Puno in the 1860s, these racialised patterns of violence have
deeper roots and other geographies. But there is more.
We cannot conclude without bringing up the case of another, yet more
ominous, terrorist labour regime that was put in place in Peru’s northern
Amazon region of Putumayo, bordering Colombia, half a century later, to
extract rubber for export, which reached a genocidal scale. In the span of
ten years, a population of 50,000 women, men and children was reduced
to 7,000 or 10,000. They were killed by starvation, executions or floggings
to death, among other forms of torture, for failing to fulfil their rubber
quotas.85 Even though this case became internationally well known and
was denounced by the press in Peru, nothing stopped the terrorist geno-
cide, and nobody was punished, because, according to Federica Barclay,
everyone, from politicians in Lima to merchants and workers in Iquitos
(the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon), drew some benefit, in one way

84 Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 248.

85 Libro Azul Británico: Informes de Roger Casement y otras cartas sobre las atrocidades en el
Putumayo, translated from English by L. E. Belaunde (Lima, Centro Amazónico de
Antropología y Aplicación Práctica, 2012 [1912]), p. 300.

450

or another, from the economic prosperity of the rubber boom.

Everybody, except those who produced the wealth.86 Closer to the cen-
tury’s end, the PCP-SL subjected other indigenous groups in the Amazon
to a similar regime of terror. They forced Ashaninkas to join their armies
or do the domestic chores for their armies in concentration camps of sorts.
They executed many of their leaders and threatened to kill those
who opposed them. The TRC estimates that out of a population of
50,000 Ashaninkas, 10,000 were forcibly displaced, about 6,000 died, and
a total of thirty to forty communities ‘disappeared’.87 The TRC wrote
bluntly about the PCP-SL’s genocidal policies.88 A common practice in the
various terrorist regimes subjugating populations deemed indígenas
was the practice of taking children away from their parents, whether to
be servants, as in Puno in the 1860s, to force them to extract rubber, as in
the Putumayo in the 1910s, or to indoctrinate them as Communist soldiers
and teach them how to kill, as in the Andes and Amazon with the Shining
Path.
These histories of terrorism are part of a whole and should be under-
stood as a whole. The history of this whole is not taught in schools, but, as
W. E. B. Dubois said about lynching in the US, the only way to stop
violence is by making it known. We can take inspiration, perhaps, from
those who already started that job: from Juan Bustamante, Antonio
Riveros and other liberals in the 1860s; from those who put together the
nine volumes of the TRC Report in the early 2000s, to mention only the
ones I have cited most in this essay. But I know there are many more. In
this learning process, let us not forget that terrorism has a history, which
should not be detached from the history of terrorism, the term. It is the
awareness of this history that will free us from reproducing the state’s
repressive gaze and to embrace our citizenship.

Further Reading
Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe Final, Perú: 1980–2000, 9 vols (Lima, 2003),
http://www.cverdad.org.pe/iﬁnal/
C. I. Degregori, How Difﬁcult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999
(Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)

86 F. Barclay Rey de Castro, ‘La Asociación Pro Indígena y las atrocidades del Putumayo:
Una misión autorestringida’, Boletín Americanista 60.
87 Comisión, Informe, Vol. 5, p. 62. 88 Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 248.

451

M. Giesecke, La Insurrección de Trujillo, jueves 7 de julio de 1932 (Lima, Fondo Editorial del
Congreso del Perú, 2010)
M. Gonzales, ‘Neo-colonialism and Indian Unrest in Southern Peru, 1867–1898’, Bulletin of
Latin American Research 6/1 (1987)
S. Stern (ed.), The Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru 1980–1995 (Durham, NC,
Duke University Press, 1998)

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Paths of Terrorism in Peru-4

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Paths of Terrorism in Peru-4

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17

The Paths of Terrorism in Peru

‘The most important thing which can be done immediately towards

The Paths of Terrorism: A Preliminary Framework

assassinations, massacres and ‘popular trials’ that included summary execu-

Recapture Methods in the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Research

command in the party, and other high-ranking commanders – who are

10 See C. Méndez, ‘Obama y Humala: ¿Nacionalismo o Democracia?’, Lamula.pe,

tribute to José Carlos Mariátegui, the celebrated Peruvian Marxist thinker of

13 Rénique, La voluntad encarcelada discusses Mariátegui’s inﬂuence in Sendero at length.

15 The most detailed account of Sendero’s origins is in Gorriti, Sendero.

My goal in this essay is not further to examine this ideological distinctiveness,

Liberals Versus Terrorists

21 El Peruano, 1 January 1840.

The ‘Law of Terror’

26 El Comercio, 16 April 1851. Article signed by ‘El Indígena’.

38 Ibid., f. 165v. Emphasis in the original. A parcialidad was a form of communal

subsistence due to their own misdemeanours, in a statement that helps us further

47 Ibid., p. 333. 48 Ibid.

50 C. Méndez, ‘Militares populistas: Ejército, etnicidad y ciudadanía en el Perú’, in

The Peruvian APRA Party: Between Ballots

a general election held on 11 October 1931. Sánchez Cerro won by a wide

56 V. R. Haya de la Torre, Construyendo el Aprismo, pp. 172–5, cited in García-Bryce,

61 García-Bryce, Haya, p. 64.

66 ‘Expediente Ley de Emergencia, Iniciado el 29 de diciembre de 1931, Terminado el 9 de

pro-US and anti-communist army general. His government inaugurated one

76 García-Sayán, ‘Perú’, 13.

77 Decreto-Ley No. 25475, 5 May 1992, Article 12, ADLP, www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/

82 Cited in Rivera Paz, ‘Ley penal’, p. 8. 83 Comisión, Informe, Vol. 1, p. 171.

84 Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 248.

or another, from the economic prosperity of the rubber boom.

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