The Shining Path

On 17 May 1980, on the eve of Perus presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and how brave police investigators and journalists brought it to justice, may be the most compelling chapter in modern Latin American history but the full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as cold-blooded and bestial, Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations and massacres across the cities, countryside and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzmn, who launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre and the formidable Elena Iparraguirre, who married Guzmn soon after Augustas mysterious death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic ideology, and the militarys bloody response, led to the death of nearly 70,000 Peruvians. Orin Starn and Miguel La Sernas narrative history of Shining Path is both panoramic and intimate, set against the socioeconomic upheavals of Perus rocky transition from military dictatorship to elected democracy. They take readers deep into the heart of the rebellion and the lives and country it nearly destroyed. We hear the voices of the mountain villagers who organised a fierce rural resistance and meet the irrepressible black activist Mara Elena Moyano and the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who each fought to end the bloodshed. Deftly written, The Shining Path is an exquisitely detailed account of a little-remembered war that must never be forgotten.