selucha:

Cuzco, Peru 1980. To mark the beginning of the people’s war, the Partido Comunista del Peru (Sendero Luminoso) hung dead dogs from lampposts as a symbol of contempt for tyranny.

leptiir:

The Shining Path - Sendero Luminoso

What is The shining path? “The Shining Path began in the late 1960s as a small communist revolutionary group led by a philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán. Guzmán opposed Peru’s prevailing political elites. His followers drew on Marxism and the example of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and coalesced into a significant and violent guerrilla army which regularly used terrorist tactics in their effort to destabilize and overthrow the Peruvian government. At the height of its power, Shining Path’s ranks numbered around ten thousand, according to a report from the Jamestown Foundation. A paper from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) says the main goal of Shining Path has always been to overthrow the existing Peruvian government and political institutions and replace them with a communist revolutionary command. Guzmán, adopting the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, attempted to do all of this while resisting overt ties with foreign powers or other Latin American leftist groups, including the contemporary Peruvian group known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. (Read more here)

Shining Path attacks killed as many as 11,000 civilians, though it estimates as many as 70,000 people were killed overall in fighting between the Peruvian government and the Shining Path. According to an article in the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, the campaign cost the Peruvian government over $10 billion.

This is 20 years of history, a chunk of Perú’s history, that has been all but completely ignored by the world. Condensed down to two short paragraphs in a tumblr post. I blame The US government for the influence it has on the world, being able to somehow make certain events seem more important than others, simply by giving it attention- whatever it is, this civil war has been totally ignored by the world, and it doesn’t seem like anyone is really paying any attention now that it’s over. But the fact of the matter is, over 70,000 people died, and a lot of the remote parts of Perú have very, very visible scars of what went down in those twenty years. I should definitely write up a post detailing my experience as the son of a Peruvian who fled her country because of the civil war, and how that’s affected me and the way I’ve been raised. I have scattered memories of visiting the village my mother is from, she’s from a small village in the Amazon Basin called Tingo Maria, and seeing the ruins of a bridge lying in the middle of the river it once hung over; it had been blown up by the Sendero Luminoso in the early 1980s, but of course that didn’t connect in my head at the age of six. Entire villages or habitas that, at present, are still standing, parts of them crumbling, but are all empty because the people who once lived there were murdered in the revolution. 10, 15 years ago, maybe.

I just got back from a three-week stay in Lima; it was mainly to visit family whom I hadn’t seen in years, but while I was there I did some traveling, stopped by some museums, and talked with many different people. At the Museo de la Nacion (Museum of the Nation), there’s a floor dedicated to an exhibit called Yuyanapaq. Para Recordar, which is essentially a visual history of the internal conflict through photographs and video, but there is also music and oral histories coming from the speakers. It’s the first time I’d ever been exposed to an unabridged version of what happened, and it really rattled me. Seeing pictures of what happened, listening to revolutionary chants and songs written by both Sendero and the MRTA (literally the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, another leftist guerilla terrorist group that was also fighting for political power), and also hearing testimonies from survivors was a strange and jarring experience. I walked around the exhibit alone, because none of my family wanted to do it with me, making the whole ordeal a lot more frightening. But I understood why: with the exception of my mother, everyone I was with had lived through it, and probably didn’t need to relive it.

It’s interesting, and heart-breaking to think that although rather indirectly, the Internal Conflict (as it’s now referred to) has affected my life in its own potent, haunting way. Growing up, I had vague glimpses and ideas of something that occurred all those years ago. Something that forced my mother and her mother to leave everything and seek refuge in America, something that eventually brought her brothers here too. I know that a couple of my uncles were kidnapped and held for ransom in Perú, before they arrived in America. It’s little clues and notes like these that were left around me as a child, mentioned but never really expanded upon. It took this trip and finally seeing what happened for everything to really fall into place in my head; For me to make the connections between what I heard whispered as a child, and what I know now.

No one really talks about the Internal Conflict, and it’s completely understandable. Like I said, there are physical reminders of it all over Perú: next to structural damage, there’s people living their lives whose families were completely destroyed, and people who are still missing. It’s a tragedy of massive proportions, but I think what’s worse is that this period of time is, like I said, virtually ignored by the world. No one really knows about it outside of Peru and perhaps parts of South America, but it’s definitely something that deserves the attention of the world. I’m hoping that with this post I can inform some of you intelligent tumblr people, who will pass it on, and spread this forgotten history.