La voluntad encarcelada

I would gladly use this book in an introductory class on Latin American politics and history. It manages to convey, in 150 pages, the historical roots of Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrilla movement responsible for more than half of all politically motivated deaths in Peru between 1980 and 2000, while also providing a concise history of its emergence, evolution, and defeat after the 1992 arrest of its main ideologue and strategist, Abimael Guzmán. Rénique also analyzes the shifts in Sendero strategy after Guzmán’s arrest, which is important to help us understand present concerns of a resurgence of guerrilla activity in this troubled Andean nation.The book is more than just another retelling of Sendero’s emergence and defeat. First, it emphasizes the historical continuities between Andean radicalism and Sendero. It also explores Sendero’s voluntarism—seen nowhere more clearly than in its efforts (largely successful) at turning Peru’s prisons into key fronts in its struggle against the “bureaucratic-capitalist state.” Rénique visited two of Peru’s most notorious prisons— Canto Grande, on the outskirts of Lima, and Yanamayo, the infamous prison built by the Fujimori government in the inhospitable altiplano, whose single purpose was to break the will of its inmates. He also studied numerous Sendero documents, human rights reports, and journalistic accounts of Sendero in the prisons. He weaves this diverse material into an engaging and readable text that will interest both specialist and nonspecialist. This solid analytical text seeks to understand the historical context in which Sendero emerged, the power of its ideology and its dogmatism, and the political will of its leaders and militants in their struggle first to lead a “popular war” in Peru and now, with most if the key leadership in prison, to survive the calamity of Guzmán’s 1992 arrest.While much of the book covers known territory, this provides necessary context. Some of the historical material also yields new insights: for example, Rénique details the history of Andean radicalism, arguing that Sendero is the legitimate child of this political trajectory and explaining why the movement never took up the banner of ethnic struggle. Some comparative reference would have been helpful: this was the case with much of the Latin American Left in the 1960s and 1970s, and Sendero was no exception (though perhaps more extreme) in its emphasis on class and its denigration of culture in its revolutionary strategy.Rénique successfully conveys how Sendero’s rigid ideology, collective organization, and persistent voluntarism have allowed its members to not only survive draconian prison conditions, but indeed to thrive in them, using the prison as a space to reaffirm their ideological commitments and continue their struggle. Foucauldian scholars have examined prisons as spaces both for the exercise of power and as spaces of resistance. In this case, prisons were, additionally, sites of explicit political struggle, from which Sendero could challenge and highlight the failings of the state and from which it sought to provoke state violence and demonstrate the moral superiority of its struggle. As one might suspect, a book about Peru’s prisons during the height of the internal conflict includes harrowing stories that reveal perhaps more about the state than about the insurgents themselves. The infamous prison massacres of 1986, for example, in which some two hundred prisoners were killed (many after surrendering), reveal the willingness of civilian leaders to cede power to the military in order to stop the insurgency. The “forgotten massacre” of May 1992 in Canto Grande prison, where, a month after Fujimori’s autogolpe, security forces killed some 30 Sendero leaders, highlights the regime’s stunning arrogance, as well as its utter indifference to human rights. The book offers insights into a little-told story: the rearticulation, from behind prison walls, of Sendero’s political strategy post-1992. That this was facilitated by the Fujimori regime itself (briefly but incisively discussed by the author) is less shocking than the fact that this new strategy may be bearing fruit. Perhaps the one analytical weakness of the book is its sidestep-ping of the question of the political significance of this rearticulation and of Sendero’s new strategy of “doing politics without the spilling of blood,” as Guzmán described it in 1993. It may be too soon to tell, but I would have liked to see more commentary from the author, given his intimate knowledge of Sendero’s ideology, organization, and political praxis on the ground. Instead, he merely implies—by way of comparison with APRA, which itself survived a period of persecution and incarceration—that it is possible.If Sendero’s recomposition is confined to the prisons and has little echo in society, it would be an interesting, but largely anecdotal, story. But if it is able to connect with larger movements in society now or in the near future, then this is the story, and we want to—we need to—know more

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