The Shining Path

Reviewed by: The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes by Starn Orin and Miguel La Serna John W. Sherman Orin, Starn, and Miguel La Serna The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. New York: Norton, 2019. The challenge of reaching a general audience is commendably met by anthropologist Orin Starn (Duke University) and historian Miguel La Serna (University of North Carolina) in this engaging sweep of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) war in Peru. The emphasis is predictably on narrative, and the content gravitates toward the well-known personalities, incidents, and flash-points of the long struggle: the seminal role of Abimael Guzmán, violence in the Ayacucho countryside, the massacre of journalists at Uchuraccay, the rise of peasant self-defense rondas in the highlands, Sendero urban terror, the 1990 presidential election contest between Mario Vargas Llosa and Alberto Fujimori, the subsequent autogolpe, and the hunt for—and final capture and public display of—Guzmán. Though a work of nonfiction, the book reads like a dramatic, plot-twisting novel. The narrative is skillfully woven around significant persons, with redux clearly designed to keep the curious neophyte engaged. There are also pockets of more depth here: the authors give us insight on Augusta La Torre (Comrade Norah), Guzmán's first wife, and good detail about their lives in hiding. We receive a very thorough accounting of the life and death of María Elena Moyano, the outspoken anti-Sendero activist (and victim) of the gritty metro-Lima barrio Villa El Salvador. What is encouraging, from an epistemological view is the range of sources employed for this broadly flowing book: Stern and La Serna tapped into key participant interviews, most significantly among both rank-and-file and senior Senderistas, many of whom remain in prison. They also drew upon police dossiers and documents, though these seem to have still yielded a mainstream accounting of the tracking and final capture of Guzmán. One hopes that the scores of interviews will produce a follow-up work—a thicker accounting of the Sendero leadership's prosecution of the war, ideally. [End Page 419] For his part, La Serna has led us in this direction with a second recent book, With Masses and Arms: Peru's Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (2020). Having interviewed several key Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) participants, he chronicles the organization from inception to collapse, relatively deemphasizing the 1997 siege of the Japanese ambassador's residence. This slightly weightier book on a narrower topic nevertheless follows the same structural pattern—orbiting an easy narrative around a series of major figures. Víctor Polay Campos, the primary inspiration for the MRTA, is predictably front and center. Although a sympathetic account, the book fortuitously does not wince from the darker side of the guerrillas, noting for example their acts of social cleansing in the Huallaga valley, where they preemptively executed drug addicts and homosexuals (practical differences between "leftist" guerrillas and "right-wing" paramilitaries are, in truth, often surprisingly few). The imperative for scholars of political violence is to break past the contemporaneous media-led story line and seek out firsthand participants retrospectively. Unusually courageous and informed journalists can also provide veritable substance, both during the events and afterward. In the case of The Shining Path, Starn and La Serna find this exceptional source in Gustavo Gorriti, a person who arguably knows Peru's recent political history better than anyone else on the planet. Readers will appreciate the subordinate yet intimate tale of Gorriti, who in his work as a journalist for Caretas (Peru's newsmagazine) intensely studied the insurgency in the field, at great personal risk. He later crossed paths with the emerging Fujimorista police state, gambling his career in an uncompromising professionalism. Accompanying photographs are nearly all from Caretas, and especially from Gorriti's colleague Óscar Medrano. In contrast, it is harder for scholars to access the perpetrators of state violence. While outsiders to structures of power seek forums in which to justify their actions, the vested rarely have any such need (with public approbation typically in their favor). They are thus far more reluctant to talk. It will be interesting to

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