[1980 - 2000] The Internal Conflict

The year is 1980. After twelve years of military rule, Peru is breathing a tentative sigh of relief, stepping back into the light of democracy. On May 18th, the day of the first presidential election in nearly two decades, the nation holds its breath. But far from the bustling political centers of Lima, in the small, remote Andean village of Chuschi in the Ayacucho region, a different kind of political statement is being made. Five masked figures storm the humble polling station. They don’t steal money; they steal the ballot boxes and the inkpads, piling them in the town square and setting them ablaze. This act, seemingly small and isolated, is the opening salvo of a war that will consume Peru for two decades. It is the public birth of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path. To understand the conflict, one must first understand the landscape of Peru itself—a nation of stark contrasts. There was the coastal, cosmopolitan Lima, home to political power and economic wealth, a world away from the Sierra, the rugged Andean highlands. For centuries, the indigenous Quechua-speaking populations of the highlands had endured state neglect, poverty, and systemic discrimination. It was in this fertile ground of grievance that the Shining Path took root. Its leader was Abimael Guzmán, a former philosophy professor from the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho. Known to his followers as Presidente Gonzalo, he envisioned a brutal, totalitarian Maoist state, forged through a protracted “people’s war” that would cleanse the nation of its old structures. His ideology was absolute, rejecting all other leftist groups and demanding total adherence. For Sendero, there were no non-combatants; you were either with the revolution or against it, and if you were against it, you were a target. The early years of the conflict were deceptively quiet for those in the capital. The war was a distant rumor from the mountains, a problem for the poor, rural campesinos. Sendero’s strategy was to consolidate power in the countryside, executing mayors, merchants, and anyone who represented the state or resisted their authority. They enforced their own brutal justice, banning traditional festivals and imposing a rigid, fear-based order. The state, led by the newly elected President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, initially dismissed them as mere `abigeos`—cattle rustlers—and sent in the police, who were hopelessly outmatched. As the violence escalated, the military was deployed, and the war entered a new, horrific phase. Untrained for counter-insurgency and operating with a racist disdain for the local population, the armed forces often saw every campesino as a potential terrorist. The people of the highlands were now trapped between two fires: the fanatical violence of Sendero and the indiscriminate brutality of the state. Massacres became a grim reality, with names like Accomarca, where the army executed dozens of villagers, and Lucanamarca, where Sendero slaughtered 69 people with axes and machetes, including eighteen children, as a punishment for rebellion. By the mid-1980s, under the presidency of Alan García, the war had come to the cities. The economy was in freefall, crippled by hyperinflation that made currency practically worthless overnight. In Lima, the nights were often punctuated by the eerie silence and sudden darkness of `apagones`—power outages caused by Sendero bombing electricity pylons. The darkness would be broken by the flash and deafening roar of a `coche bomba`, a car bomb, a tactic that became tragically common. The sound would echo through the streets, a reminder that nowhere was safe. Daily life became a series of negotiations with fear. People learned the grim calculus of survival: which streets to avoid, to be home before the unofficial curfew, to flinch at the sound of a car backfiring. Alongside Sendero, a second, smaller insurgent group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), added to the chaos. Inspired by Cuban-style revolutions, they engaged in kidnappings and high-profile attacks, but they lacked the messianic, all-consuming violence of Guzmán’s followers. The early 1990s marked the conflict's zenith. Alberto Fujimori, a political outsider, had swept to power, promising order. In 1992, he executed an `autogolpe`, a self-coup, dissolving Congress and seizing absolute power with the backing of the military. He promised to crush the insurgency, and his government intensified the dirty war. The violence in Lima reached a terrifying peak. On July 16, 1992, Sendero detonated a massive car bomb on Calle Tarata, in the heart of the affluent Miraflores district. The blast killed 25 people and wounded over 200, but its psychological impact was immeasurable. It proved, definitively, that the war was not just for the poor or the people of the Andes. It was for everyone. Yet, just as Sendero seemed invincible, its end came with astonishing speed. The key was intelligence. A special police unit, GEIN, had been patiently tracking Guzmán for years, not through force, but through meticulous detective work. They staked out houses, analyzed garbage, and pieced together the puzzle of the phantom leader's whereabouts. On September 12, 1992, they raided a safe house above a dance studio in Surquillo, a middle-class Lima neighborhood. There, without a single shot fired, they found him: Abimael Guzmán, the feared Presidente Gonzalo, a portly, unassuming man who had orchestrated so much death. The image of his capture—disheveled, defiant, but ultimately a man in a cage—was broadcast across the nation. It shattered the myth of his invincibility and decapitated the Shining Path. The organization, built entirely around his cult of personality, began to crumble. The conflict wound down through the rest of the decade, though the violence did not stop overnight. The MRTA made its last dramatic stand in 1996 with the Japanese embassy hostage crisis, a 126-day siege that ended in a bloody military raid. But the war, for all intents and purposes, was over. What remained were the scars and the staggering cost. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), established in 2001, delivered a final report that stunned the nation. It estimated the number of dead and disappeared to be nearly 70,000. Crucially, the CVR concluded that roughly 75% of these victims were native Quechua speakers from the rural highlands—the very people Sendero claimed to be liberating, and the same people the state failed to protect. The Shining Path was responsible for the majority of the deaths (54%), but the state’s forces were responsible for a significant portion as well, along with smaller groups like the MRTA and local militias. The two decades of terror left a legacy of trauma, mistrust, and a profound, unresolved grief that Peru continues to grapple with to this day.