Just two weeks before Peru’s second-round election, the media reported the execution-style murder of 16 civilians, including two children, in the remote jungle district of Vizcatán. The attack took place in a region known by its acronym VRAEM, where 75 percent of Peru’s coca leaf — the primary ingredient in cocaine — is produced.
A Peruvian military statement blamed the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgent movement active in the 1980s and early 1990s, for the killings. Here’s what the research tells us about Shining Path and how the legacy of fear may be a factor in Sunday’s election.
The news of this tragedy quickly became politicized
After the April 11 first-round vote, left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo, a newcomer to the national political scene, held a comfortable lead over Keiko Fujimori, a third-time presidential contender from Peru’s hard right. In close alliance with the mainstream news media, Fujimori’s campaign has tried to discredit Castillo by portraying him as a left-wing extremist who, if elected, would destroy Peru.
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The Fujimori campaign seized upon the Vizcatán massacre to reiterate the “Castillo-as-extremist” narrative, pointing to alleged ties between Castillo and a Shining Path front group, MOVADEF, to suggest that Castillo bore some responsibility for the gruesome killings. Fujimori’s allies claim a Castillo presidency would return Peru to the violence of the 1980s.
Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who led campaigns to defeat Keiko Fujimori in 2011 and 2016, has now become a supporter, publicly urging Fujimori to “save” Peru “from falling into the hands of totalitarianism.”
What is the Shining Path — and are they still a security threat?
The Shining Path was an authoritarian insurgency active in Peru three decades ago. As I discuss in my book, the group gained influence throughout the country largely because the Peruvian government failed to address the basic needs of its citizens. The Shining Path also employed terror tactics to impose its will in rural and some urban communities throughout the country.
Unique among insurgent movements in Latin America for its level of brutality, the Shining Path is perhaps more comparable to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia than any of the insurgent movements in Central or Latin America over the past 50 years. A Peruvian truth commission found the Shining Path to be responsible for 54 percent of the 69,000 deaths that resulted from Peru’s internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000.
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By the mid-1990s, however, government forces had decisively defeated the Shining Path. Its founder and top ideologue and strategist, Abimael Guzmán, was arrested, along with other top leaders and most of its members. Peruvians rejected the group’s totalitarian ideology and violent methods.
Yet two small groups continue to claim the Shining Path mantle. One group, MOVADEF, recognizes Guzmán’s leadership and has sought to make inroads into electoral politics, but it has few followers. Another, the “Militarized Communist Party of Peru,” split long ago with Guzmán. It has become closely linked to drug trafficking and has no viable political project. Led by Victor Quispe Palomino, the group capitalizes on the government’s failure to address poverty and security in the VRAEM region.
It’s this second group, the Militarized Communist Party of Peru, that the military claimed was responsible for the Vizcatán killings. Not only did it make this claim before any full investigation into the murders, but the military has also conflated this group with the historic Shining Path, sowing confusion and generating fear among the general public. The head of Peru’s police, in contrast, urged caution in assigning responsibility for the massacre until an investigation could be carried out.
Reports on the ground suggest that the massacre wasn’t the work of Quispe Palomino’s group but instead was a reprisal of some kind that was linked to drug trafficking. Why, then, did the military equate the historic Shining Path with the splinter group operating out of VRAEM, and why was it so quick to do so?
Politicians have used fear to undermine the left
During the 1980s and 1990s — in the context of the war against the Shining Path — politicians, the military and the mainstream media portrayed anyone from the political left as subversive threats to the nation. Trade unionists, student leaders, university professors and peasant leaders were jailed, killed and disappeared, even though they were not part of the armed insurgency. In many instances, the Shining Path attacked them as well, viewing them as rivals in their mission to overthrow the government.
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In my book, I analyze this “politics of fear” — perfected during the regime of Keiko Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori, who served as president from 1990 to 2000. Though Peru transitioned to democracy by 2001, conservative elites and media groups continued to deploy this politics of fear to attack and discredit the opposition.
Peruvians remain traumatized by the Shining Path war, which means many are still susceptible to the politics of fear. Activists are now challenging this tactic — dismissing efforts to “terruquear” someone, or discredit them by labeling them a terrorist. It’s a term based on Peruvian slang for terrorist, “terruco.”
The politics of fear is on full display in Peru today. The mainstream media offers flattering, nonstop coverage of Keiko Fujimori while portraying Castillo as a dangerous communist. Some accounts even call him a Shining Path militant. The campaign to blame the Shining Path for the Vizcatán killings — and Castillo by association — seems aimed at using long-standing public fears of terrorism in Peru for political advantage. The politics of fear may pay off for Fujimori: In the run-up to the final vote Sunday, public opinion polls put her neck and neck with Pedro Castillo.
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Jo-Marie Burt (@jomaburt) is associate professor in political science at George Mason University and the author of Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (Palgrave, 2007).