>>2909928>A comrade i respect says the Shining Path is "interesting"Well sure. The interesting question about them to me is who actually were these people. Like what was the social base and "why" this thing emerged when it did. Apparently many of them were mestizo kids in smaller towns and cities who were the first generation to go to college. They weren't the true Quechua speaking indios or the whiter Lima people either but in between. Historically the same social class became members of the Catholic clergy going back to colonial times.
>and the massacres are CIA propaganda. The problem is that Peruvians by and large look at the Shining Path as insane terrorists. I was talking to a Peruvian woman who I run into occasionally (mesti girl I think, looks kind of like this) and she was born in the early 1980s so was a little girl when that was going on, and she just called them "terrorists." She didn't like Keiko Fujimori but called the other guy a "communist" which she said in a way that sounded like a slur. I was, like, damn.
>From what i remember, Gonzalo and his followers were nutjobs (equaling Gonzalo with Marx Lenin Mao…) There was a populist general who took power in 1968 named Juan Velasco Alvarado. He did land reform and nationalizations. (Hugo Chavez was also a young military man who visited Peru and heard him speak, was influenced by him.) Velasco was ousted in a coup in 1975. Apparently there were social movements which were doing work during that time, but Gonzalo and his core group of people played no part in them. He was a philosophy professor in Ayacucho. So these students really built a cult around this guy. Before they launched their guerrilla war they were considered by the wider Peruvian left to be a kooky / fringe Maoist group. Mao also died in 1976.
It's almost like if Bob Avakian's followers took over half of the United States in a war. And iirc Avakian's group was part of the same international tendency as them back then. So what's odd is how this doubling down happened as the overall trend (Mao dying, the Gang of Four getting purged, etc.) was going into reverse. Just very contradictory as a historical phenomenon.