Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 by the Special Criminal Court of Peru’s Supreme Court to the maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity. The conviction marked the final chapter of Peru’s decades-long conflict against the Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path. A self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary force, the Shining Path believed a communist revolution could take place if the agrarian preindustrial society became politically conscious — and, more importantly, armed. As such, its members have been alternatively considered the heroes and the villains of Peru’s turbulent civil war, which began in 1981. They have remained idyllic in their ideology and brutal in their strategy: While initially promising to transform society, they also pledged to pay a “quota of blood” in order to establish a utopia. Their terrorist tactics of kidnapping, assassination and bombing were met with an equally violent response from the state that spilled over into the lives of its civilians. Elected with the promise of ending the bloodshed at any cost, Fujimori had tough-on-terrorism policies that transformed him in the eyes of the Peruvian public from a savior who promised to end the bloodbath to a monster that created deep wounds in Peruvian society. As Fujimori now serves his time in jail, the story of his battle against the Shining Path is a reminder that trading liberty for security is a deeply fraught choice for any nation.
The seeds of Peru’s conflict were sown in 1962, amidst national economic hardships and the widespread marginalization of rural Peruvians. The increasing difficulties of eking out a living made the poor, rural province of Ayacucho the ideal site to incubate a revolution. It all started with Abimael Guzmán, a leader of the Peruvian Communist Party and a philosophy professor, who was appointed to teach at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho. Guzmán visited China during his time teaching and witnessed Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which ultimately contributed to the radicalization of his beliefs. He became, in the words of Encyclopedia Britannica, “convinced that a rapid violent revolution was necessary to destroy Peru’s existing government and institute a peasant dictatorship.”
By the 1970s, Guzmán had transformed the Peruvian Communist Party into a guerrilla army under the name Sendero Luminoso. The group began its military operations in Ayacucho in 1981 and quickly came to dominate most of the countryside through not only appeals to popular justice, but also tactics of intimidation. What began as a peasant revolution then slowly began to infiltrate the cities. The conflict had escalated into a full-blown civil war by the early 1990s. While the Sendero Luminoso was not the only leftist group taking up arms at the time, it was the most prominent and violent one. At its peak, the Shining Path was comprised of 10,000 militants and controlled about 60 percent of Peru’s national territory. It alone was responsible for an estimated 54 percent of the 69,280 total deaths produced in the conflict.
Indiscriminate use of violence by the Shining Path undermined its intended message of justice, and the Maoist-style Cultural Revolution it tried to incite at gunpoint failed to take root. As Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later concluded, the Shining Path’s support base was largely limited to academics and unemployed youth. The group’s militaristic, totalitarian and brutally violent revolution was far from welcoming: The Shining Path banned indigenous and Christian holidays, stoned communal leaders and massacred entire villages where self-defense militias were organized — oftentimes even using machetes and knives in order to save ammunition.
Confronted with prolonged conflict, many citizens began clamoring for the end of the Shining Path’s reign of terror. Protestors advocated for restrictions on fundamental rights and principles for the sake of combatting guerrilla violence — demands with which the government readily complied, employing a military solution with no civilian oversight. Threatened now by the Shining Path and the army, who both ruthlessly rallied for support in the countryside, many rural communities sided with government forces, seeing it as the lesser of two evils despite a normalized culture of military crackdowns and the regular disappearances of dissenters.
Support for the government’s counterinsurgency eventually extended beyond rural areas. Because of the Shining Path’s brutality, people from all social strata were willing to take a risk and give substantial power to the army — although the tradeoff ultimately meant an exchange of democracy for security, and with it, toleration of violence against civilians as a necessary cost to end the insurgency. In many minds, violent terrorism by the Shining Path called for an extreme response from the government, including the expansion of presidential powers, the indiscriminate use of force and the abrogation of democratic principles. In this context, the population offered strong support to Fujimori, who promised to stabilize the economy and crack down on terrorists. Using strong political rhetoric against the agitators, he was elected president in 1990 and subsequently refused to devolve power, eventually transforming himself into the first democratically elected dictator in the region. Two years into his administration, with widespread support from the population and the military, Fujimori staged a “self-coup” that would allow him to address terrorism and Peru’s stagnant economy as he had envisioned. He declared a state of emergency, wrote a new constitution that allowed him to legislate by decree, dissolved Congress, dismantled the country’s legal system and took over its media outlets.
Under Fujimori’s new anti-terrorism laws, many Peruvians’ legal rights were violated, including their access to both due process and judicial guarantees. The new definition of terrorism that the law created was vague, leaving room for virtually any act of violence against “life, the body…[or] property” to be interpreted as one of terrorism, regardless of intent. Military and security forces were given a free pass to arbitrarily detain and even kill alleged terrorists. Torture and forced confessions became common interrogation practices. With no civilian oversight of the judicial process, anyone could be indicted for terrorism and punished with disproportionate sentences that ranged from 20 years to life in prison. Additionally, the army secretly formed a death squad called “Grupo Colina,” which was responsible for assassinations, disappearances, widespread massacres and inhumane cruelty between 1991 and 1994. While the group was originally established to annihilate communist militants, it eventually targeted trade unionists and political opponents as well. The Grupo Colina also carried out infamous massacres in Barrios Altos, El Santa and La Cantuta — neighborhoods of Lima, the capital — killing ordinary civilians and peasants.
Despite the ongoing human rights violations, popular support for Fujimori remained surprisingly high. Counterinsurgency policies in particular continued to receive support from up to 82 percent of the population in the ’90s. These brutal policies eventually led to Fujimori’s 2009 conviction, but they were nevertheless effective in subduing the threat of terrorism in the country. He arrested Guzmán in 1992 and mostly dismantled the Shining Path, though it still maintains limited operations today.
Peru’s case parallels many similar instances of state violence across the globe. Insurgent or criminal threats usually serve as a justification for violations of fundamental rights. As terrorism expert and professor at Washington College of Law Robert Goldman explains, “When people feel there is no security, people will support suspension of fundamental liberties, basically believing, ‘This really doesn’t affect me, I’m a good citizen, I’m not engaged in any subversive activities.’” While some indigenous and rural communities who were disproportionately affected by the conflict resisted these incursions on their rights from the beginning, resistance was rarely successful. Always marginalized, their voices were not represented in the government. So long as the threat of terrorism persisted, the social costs of war could be ignored.
Support for state-sponsored lawlessness, however, eventually hit a threshold. As the violence escalated, more people were swept under the brutality legitimized by antiterrorism laws, making it undeniable among the general population that a great portion of the “terrorists” were innocent and that the justice system had become an instrument of repression. As the government stepped further beyond its bounds, the populace realized that there was no inherent tradeoff between security and liberty. The indifferent became attuned; a critical mass of people started caring, questioning and contesting.
As the threat of guerrilla violence subsided, the Peruvian government lost its carte blanche for abuse, and corruption schemes and human rights violations were finally brought to light. The head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service at the time, Vladimiro Montesinos, was caught on video in 2000 bribing an opposition senator to ally himself with Fujimori, causing significant public outcry. Both Fujimori and Montesinos were subsequently accused of drug smuggling, vote tampering, embezzlement and arms trafficking — including through deals struck with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). The pair was later also held criminally accountable for the Grupo Colina and its violence. By the end of the century, Fujimori was utterly discredited. He failed to secure an illegal third term in office and fled the country a few weeks later, faxing his resignation from a new safe haven in Japan. When he later left Japan for Chile, he was arrested and extradited to Peru. He ended his legacy as the first Latin American president to be tried in his own country for grave violations of human rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Still, the Shining Path did not regain its legitimacy with Fujimori’s fall and conviction, and the fact that it too was victimized did not undo its acts of terror in the public’s eyes. Similarly, the government, and Fujimori especially, were no longer seen as heroes by the Peruvian public. Statistics and reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission attest to the nuances of victimhood in the Peruvian civil war. While it can be an extreme case, Peru’s handling of the Shining Path shows that concentrating executive power and bending the norms is a counterproductive strategy for winning support in the global fight against extremism. Complying with the law is not “a weakness,” as Goldman points out. “It’s a strength. It’s what differentiates you…from your enemy.”
Art by Grace Sun.