Last
night, I finished Gustavo Gorriti’s account
of the Peruvian personality cult led by Abimael
Guzmán, aka Comrade Gonzalo. I wondered,
sleepily, what had become of the Sendero Luminoso.
This morning, the newspaper displayed him center
stage, fist in the air, with other graying guerrillas:
‘Long Live Marxism’. His retrial has opened
in Lima.
The
book by Gorriti I call an account rather than a
history, because it conveys the movement in medias
res, published in 1990 as the SL prepared to
assault the capital, well before the 1992 capture
of Guzmán and the persecution of Gorriti.
Particularly relevant to readers of The Blanket
is the preface by the author to the 1998 translation
by Robin Kirk. Here, he briefly describes how, when
president (elected in 1990) Alberto Fujimori staged
a coup in 1992, he was arrested for his investigational
journalism into the president and his ‘Creole
Rasputin’—right before the arrest of Comrade
Gonzalo. Gorriti managed to escape, files spirited
out of the country too, and wound up in Panama working
for its paper La Prensa. There, in 1996,
he again faced his enemies as that government threatened
him after he exposed a campaign financed by a Colombian
drug cartel. He lived in his office for weeks, so
as to foil police plans for his deportation. He
emerged victorious, determined to uphold—in
what he calls ‘cosmetic democracies’,
a free press.
At
the time Gorriti compiled his tale of the SL, he
had intended it as part of a three-volume work on
the Peruvian Communist Party and its many alphabet-soup
off-brands. This shows, as I was instantly immersed
into a detailed narrative of unions, strikes, police
machinations, and bureaucratic—to me—trivia.
The book is probably not the first place to go for
a quick introduction to the situation into which
Sendero Luminoso stumbled. Gorriti clearly addresses
an audience more familiar than I was with his country.
Still, the gifts of his journalistic verve carried
me through pages of departmental decisions into
powerful chapters that highlighted the deadly nature
of Guzmán’s millenarian blend of Lenin,
Marx, Mao, and messianic apocalypse that plunged—literally—much
of his nation into darkness and resulted in at least
70,000 deaths, half of these at the hands of those
who claimed to liberate the people from their imperialist
oppressors. Half of these at the hands of those
who claimed to protect the people from their revolutionary
oppressors.
This
is Gorriti’s achievement. Eschewing the glib
slogans of the left and the harsh vows of the right,
he tracks the rise of the Shining Path from a few
students tossing dynamite—a commodity readily
nicked from the mines—to police reprisals and
the spread of societal breakdown across the Andes
and into, as the book ends, the edges of the city.
What the history lacks is a context for foreign
readers into which Guzmán and his ilk can
be placed. Not even his birthdate is given; we know
nothing here about his early schooling, what kind
of a doctor he was, or how José Carlos Mariátegui
founded the PCP, apparently in the 1930s. This information,
which any academic editor would insist upon in a
conventional manuscript, is, I assume, assumed by
Gorriti not to matter or to be common knowledge
to his Peruvian audience. Robin Kirk (who has written
a lefty’s view of Perú, The Monkey’s
Paw) translates what, given my knowledge of
Spanish, I presume carries the uneven rhythms of
the original prose, with its leaden ‘he said,
she said’ reports from within the corridors
of power as well as its nearly cinematic vignettes
of attacks and reprisals from the front. Given these
drawbacks, nonetheless, the uneasy mixture of dry
minutiae about police intelligence sloshes against
a potent additive. The energy with which he describes
the attacks by the guerrillas on the Ayacucho police
stations, the torture of suspects, the funerals
of officers and cadets, the rain on a tin-roofed
shanty where a teenaged girl guerrilla shows her
interviewers the marks of her abuse by her captors:
all of these vignettes unforgettably inscribe themselves
on your memory.
Years
ago, I had read Mario Vargas Llosa’s novcl,
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, based on
Guzmán’s career. I’ve just started
the British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare’s
The Vision of Elena Silves, which appeared
about the same time as Gorriti’s book. (Shakespeare
also penned a later novel, The Dancer Upstairs,
based on the capture of Guzmán, which was
made into a movie by John Malkovich which I have
not seen but which received tepid reviews.) The
portrayals by Gorriti of the conditions in which
the Shining Path provoked repression and in which
the police and civilians resisted glow with the
same passion that a good novelist channels. You
do feel as if you are there.
For
the more politically inclined, Gorriti analyses
how Guzmán terrorised his comrades. While
their own backgrounds—Gorriti alludes that
many of them would have been with him from the start,
although we learn nothing about when or where this
was—remain unknown, we do learn how, as Guzmán
built his personality cult, he destroyed any opposition.
Shades of Stalinist show trials: again, weeks of
self-incrimination, abasement, confessions, until
his victims begged for death at his hands even as
they praised him. His citations of their own pleas
should be read by any true believers of any totalitarian
creed. Here, Gorriti’s analysis of how a ‘Marxist-Leninist-Mao
Tse-Tung thought’ ideology in all its awkwardness
emerged under Comrade Gonzalo’s tyranny into
a messianic message threatening, to quote as he
did a Prussian strategist: ‘War is humanity’s
most invigorating iron cure.’ (237) His chapters
on party thought, recrimination, and internal (if
ultimately one-sided) debate feature cogent, clever,
and closely argued readings of Guzmán’s
florid ravings, as he gradually leaves Marxist ideology
behind to embrace dictatorship, deny any semblance
of democracy, and, contrary to today’s paper’s
phrase, no arrival of ‘a classless utopia’.
Rather, an Orwellian boot upon a human face, forever.
Gorriti cites Comrade Gonzalo’s desire for
a system built on endless purges, of annihilation,
of destroying Perú to save it. ‘The
quota’ for blood via Lenin’s State
and Revolution surpasses even his fevered sallies.
As long as recruits continued, they could be decimated.
Ensuring that a few led and many fought, Guzmán
determined to provoke state repression. Mid-level
cadres too could succumb, according to his calculus,
if in the end the force of counteraction by the
imperialist powers overwhelmed guerrilla operations.
Gorriti’s
success, despite the awkward pace of his book, shows
in his coverage of both factors of this terrible
sum. His humanism overcomes the glib slogans of
the left and the harsh vows of the right. Working
as he was in a war zone, under a harsh regime itself
under terrible attack, with little access to more
than what he himself could find on the Shining Path,
his achievement is remarkable. His account of how
the ‘legal left’ fared at the hands of
their former radical comrades offers a cautionary
tale for activists. Peruvian union advocates and
Marxist sympathisers rallied in early years to free,
on humanitarian grounds and on the basis of professional
solidarity, certain Senderos. Their crimes hidden
from the public, they were depicted as helpless
pawns of a cruel imperialist regime. Released, they
progressed into more deadly reprisals against those
on the left and the right and anyone in between,
true to their leader’s determination to collapse
the nation.
Although
he mentions an International Revolutionary Movement
only in passing, Gorriti shows how the Shining Path
manipulated the case of Max Durand as an example
of the cynical approach of the Senderos towards
foreign well-wishers. Only 13 Maoist assemblages
‘both small and miniscule’ could be rallied
for Guzmán’s global support, from such
bastions as the Senegal, New Zealand, and the Dominican
Republic. Even Albania had failed to inspire the
last faithful proponents of the proletariat. For
the Senderos used ‘Hoxhist’ as an insult,
praised only unending dictatorship, and hung from
Lima’s lamp posts dead dogs wrapped in scrawled
slogans denouncing Deng Xio-ping.
Activists
were expected to surrender their children to be
raised as orphans so their parents could continue
the cause. Sanguinary sacrifice increasingly rallied
Guzmán’s disciples. The CIA aided the
elite anti-terrorist Sinchi squadron while the Soviets
funded the police intelligence units. The Senderos
gloried in the chaos they invited. Gorriti explains
that all guerrillas were over-burdened with responsibility;
all felt inadequate to carry out the demands set
by Guzmán. Therefore, all acquiesced to his
control, guilty of their own lapses. In this way,
one leader finally overshadowed even Marx, Lenin,
and Mao as their role model, who preached: ‘Other
than Power, all is illusion’.
While
the Marxist ‘legal left’ sought the constitutional
route—Gorriti explains this as a inevitable
route for those following Khruschev’s rejection
of violence as the necessary dynamo at the Second
International—they unwittingly offered a version
of Danny Morrison’s by-now clichéd assertion.
Just before giving up the gun, a leader before a
radical crowd hoisted a stick rifle. The real weapons
remained in the hands of the state and those sworn
to demolish what they saw as a colonial façade.
At the close of the book, 1990 brings the threat
of darkness literally to the cities. Generators
were targeted by guerrillas. A black future loomed
for Perú, not only as a metaphor.
I
titled this with a nod to a collection of essays
by Hubert Butler, who like Gorriti knew how to wield
the pen against the sword. His revelations of Vatican
collusion with Balkan and Nazi puppet regimes as
well as the Fethard-on-Sea boycott in the 1950s
against Protestants revealed truths that another
purported democracy feared. Perú today is
no Andean paradise, but the Senderos never wanted
to make it one. Gorriti compares Guzmán’s
efforts to those of an anthill. Senderos too could
not be easily detected from above; their diligence
depended on secrecy and not sunlight. Their leader
taken away, held in a cage in a striped suit to
boot, the cadres collapsed into the chaos with which
they had sworn to spread all over their territory,
as if robotics and not reason prevented them from
realising that such nihilism would sweep them away
as well as their enemies. When you see pictures
of Guzmán and his survivors, fists aloft,
remember the millions with whom they lived whom
they longed to destroy, and tens of thousands they
did.
