Flor
de retama, the broom flower with its yellow
shoots flourishes from soil nourished by blood.
Peru's Shining Path fanatical cult, devolved from
earnest Maoism into indoctrinated millenarian warriors
determined to bring down their corrupt nation and
destroy it in order to rebuild it into a utopia,
chose this weed as their logo. Like the Easter Lily,
the flower symbolised resurrection from sacrifice.
Unlike the lily, its appropriation sprang from nihilism
more than nationalism. Robin Kirk, in her collection
of chapters, charts her Peruvian encounters with
the senderistas, their pursuers, and the
victims left by both sides--'internal refugees'
forced off their land by those who claimed to fight
for and protect them, whether government or guerrillas.
Beginning with her 1983 first visit with her American
partner as he was writing his dissertation about
a Piura hamlet, Tunnel Six, that grew around the
spew from an irrigation works near the Ecuadorian
border, she records various stints spent in the
country over the next decade and more, as the war
with Abimael Guzmán's disciples intensified
and spread to the cities.
Which were, fittingly, plunged into darkness as
the senderos dynamited power lines. Harbinger
of the apocalypse which the revolutionaries vowed
to bring down upon millions of their fellow citizens.
I read Kirk's version of what she subtitles 'new
chronicles' from a world that has dazzled and disoriented
earlier journalists, from Incas portraying their
nation after it had been overrun by the Conquest
which also taught its subjects to read and write
in another language so they could send back their
half-fabricated, clumsily fantastical, laboriously
compiled nuevas crónicas to their
Spanish rulers. For any student of today's (post)colonial
legacies with jargon of subalterns and interrogation
of/by the Other, both the 17c and this late 20c
report from imperial border fringes, sharing their
quixotic centuries of native rebellions and defeats,
should recreate familiar scenarios. By the end,
Kirk, however, remains little more enlightened than
those who received earlier dispatches from the fabled
but rebellious hinterlands.
I read her account after having studied her translation
of Gustavo Gorriti's history of the SP (reviewed
in an earlier article for The Blanket, 'No
Escape from the Anthill'. Comparisons and contrasts
with the long war undertaken by the IRA over roughly
the same time period have always intrigued me. But,
even in Spanish, abroad I found few crónicas.
I wondered, from an English-language vantage point,
why so few reporters from outside Perú had
produced book-length works for a popular audience
on the movement, as opposed to the regular production
of now a shelf of such investigations of Irish republicanism.
Perhaps the lack of a wider British and American
audience for journeys among the Andes plays a part.
But a less welcome feature, for those on the left
curious to align their optimism with this particular
Third World liberation struggle, was that it lacked
the ameliorative appeal of South African, Palestinian,
or Vietnamese uprisings. Why? The hostility towards
'Western' gringo observers, not only by the army
and police suspicious of collaborators, but from
the SP itself.
Kirk devotes much of her book to an effort to enter
the mind of the female guerrillas. Unlike other
movements, she notes how many women entered ranks
as universities opened up in the 1960s and 70s to
peasants. Senderos promoted many young girls
quickly. Kirk offers a clever analogy. Both rebels
and clerical systems have offered those from the
impoverished and marginalised masses opportunity
for more rapid advancement than the larger societies
have. For mediaeval women, a religious order could
afford the talented a ladder upon which to rise
according to their talents. For Peru's women, they
'also accepted a mystical contract that exempted
them from a female fate.' (79) Unique among Peruvian
factions, the Shining Path actively recruited them.
The SP, entrenched under Guzmán's professorship
(although Gorriti devotes no small scholarship to
examining the increasingly spurious medical excuses
Comrade Gonzalo kept producing to claim sick pay
for his frequent coastal sabbaticals from the burden
of teaching in a mountainous city), practiced its
aggression in the classroom, in the quads, and on
the plains. It drew its followers, as scholars now
assert about the 'old' IRA, not from the workers
and peasants so much as their newly educated children.
Led, as many such cultural revivals, by those predominating
from the colonial and urban classes, the SP claimed
that it sought to free those it coerced. Caught
between the guerrillas and the government, the chutos
often had to flee their rural holdouts into safe
zones that were patrolled by police and mortared
by militants. To translate the Peruvian proverb,
they were hammered between 'sword and stone'.
The author, like previous chroniclers to a land
of harsh weapons and forbidding walls, finds herself
trapped. Her white skin, San Franciscan provenance,
and education distance her from her subjects. They
mistrust her, and she finds herself caught between
pity and contempt more than once as she listens
to guerrilla prisoners. At one point, on a visit,
they put on a show of martial precision with earnest
chant followed by their invitation for her to dance
with them. She shrinks back, unwilling to be claimed
by them as a prize, a convert to their chilling
blend of conviction and cruelty. Kirk's honesty,
her own realisation that she can only approach but
never enter the interior of those she interviews,
makes for a bracing if disheartening recounting
of her Peruvian journeys.
Seeking to rendezvous with the SP, in the opening
episode, she finds her illusions shattered when
learning that the guerrillas and police alike were
wont to board buses, arrest suspects--including
meddling gringos--force them to kneel on the road
as the bus lumbered off, and shoot them in the nape
of the neck. Later in the book, she explains how
the senderos update what readers of The
Blanket might think of as Tom Barry's 'flying
columns'. Twenty to a hundred insurgents. Nomadic,
with no fixed base. But Seán Keating's iconic
painting of a few such 'old IRA' men at the ready
now we can juxtapose against another rural vista:
{W}hen
the column came, people hid. But the column could
drag them from their homes and administer a ''popular
trial." The column could shoot them or hack
them to death with machetes or stone them as they
begged for mercy. Or the column could force a
daughter to kill a father; a husband his wife.
La columna could force an entire village to march
before them, forming the people's vanguard of
an attack. It burnt the houses of those it deemed
traitors. It took those, especially the young,
it found useful. The column called itself "the
people's wrath." Its appearances could be
as sudden as a thunderhead cresting a ridge. Its
departures were scored by the slow, measured sound
of grief. (104)
Certainly
such a panorama bloodies even more any post-Leninist
vision of a revolutionary vanguard. And whether this
herded flock constitutes the force of the peasant's
class struggle against feudal and capitalist pitucos
or the victims of such wrath by those their self-anointed
liberators remains ambiguous, if not to the Sendero
Luminoso itself. Its name taken from a poem (by
José Carlos Maríategui, founder of Perú's
CP in the 1920s), its nightmarish rhetoric, its idealised
portraits transforming its portly Ayacucho doctor
into a cherubic, trimmer messiah of redemption through
decimation: all underscore the actual distance between
the SP and those from the lowly for whom it mediated
in fevered litany its 'pensimiento Gonzalo'.
The hearts and minds of the people remained aloof
from these vengeful liberators. As an aid worker to
IDPs (internally displaced persons, whom Kirk notes
outnumber worldwide the numbers of refugees, but who
languish unprotected by international treaties) asks
Kirk: 'if they are fighting for the people, why kill
them? Why did they drive them away?' (170) This discussion
leads into an excellent analysis of what differentiates
senderistas from other militants.
Peru's peasants suffer under the colonial legacy of
the caste system. At the bottom, the chutos
or sallqas (meaning dirty/savage/pagan) live
on the highland plains, the puna. I take this
to be equivalent to tinkers or bogtrotters or spalpeens.
(I know these Irish counterparts differ from each
other as well as their Peruvian versions, but I make
this comparison and choose these terms for parallels.)
Reform for the Irish began with the Land League and
the gradual redistribution of estates under 1904 British
law. For Perú, such reforms occurred only under
General Juan Velasco, who deposed the criollo
Fernando Belaunde in a 1968 coup. Under anti-Communist
rationales, the military dictator from a poor urban
slum--who had worked his way up as a mixed-blood cholo
by one of the only avenues of advancement, the army--nationalised
foreign holdings, organised workers, and divided land
among the previously dispossessed. The peasants gained
more from the mistis, dividing up their bosses'
livestock, tools, and farming machinery. Higher education
expanded to the poor, among them those recruited by
Dr Guzmán and his cohorts into the SP. But,
why did the Marxist rebels not follow the success
of similar Third World situations?
Kirk and a former comrade she interviews agree: the
case of Osmán Morote serves as a paradigm.
This SP leader wrote his 1970 MA thesis at Ayacucho.
He applied a 'scientific Marxist' approach to his
anthropological study of 'lucha de clases'
or class struggle among in the Huanta district--an
area where one landowner had until Velasco's seizure
reigned in manorial excess. Yet Morote neglects that
Velasco's 1968 reform had occurred in his 1970 study.
He rails against other Marxists on the faculty insufficiently
violent, and against bourgeois peers, yet never refers
by name to one of the Indians on whose behalf he constructs
his dissertation. He, like his inspiration Guzmán,
spends words and spreads bullets in the cause of the
poor, but to the intellectuals who ran the SP, the
peasants remained chutos, a mere category of
force and energy to be harnessed or driven by those
inducted into Comrade Gonzalo's cadre, and, when exhausted,
to be cast out or eliminated as an abstraction, a
by-product of the dialectic which itself became apoplectic
in its allegiance only to Guzmán.
The gap between the observed and the observer, whether
Morote or Guzmán, the aid worker or Kirk, persists.
How can any of us, faced with exhibits from Pol Pot
or Hitler's terror, comprehend genocide and mass death
except from its material remains? She cryptically
states, almost as an aside from Huanta: 'From the
stadium, where the navy is said to have buried the
"disappeared," hair, no longer straight
or moreno, but in tufts, used to tumble down
the streets, collecting dust and twigs and banking
against the adobe bricks of the locked and shuttered
houses.' (172) The state, crushing not only senderistas,
also perpetuated its own class bias, as the navy's
European-descended commanders unleashed their own
brutality upon all those caught up--guilty, innocent,
or compromised--within the counter-revolt. The country
kept bleeding, more rapidly than before. Kirk's descriptions
of prisoners, of crusaders for justice, of activists
for human rights, all show how nuanced turn distinctions
in a war zone. Irish readers can learn from her careful
portrayal that the tension sustained by those who
have entered from the press or academia into republican
and/or loyalist undergrounds in hopes of clarification
themselves become entangled by their own fidelity
to morality as their own ethical rationales become
parsed and rephrased and knotted.
Kirk, by the end, finds that she cannot keep returning
to the flame that threatens to devour her. As a journalist,
akin perhaps to today's stringers in the Six Counties,
she finds that her employers less eagerly solicit
stories on community reform than terrorist assaults.
As the SP reels from the backlash by not only the
government forces but vigilante peasant groups, these
same gatherings find that they may have learned a
bit from the mystical nihilism of the senderos
after all. Not in content so much as in form. For
what were once dreams begin to assume reality. In
the wake of first Velasco and then the SP, despite
the near-collapse of the economy and its mismanagement
by whoever manipulates himself into the presidency,
the common people begin to embrace local control of
their justice system, their farm production, and their
faith, which increasingly finds its dynamism fueled
by evangelical Protestantism and its insistence upon
self-worth and hard work to achieve security. As Kirk
wings her way from Perú for the final flight
home, she admits her bravery and its lack. She attempts,
she concludes, to remain moral in adverse circumstances
few of her readers or subjects will have faced willingly.
In the awe-inspiring but also awful--in its sheer
reach beyond human power--array of climates and terrains,
Perú represents a microcosm of our planet's
diversity. She raises again the question with which
she began: 'Can I bridge the gap between Peru and
me, between privilege and want, between fear and security?'
(211) Kirk answers herself by quoting her co-reporter,
as they faced taciturn, tortured senderistas
in prison, or as she inspected her host at Tunnel
Six cradling her dead infant: 'Never underestimate
fear.' This land, fabled as our El Dorado for so long
in our Western legends, resists those of us who dare
to delve into its hidden veins.
(ISBN: 1-55849-109-0. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1997. See also the compilation edited by
Kirk, her partner Orin Starn, and former colleague
of Guzmán and expert on the SP Carlos Iván
Degregori, The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.)
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
