Ideology in Context: Explaining Sendero Luminoso's Tactical Escalation
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | James Ron |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343301038005002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
569
Introduction
In 1980, the Peruvian left-wing group
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) ended a
decade of nonviolent activism and initiated a
surprisingly effective armed struggle against
the Peruvian state.1Over the next 14 years,
the organization’s influence spread from the
mountainous region of Ayacucho, where
Sendero was initially based, to most areas of
Peru. The number and frequency of armed
Sendero actions climbed dramatically during
the decade, reaching a crescendo in the late
1980s and early 1990s (McCormick, 1992).2
Starting from a small core of several hundred
committed activists, Sendero’s roster of
full-time fighters climbed to a reported
10,000 persons in the early 1990s, while
its part-time supporters were estimated
at 50,000–100,000 (McClintock, 1998:
© 2001 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 38, no. 5, 2001, pp. 569–592
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200109)38:5; 569–592; 019466]
Ideology in Context: Explaining Sendero
Luminoso’s Tactical Escalation*
JAMES RON
Department of Sociology, McGill University
This article explains tactical escalation by a Peruvian left-wing group during the 1980s and 1990s as an
interaction effect between organizational ideology and the broader political and organizational environ-
ment. In 1980, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) organization ended a decade of political
organizing and launched armed struggle against a new civilian government. Peru had been governed
since 1968 by military officers, but popular pressure, including strong left-wing protests, had forced the
military to cede control. In responding to democratization with revolution rather than electoral par-
ticipation, Sendero broke with the rest of Peru’s Marxist left. In 1983, Sendero again escalated its tactics,
initiating a campaign of violent intimidation against Peru’s legal left. By 1996, according to data assem-
bled for this study, the group had selectively assassinated some 300 prominent Peruvian leftists. For the-
orists of revolutions and social movements, Sendero’s tactical trajectory poses two important puzzles.
First, many revolutionary theorists believe that transitions from authoritarianism to elections decrease
armed insurgency. Why, then, did Peru’s democratization provoke Sendero’s escalation? Second, Sendero
might well have been expected to cooperate with other left-wing groups, rather than to attack them so
brutally. Why did Sendero choose an alternative path? The group’s anti-left measures are all the more
puzzling given the opposition they provoked among potential allies at home and abroad. This article
explains Sendero’s choices by drawing on political opportunity theory, theories of organizational com-
petition, and the concept of declining protest cycles. Democratization can promote greater levels of
strife if small but violence-prone groups fear marginalization in electoral politics. A dense left-wing social
movement sector, moreover, can stimulate internecine competitive fighting if only some of the move-
ment’s members accept the legitimacy of national elections.
* Please address correspondence to James Ron, Canada
Research Chair in Conflict and Human Rights, McGill
University, james.ron@mcgill.ca. I am indebted to Ana
María Quiroz for her skillful research in Peru, to Kim Voss
and Laura Enriquez for their early support, and to Charles
T. Call, Stathis Kalyvas, Cynthia McClintock, David Scott
Palmer, Emma Naughton, and several anonymous review-
ers for their comments.
1The group’s full name is the ‘Communist Party of Peru –
For the Shining Path of Mariátegui’. 2See Kent (1993: 441–455) for Sendero’s geographic
diffusion.
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74–75). Throughout, Sendero combined
political organizing with violence, targeting
bureaucrats, security personnel, wealthy peas-
ants, business leaders, and politicians. Peru-
vian security forces responded harshly, killing,
injuring, and disappearing thousands (Amer-
icas Watch, 1990; Amnesty International,
1991; McClintock, 1998: 117–118). Begin-
ning in 1983, Sendero gradually supple-
mented its assault on wealthy peasants and
state agencies with violence and intimidation
against left-wing activists, grass-roots organ-
izers, and left-liberal intellectuals. By 1996,
Sendero had selectively assassinated some 300
activists from Peru’s legal left (see Figure 3 and
Table I).
Sendero’s tactical trajectory poses two
important questions for scholars of internal
war, revolutionary activism and social move-
ments. The first question is one of timing:
why did the group initiate armed struggle in
1980? Although the movement was founded
in 1970, its leadership waited a decade before
taking up arms. The choice of 1980 is par-
ticularly intriguing in that this was the year of
the Peruvian left’s greatest political victory: in
1980 the Peruvian military, which had seized
power during a 1968 coup, responded to
popular pressures by ceding power to an
elected civilian president. Sendero was the
only left-wing group to respond with vio-
lence. Sendero’s ‘declaration of armed insur-
gency in 1980’, a noted historian of Peru
observes, ‘seemed absurdly out of step with
the turn of the polity and the leftist opposi-
tion toward competitive electoral politics’
(Stern, 1998a: 3). Sendero’s 1980 choice also
challenges conventional wisdom in revol-
utionary theory, which suggests that elections
and partial democracy are powerful disincen-
tives to armed struggle (Goodwin & Skocpol,
1989; McClintock, 1998; Wickham-
Crowley, 1992).
The second question pertains to Sendero’s
campaign of assassination against Peru’s left.
Why did Sendero choose to attack other
Peruvian leftists, rather than pursuing col-
laboration? Why would a revolutionary
movement attack groups close to its own
political position? Although these assassina-
tions were a small percentage of the total
number of persons slain during the 1980s
and early 1990s, they had a major impact on
the way in which Sendero was perceived at
home and abroad. Within Peru, Sendero was
increasingly hard-pressed to recruit allies
amongst the legal left and, over time, some
Peruvian leftists began even to consider
cooperation with state security forces (Burt,
1992: 5). Internationally, Sendero’s assassina-
tions were similarly counterproductive.
Although the Peruvian state systematically
abused human rights in its fight with
Sendero, its brutality never translated into
international support for a Sendero insur-
gency. In this, Sendero’s experience was
markedly different from that of El Salvador’s
leftist guerrilla coalition, the Farabundo
Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN),
which skillfully leveraged abusive govern-
ment policies into international sympathy for
its cause (Arnson, 1993; Whitfield, 1995).
Drawing on social movement theory and
assassination data assembled for this study, I
explain Sendero’s tactical trajectory as the
product of an interaction between movement
frames, political opportunities, and com-
petition within Peru’s social movement
industry. ‘Movement frames’ are organiz-
ation-specific interpretations of reality offer-
ing a diagnosis of, and a prognosis for,
specific social problems (Benford, 1993,
1997; Johnston & Klandermans, 1995;
Snow & Benford, 1988); ‘political oppor-
tunities’ are new institutional arrangements
that change the context in which collective
action takes place (McAdam, 1982;
McAdam, McCarthy & Zald, 1996; Pag-
nucco, 1996; Tarrow, 1998); and ‘social
movement industries’ are clusters of organiz-
ations similarly concerned with social change
(Zald & McCarthy, 1980).
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