Blog Post #11: Week 11

For this week's blog post, I want to discuss one of the movements of terror that Dawson elucidates in his book. Namely, Abimael Guzman and his movement of El Sendero Luminoso. In this blog post, I want to explain their principal beliefs, alongside a brief historical overview of the movement.

The objective of the Shining Path, in principle, was to carry out the revolution through armed struggle and to position the countryside as the most important aspect of the country (the city as complimentary). Also, another of his goals was to replace the selected bourgeois institutions or entities with other organizations representing the countryside revolution, something very similar to what Mao did in China. However, the political guidelines of the Shining Path are based on the political positions proposed by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, which expose the various guidelines that characterize communism and socialism as the best political, philosophical, economic and moral tendency to put into practice.

I was able to pinpoint what Guzman tried to adopt from each ideology below:

1. From Marxism, the Shining Path adopts the position that the peasants and all those who live in rural areas and the proletariat are those who must fight against those who consider themselves capitalists, or exploiters.
2. From the Leninist position, as a model of Russian communism, the members of the organization took the idea to impose, through force and arms, their power over all people and in all possible spaces that were under their control.
3. From the Maoist thought, the organization adopted the idea that the main actors of the revolution and changes that they wanted to impose in Peru, must be effected by the peasant population and the proletariat through violent acts.

However, as a consequence of these violent ideological positions of El Sendero Luminoso its members have planned and committed criminal acts, in which thousands of people have died, for which reason, they are considered in many countries as a terrorist organization. Notwithstanding the imprisonment of Guzman, El Sendero Luminoso is a political organization that is still active although it no longer has the support of previous years, precisely because the peasant and proletariat do not approve of violence as a means to carry out the proposed ideas.