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Peru Guerrillas in the 1960s
The organization of farmers in the La Convención Valley
of
Cusco, beginning locally in 1951 and with the aid of
Trotskyite
Hugo Blanco starting in 1960, was the most visible of
various
efforts in rural Peru in the 1950s and 1960s pushing for
land
reform. The farmers' movement in La Convención whose
principal
tactic was to occupy land was successful only after a
period of
violent confrontation with landowners, police, and
military and
the capture of Blanco and most of his partisans in May
1963. It
was the first example of substantial, locally organized
pressure
for agrarian reform. The Revolutionary Military Government
(July
1962 to July 1963) officially ratified this de facto local
reform
as part of its newly progressive approach to dealing with
Peru's
problems. This initiative gave an early indication of how
the
armed forces preferred to deal with issues of development
that
became related to internal security.
The peasants' success in La Convención inspired many
others
around the Peruvian highlands to carry out their own land
occupations, a large number of them coordinated with the
return
to elected government on July 28, 1963, as President
Belaúnde
took office. More radical groups, Cuban inspired, also saw
the
growing rural ferment as an opportunity to begin armed
revolution
in the countryside. One was the Movement of the
Revolutionary
Left (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria--MIR),
created in
1962 and led by Luis de la Puente Uceda with other
disaffected
former APRA militants. Operating in Cusco, the MIR was
tracked
down and destroyed by the military in October 1965, and De
la
Puente was killed in action. Another radical group was
Guillermo
Lobatón's Túpac Amaru (not to be confused with the MRTA),
which
suffered the same fate in Junín in January 1966 after six
months
of skirmishes. A third group, from the National Liberation
Army
(Ejército de la Liberación Nacional--ELN), a Castroite
force
founded in 1962 and led by Héctor Béjar Rivera, was also
defeated
in early 1966 in Ayacucho. Béjar was captured and jailed
in late
1965. Freed in the military government's Christmas 1970
amnesty,
he became an important official in the regime's
organization to
foster the labor movement. These guerrilla activities and
military responses helped convince the armed forces that
centralgovernment reforms, rather than continued protection of
the
status quo, were the preferred route to defend Peru's
domestic
security needs.
Although the military junta's reforms were ultimately
unsuccessful, the regime did attempt to resolve the
problems it
created by turning the political process back to the
civilians.
It did not try to overcome its own legitimacy crisis by
force.
The military regime also opened up the system to the
left--political parties and unions especially--for the
first time
on a sustained basis in Peru's history. Both the
constitution of
1979 and the elections of 1980 were to a significant
degree the
results of the military's decisions. In this context of
the
restoration of civilian rule and all the enthusiasm that
accompanied it, what was totally unexpected was the
simultaneous
preparation for the inauguration of guerrilla war by an
obscure
provincial Maoist university group known to outsiders as
the
Shining Path, and to militants as the Peruvian Communist
Party
(Partido Comunista Peruano--PCP).
Data as of September 1992
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