To continue on sounding like a broken record, I had never heard of the events of this week’s readings. The terror in Peru, Sendero’s war or even of Fujimori. The amount of history that I don’t know of is quite daunting and I hope that even after this course has ended I will continue on learning about the history of these places.

It surprised me at first that many of The Shining Path were university students. Maybe I had a stereotype of what kind of people would be in a group like this but as I read on it made more sense. What I got from it was that the excitement drew them in. Some first attended gatherings advocating for more radical ideologies and from there on it snowballed. The Shining Path also appealed to the peasants of the region, giving action to their grievances. The movement grew in rural areas. Eventually, the group began turning on the peasants and what they had started off advocating for. They began to treat them as pawns in their war.

In Dawson’s section of the chapter there was the picture of a poster from the time of the dirty wars. It directly made out to contradict all of the negative things beings spread about the war, which is strange to say in general, because not many positive things can be said of wars. Many people were growing concerned over the extremely harsh methods (probably an understatement) that were being used in the war. As Dawson says, “The advertisement challenges this view, insisting that their actions were not just clean, but cleansing, that this was a just war. Both extreme left and right spoke in ritual ways about these acts, believing that they were somehow engaged in an exercise that would purify society.” Pointing out the obvious, “purify[ing] society” is a phrase that should never be taken lightly. The amount of violence that occurred during this time is unbelievable (again I feel as if I am understating here) and the fact that it happened only a few decades ago is even more so.