The Terror
For this week, I decided to watch a video of a conversation with Maxwell Cameron, a professor of Political Science, “Peru: Shining Path, Fujimori, and the Legacy of the Civil War.”
Peru is a unique country that faced reformist and revolutist movements backed by the communist party in the 1920s. Eventually, from the 1930s to the 1940s, it became an important reformation period where it aimed political incorporation, inclusion and state building. Those promises didn’t happen in Peru, which led to serious consequences by creating guerrilla movement in the countryside who struggled for land among the peasantry class. Military and young officers were shocked and sympathized the abandoned situation in the countryside due to the government failing to meet the promises.
General Velasco and his junior military air force officers conducted a military coup d’etat. Velasco then took radical reforms which promoted trade unions and emphasis on land reforms, ‘Shining Paths’. However, it failed to bring prosperity to the peasantry population in the highlands. Land reforms led to a collapse in the rural production. This operation was carried out by the military but did not follow up by providing training, credits, support for the new rural producers.
Cameron said that the reason for settling an agrarian reform is to pacify the rural population. I believe that this statement is especially relevant for regions where land was reclaimed from the natives. Because in the Americas, usually, each social class represented people with different skin colour. For example, majority of the agrarian population were the natives while the bourgeois were Europeans, and so on. I personally thought that by having the same skin colour, sharing similar negative experience from the Gamonales, made it feasible for creating organised guerrilla movements.
Peru was still facing a severely unstable society where there were many car bomb cases in Lima. In order to fight back these terrorists, Alberto Fujimori stands up. He made connections with intelligent parties to rise in political power and received support from Vladimiro Montesino for the forming of assassination squads to take down the rebellions. However, people began to question Fujimori’s commands such as massacre and violating human rights. Fujimori decided to resign and the Shining Path leader was captured soon after. By 1992, Peruvians believed that peace was finally returning to the country. Since Fujimori fled in 2000, Peru’s government began to recover democracy.
So, my question for this week is: What should the current Peruvian government prioritise for creating a better society? Is it to achieve a fully democratic governing system? A system that incentivizes political inclusion of the natives?
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