52 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Thus, my encounter with the wouldbe Shining Path members was concluded, or maybe not. Some of those recruits may well have subsequently surveilled us or attacked our contacts or the embassy. When I returned to Peru in 1992, perhaps some of the newer captured guerrilla notebooks I read had belonged to them. e A critical metric for violent extremists is their ability to grow and replace members who are killed or captured. Al-Qaida in Iraq, and later the Islamic State, ultimately failed to do this in Iraq, but the Taliban succeeded in Afghanistan. The Shining Path sought quality in its recruits; the alleged members I had met in the mountains showed motivation, obedience, and what Shining Path ideologues called “class consciousness”—including a willingness to die for the cause, what their leaders termed “crossing the river of blood.” In the Ayacucho countryside the Shining Path had grown through the This Shining Path poster from 1985 highlights the “armed struggle” and illustrates the “cult of personality” surrounding Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán. COURTESY OF STEPHEN MCFARLAND Shining Path propaganda on the walls of a school outside Huancayo in the central Andes in February 1988, as the Shining Path stepped up its presence there. university’s contacts with students and villagers. As the war’s intensity increased, Shining Path violence against peasants reduced its appeal, but military human rights violations helped the guerrillas to recruit. Outside Ayacucho, a peasant told me that while no one in his community supported the Shining Path, the soldiers had still killed his brother; what he was most worried about, however, was the soldiers’ theft of his sheep, his family’s livelihood. The Shining Path’s ideology based on class warfare found fertile ground in a Peru whose stark inequalities tracked major racial, ethnic, class, and regional divisions, and resentment. Many at the May Day event were likely from families that had migrated from the mountains to the capital’s shantytowns. They appeared to be mostly from the lower class, with some from the lower-middle class, but not from the very poor. Many looked like, and probably were, workers in dead-end jobs in the informal economy, or state university students, or lowpaid government employees who struggled under hyperinflation. Clearly the Shining Path’s urban recruiting base was much broader than the government or the U.S. embassy imagined. Peru’s politicians dismissed the Shining Path as lacking popular support, and it is true that it would have lost in an election. But that missed the point: Shining Path’s leader was building an elite, hierarchical, and ideologically pure Maoist party to use organized violence and, in particular, terrorism to seize power. As in Russia in 1917—and later elsewhere, from the left and the right—a resolute, ruthless extremist minority could conquer a larger but disorganized majority. The Shining Path STEPHEN MCFARLAND
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