In the first InsideGMT article on The Guerrilla Generation, I covered the famous urban guerrillas known as the Tupamaros in the Uruguay game. In this article, I’ll cover the other game set in South America, The Guerrilla Generation: Peru. The Peru game depicts the Shining Path insurgency from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. As with Malaya in The British Way, Peru represents a less radical departure from the standard COIN model and provides a good starting point for COIN players transitioning to or from existing modern conflict volumes such as Andean Abyss, Cuba Libre, or A Distant Plain. Thematically, The Guerrilla Generation: Peru has a lot in common with the Colombian civil war depicted by the first COIN volume Andean Abyss. Both South American conflicts involved a leftist insurgency that outlasted the end of the Cold War, partially by becoming involved in the drug trade. However, as will be explained below, the Shining Path insurgency’s violence featured in Peru makes the FARC insurgency in Colombia look restrained by comparison.
The Guerrilla Generation: Peru allows players to learn about one of the most violent insurgencies in Latin American history, the Shining Path. The Shining Path insurgency operated as a highly centralized group that organized around a cult of personality of its leader Abimael Guzmán. The movement glorified the use of violence and carried out extensive civilian victimization. Unlike most conflicts in Latin America, the Truth and Reconciliation report conducted in Peru after the conflict found that the Shining Path committed more violence against civilians than government forces, responsible for 54% of the 69,820 reported deaths or disappearances. To accurately depict the conflict, the Peru game builds the group’s extensive use of violence into their Faction, but also makes sure to model the major drawbacks of such violence. Facing the brutal Shining Path insurgency is another Government faction that must balance their response to the insurgency with the restrictions of a democratic government. As in the Uruguay game, featured in the last InsideGMT article, the use of too much repression could lead to a military coup against the democratic government.
The Battle for the Highlands of Peru
Much of the conflict focused on a struggle over the highland communities of central Peru. The insurgency began by exploiting the grievances of these communities who felt left behind by the population in coastal areas, particularly in the department of Ayacucho. The Shining Path rapidly spread across the highland departments, using a mixture of political agitation and violent terrorism. Given the movement’s heavy emphasis on civilian victimization, the use of Terror Operations in Highland spaces is free for the Shining Path. However, every Terror used in Highland spaces places an Underground Rondas, one of the major mechanical changes in the Peru game. In response to the Shining Path’s brutality, highland communities began organizing self-defense groups, or rondas campesinas (‘peasant rounds’). Although the Government organized some of these groups, many were established independently as a local response to the Shining Path. Underground Rondas are not immediately threatening to the Shining Path and don’t count toward Control of a space. However, during each Propaganda Round, Underground Rondas may go Active, creating a number of difficulties for the insurgency: Active Rondas improve Government Assault, count toward Government Control, and remove Guerrillas during the Propaganda Round. The Government can also use its Organize Special Activity to place Active Rondas directly into spaces. The Shining Path may remove Underground Rondas peacefully by addressing the communities concerns through the use of their Govern Special Activity, or more brutally by using Attack at the expense of shifting the space toward Active Support.
However, as the number of Rondas grow in the highlands and undermine the Shining Path’s position, many Shining Path players will be tempted to follow Guzmán’s strategy of directing terror towards Lima and the other major Coastal areas. Each Terror marker in these spaces lowers Political Will at the Propaganda Round, to reflect the insurgency’s goal of making the Government appear helpless even in the heart of the country. To reflect the extensive Terror campaign in Lima, the Lima space may hold more than one Terror marker and often devolves into a struggle between Police and Guerrillas. A particularly ambitious, possibly even foolish, Shining Path player may even attempt to take Control of a poorly defended Lima.
The Organization and Operations of the Shining Path
As with the other games in this multipack, a major goal of The Guerrilla Generation: Peru is to highlight the organizational and strategic differences of the insurgent factions in the pack. I’ve already covered the group’s particularly brutal strategy that heavily emphasized terror tactics and civilian victimization, but not their organizational structure. The Shining Path is the most centralized insurgency of the four included in the box. The leadership at the top around Abimael Guzmán had tight control over subordinate commanders and often sent explicit strategic directives. This organizational structure offered benefits and liabilities for the group. On the one hand, it meant that the insurgency had a greater ability to follow a long-term organized strategy than other more decentralized groups. Mechanically, the Shining Path player possesses a Guzmán Directives Base that they secretly (or randomly if two-handed solo) swap with an on map Base. At the start of the Propaganda Round, if the Directives Base is still on the map, the Shining Path player may carry out a free Limited Operation in and adjacent to the Base. This enables last minute operations prior to the checking of Political Will. The insurgency also has a powerful Evade Special Activity that allows for a single Guerrilla to infiltrate into spaces where they normally would flip Active.
However, the highly centralized nature of the Shining Path insurgency came at a price. By centralizing decision-making so heavily on a single leader, the group made itself vulnerable to decapitation. In 1992, the capture of Guzmán and other top leaders severely weakened the insurgency. To model the importance of leadership decapitation the Track for the Peru game focuses on the “Hunt for Guzmán.” The Government Investigate Special Activity, Events, and the removal of the Guzmán Directives Base all shift the track towards Guzmán’s capture. The Shining Path may remove Guerrillas in Lima with their Evade Special Activity to attempt to throw off the search for Guzmán, who was actually hiding in Lima for most of the conflict due to his medical condition. If the Peruvian forces capture Guzmán, the effects are severe but not necessarily game ending, so long as the Shining Path player has managed to sufficiently drain Political Will.
The Government Response
Like The Guerrilla Generation: Uruguay, the Government in Peru facing the Shining Path is democratic, having recently transitioned from military rule in 1980. Democracy shaped the counterinsurgency effort in several ways. First, departments had to be declared “emergency zones” to enable counterinsurgency tactics that required emergency powers, such as organizing rondas or inflicting collective punishments. Over the course of the conflict, emergency zones steadily spread throughout much of the highland departments. Most of the civilian victimization attributed to Government forces occurred within these areas. To model the tradeoff, the Government is more likely to gain Political Will if they use less Emergency Zones in Department spaces, but at the cost of having less flexibility about where they can use their Organize and Reprisal Special Activities. Even worse, if the Government player has placed down too many Emergency Zones and the Autogolpe Event comes up, then the democracy itself might fall in a “self-coup”, where the president colludes with the military to take power. As a democracy, the president of Peru also changed several times throughout the conflict, with each of the presidents having different priorities on how to conduct the counterinsurgency campaign. As with the Coup Cards in the Fire in the Lake COIN volume, the effect of each historical president will boost or hinder the Government player’s current plans.
For those looking to read more on the Shining Path and just starting to learn about the topic, I’d recommend Orin Starn and Migel La Serna’s popular history The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. For those wanting an account focusing less on personalities and more on broader trends and data, I highly recommend the summary of the Truth and Reconciliation report (which is also free!): https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/subsites/peru-hatun-willakuy-en/. For anyone curious about other games on the Shining Path, once again, the first and only game (so far) on the topic is by the legendary irregular wargame designer Brian Train: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7337/shining-path-struggle-peru. In the next article, we will move on to El Salvador, the first of the two Central American conflicts in the multipack – which surprisingly has no game by Brian Train!
Previous Article: The Guerrilla Generation: Uruguay
Author: Stephen Rangazas
I lived in Peru during the worst years of the war. One thing that made Sendero Luminoso so different from other Latin American revolutionary movements of the time is that they did not have outside support from Cuba, the Soviet Union or China. They were self-financed. It was only in the later years when most of killing was over that Sendero Luminoso became heavily involved with the cocaine trade. They are also interesting in that they had a rival revolutionary movement fighting at the same time. The Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru was a traditional Marxist Leninist group allied with Cuba and the traditional Latin American Left. It will be interesting to see how this complexity is modeled in the game. For me, this game is a must purchase. It is the only war where I was a civilian observer.
I’m happy to hear you’re looking forward to the game! I’d love to hear your reactions once you have a chance to play it.
MRTA gets two event cards. Their size meant that they couldn’t get a lot more attention but I wanted to include them, particularly after reading La Serna’s excellent book on them, With Masses and Arms (2020). There are also cards and mechanics devoted to the Upper Huallaga Valley where at least a part of the Shining Path became involved in the drug trade during the period covered by the game (though I don’t exaggerate it’s role since the period the game covers ends in 1992).
Miguel La Serna’s “The Corner of the Living” is the best micro-history of the war. It is one of the best books about counter-insurgency that I have ever read. Right up there with the French masters. In that book, La Serna looks at how two villages in Ayacucho responded to the rise of Sendero Luminoso. The best fiction book is Daniel Alarcón’s “War by Candlelight”. It really captures what it was like to live in Lima during that time. We are fortunate that there are so many excellent books written in English about the war. I feel as though my war has been really well documented.
I am really looking forward to this game and the pack as a whole. I am curious what your reaction to this review of “The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes” and if you agree with its primary criticisms. There is a transcript in the link to make it easy for quick reading.
https://peopleshistoryofideas.com/episode-6-book-review-of-the-shining-path-love-madness-and-revolution-in-the-andes/
Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna did extensive fieldwork in the Andes during and right after the war. Their take on Sendero’ ideology is not outside the mainstream of the mainstream of how most academics understand Sendero Luminoso. Rothwells’ critique is far outside of the mainstream. It is a view shaped in the library. Personally, I believe Guzman’s peculiar ideas are product of the hothouse of politics inside an obscure university located in remote Ayacucho. Guzman’s views developed in a remote and isolated space. He did not have real peers as he was coming to his singular ideas. His followers were educated in great isolation and poverty. I am not sure they even understood the ideas they were fighting for. Their motivation was to tear down a system that was corrupt, violent and inequitable. Their world view was more Pol Pot than Mao. Incoherent ideologies are nothing new. Take a look at Trumpism.
Thanks for providing a link. Based on my reading of a large portion of the literature on the conflict including both academic/non-academic and translation of Peruvian scholars and academics based in other countries, I think the review raises a view reasonable criticisms but overall deviates from nearly the entire literature (which is generally hard to do given it’s diversity!) in its attempt to defend the Shining Path.
The best critique it makes is “At no point in this book is there any attempt to come to terms with how and why so many people found Maoism, and more particularly the form of Maoism espoused by Abimael Guzmán and his followers so convincing.” I think other books including “The Corner of the Living,” mentioned above, by one of the authors does a better job of focusing on this question.
However, it seems to criticize the authors for their framing of the group’s ideology which is widely believed to be rigid, extolling violence, and often a bit hard to follow. Although we may sympathize with the Shinning Path’s goal of helping the underprivileged, there is two major problems with the review’s criticisms. First, the Shining Path, particularly its youth leadership, often did not respect local rural traditions and were too quick to utilize violence to resolve disputes when they arose (one of my favorite books on the conflict given it’s micro-level detail by Lewis Taylor, Shining Path Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980-1997, address this well). A more pragmatic approach to governance and community relations would have lowered their abuses and probably slowed the Rondas movement.
Second, and possibly more importantly, I’d argue we really don’t need to sympathize with the Shining Path given the many revolutionary groups in the region seeking to make similar change that did so with far greater restraint such as the FMLN in El Salvador, M26 in Cuba (Cuba Libre actually gross exaggerates the amount of Terror used), Tupamaros in Uruguay, or even MRTA in Peru. I find the reviews’ passing reference to the Shining Path committing “some terrible atrocities” and “war of attrition” quite irresponsible both given it’s relatively uniquely high levels of civilian victimization in the region and the fact that such high violence suggests that their policies were perhaps less popular and accepted than the review lets on.
I suspect the authors’ attempt to make their book more popular probably led them to sensationalize the Shining Path more than they intended given their other excellent and more sophisticated academic works on the topic. The book’s focus on personalities on both sides can make it quite hard to follow the more structural and organizational factors going on which is why I prefer other sources but it’s fine for someone who has never approached the conflict before. Given the Shinning Path’s exceptional level of violence against civilians, it’s just hard for me to be harsh on a work that comes off as fairly unsympathetic to the group, particularly when their juxtaposed with the exceptionally restrained FMLN that we will cover next InsideGMT article!
I am skeptical about a developed ideology amongst most revolutionaries. In the 1990’s, when I was helping Kanjobal Mayans with their political asylum petitions, I thought I would hear stories colored with political ideology. To my surprise, tremendous killing was taking place in the Guatemalan highlands in disputes about farmland, religion, political patronage and revenge. Communist ideology really did not come up. Maybe at the leadership cadre and the educated upper class intellectual level, ideology mattered. But from a Mayan peasants perspective, local disputes drove the killing.
But to be honest, I am skeptical about any coherent ideology amongst anybody but a select few. I went to college in Lima in the 1980’s. Students casually tossed off lines from Mariategui, Enver Hoxha, Castro, Trotsky, Mao and Lenin. But when you started asking people about their political beliefs, all you would get was some jumbled mess of revolutionary cliches. I can only imagine what the high school students high up in the Andes believed in. My sense is that they were immature teenagers with guns. Their leaders gave them license to met out revolutionary justice as they saw fit. No wonder they went overboard and killed lots of peasants. It took middle aged ronderos with single shot rifles to put down Sendero Luminoso in the countryside. The killings that took place in Lima were another matter. There was lots of thrill killings masked in revolutionary chants.
One of the fascinating things about the narco-terror now going on in Mexico is that no one bothers to pretend there is any political ideology at play. It is all about money, sex and power. The bloodiest Latin American war is not a social revolution. It is about extreme consumerism run amok.
I agree to a point – I think it is to be expected that the ‘mass’ of a peasant revolution is not going to be operating with a studied ideological framework. The same people who absorb incoherent values and beliefs from their environment during peacetime don’t suddenly gain a rigorous political consciousness during war – that is what the party is for.
I do think that some parties are more rigorous in their ideological commitments than others – and it sounds like the Shining Path was on the stricter side of things with their self criticism and struggle sessions. I am by no means an expert on them however.
Thank you for your detailed response. I think you touch on my main interest, which is why the Shining Path acted the way they did – his primary critique is that the book does not leave the reader with an understanding of the ideology behind the disastrous strategies taken by the party. I have not read the book, and was wondering if you think that is accurate – not to cast them as sympathetic or tragic heroes but to understand their reasoning and how they went so wrong.
I don’t think Rothwell’s critique is that their analysis is outside of the mainstream, but that it doesn’t go into detail or is at times misleading in their portrayal of the ideology. However, if you don’t think the high levels of violence were caused by ideology, what was the reason for the comparatively high rates compared to other insurgencies that similarly relied on peasants? This is what I am trying to pin down.
Guzman also spent time in China learning about their revolution, so at least the leadership seems educated in the broader communist guerrilla theory.
The book that really understands peasant dynamic in an insurgency is David Stoll’s “Between Two Armies in the Ixil”. His book argues that peasant’s find themselves caught between the army and guerillas trying to control them. The Indian peasant’s own history of inter-communal violence is manipulated by the army and guerillas in order to reach their own political aims. It is a really good book that is complementary to Miguel La Serna’s work. It also resonated with my experiences.
Once the war in the Andes really got going, Sendero Luminoso fragmented. The Senderistas were constantly on the run. The army and the ronderos wanted to destroy them. Whatever ideological coherence they had before the war started to fall apart. The older cadres in their 20-30’s had a deeper understanding of Gonzalo thought. The teenagers with guns not so much. It was with the prisoners that Gonzalo thought had time to deepen and mature.
Another really good book about insurgency is Jeremy Weinstein’s “Inside Rebellion”. In his book, Weinstein looks at rebels in Uganda, Peru and Mozambique. Museveni’s guerillas in Uganda had real ideological strength. They were far more successful than Sendero Luminoso.
Thanks, I actually started reading Inside Rebellion a few weeks ago, although I put it aside to finish Insurgency & Terrorism by ONeil. I will definitely add your recommendation by Stoll to my reading list!
I love war gaming. It is one of the few hobbies where you can have a conversation like this. I have been thinking about counter-insurgency since the late 1970’s when I first read Jean Larteguy. Unfortunately, I live in a world where no one is interested in these topics. It is such a pleasure to finally meet someone who has even heard of the Logic of Violence or Inside Rebellion.
Stephen, please let me know if you plan to attend any wargaming events. I would go just to meet you. Do you plan to attend a GMT Weekend?
Finally, my latest book purchase is Carlos Alberto Sanchez’ “A Sense of Brutality”. He is a philosopher interested in the topic of brutality in the context of Narco-Terrorism. He wants to know why killers need to go over the top and commit symbolic acts of brutality when they do not have to. Sendero also took some of their killing to ritualistic levels. I think brutality has another type of logic that I still do not understand.
Again, it has been a pleasure to meet all of you via these posts.
I think the exceptional levels of violence was most likely caused by two factors. First, the introduction of “emergency zones” and the army into the conflict meant that much of the rural areas of the highlands became contested meaning that Shining Path control over the population became challenged leading them to use more indiscriminate violence against civilians to try to keep civilians from defecting to the other side (the Government did something similar and there is a recent political science article on how many communities joined the rondas as a signal to avoid Government massacres). However, as these strategies backfired, Guzmán felt the only way to continue pressuring the government was to conduct high profile attacks in the urban areas of Peru, these resulted in horrific terrorist attacks. These sorts of factors are going to be really hard to pick up in a popular book and I’d recommend something more along the lines of Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence as an introduction to them. I think it’s fair to say the popular book could have done more contextualizing here.
However, these more strategic concerns might explain why the group used violence against civilians but not necessarily the exceptionally high levels of violence. I think ideology plays a role but where I think the Rothwell critique sort of misses the point is that Starn and La Serna’s at times harsh portrayal of a specific group’s approach to ideology doesn’t necessarily mean they are critiquing the broader ideological category that the group supposedly subscribes. As I noted above, being leftist, or even jihadist doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to target civilians because of your ideology. Shining Path’s ideology put forth by Guzmán specifically emphasized the use of violence even when it resulted in high levels of violence that were strategically problematic (the two authors actually have a brand new article on how middle-ranking leaders tried to challenge and remove Guzmán given their strategic concerns with his beliefs). Therefore, from what I remember from their book, a lot of their criticism is of that specific variant of the broader ideology and the behavior that resulted. I’ve actually published an academic article with a co-author related to this issue that compares two jihadist extremist groups in Yemen (AQAP and ISY) and why one was far more restrained in their violence against civilians and the other went out of their way to target civilians: https://tnsr.org/2023/07/restrained-insurgents-why-competition-between-armed-groups-doesnt-always-produce-outbidding/.
So my guess is that it was a combination of more generalizable strategic conditions mixed with a more idiosyncratic group specific view of the utility of violence. I recall their description of SP’s ideology to be consistent with the rest of the literatures and I don’t think one can remove Guzmán’s problematic additions from the broader aspects when discussing the Shining Path. When designing a game on these groups (and Government), one big question I face is how to incorporate that second factor not just the strategic dynamics. I usually do so by crafting aspects of the Player Action Menus in a way that I think reflects their willingness to use violence (e.g. SP Terror in Highlands is Free whereas FMLN only have Sabotage but no Terror).
Marco always beats me while I write my long winded posts! I’d second all of the sources mentioned.