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Before the Shining Path

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................ixMap.....................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction............................................................................................................11. Small Towns and Giant Hells: The Politics of Abandon in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1919....................................152. To Unify Those of Our Race: The Tawantinsuyo Movement in 1920s Ayacucho..............................................423. We Will No Longer Be Servile: Peasants, Populism, and APRA in 1930s Ayacucho.........................................714. When the Ink Dries: The Politics of Literacy in Midcentury Ayacucho..................................................965. The Last Will Be First: Trotskyism and Popular Action in the Belande Years..........................................1206. Unfinished Revolutions: Ayacucho and the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, 1968-1978.....................1487. Abandoned Again: 1978 Onward.........................................................................................173Conclusion..............................................................................................................191Notes...................................................................................................................201Bibliography............................................................................................................233Index...................................................................................................................243

Chapter One

The Politics of Abandon in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1919

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Handing me the flower held tucked beneath his faded lapel, ninety-three-year-old Hernn Carrillo invited me to sit down beside him in Carhuanca's central plaza. That afternoon, Don Hernn spoke to me of his district's history, recounting tales of abusive authorities, priests, and the local gentry. Shrugging his shoulders and sighing, Don Hernn remarked, "small town, giant hell." That same summation of political life inside Peru's rural indigenous communities-"our minor towns, rightly called major hells"-appeared in Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner's acclaimed 1889 work Aves sin nido. Matto de Turner's portrayal of malicious governors, lustful priests, and corrupt tax collectors very much resembled the stories Don Hernn told me about Carhuanca's politics and echo Peruvian thinker Manuel Gonzlez Prada's argument that nineteenth-century indigenous communities suffered "the tyranny of the justice of the peace, the governor, and the priest, that unholy trinity responsible for brutalizing the Indian." These comments all push for a closer consideration of the mechanics of local authority and the processes of rule inside Ayacucho's rural, indigenous communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period that cemented the local power relationships and abuses, as well as the practice of state neglect, that propelled and delimited Ayacucho campesinos' political struggles from 1919 forward.

Known as the "Aristocratic Republic," the period between 1895 and 1919 consolidated a national political order premised on the exclusion of indigenous campesinos. Broadly defined by political stability and economic development, these twenty-four years amounted to a period of reconstruction following the disastrous 1879-1883 War of the Pacific, a conflict fought among Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. The story of indigenous campesinos' participation in the War of the Pacific and their subsequent exclusion from national political life has been well told. Historians like Nelson Manrique, Mark Thurner, and especially Florencia Mallon have shown that indigenous peasants served as patriotic fighters in this devastating war, only to face brutal demobilization and racialized scorn after the fighting was over. As the dust settled and the bodies were cleared away, nonindigenous national authorities revised Peru's constitution to deny citizenship rights to the men and women they deemed ignorant and dangerous Indians.

For the men and women living in the rural and predominantly indigenous district of Carhuanca, politics in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth were defined by abuse exacted in a context of political neglect. During the Aristocratic Republic, Carhuanquinos' connections to national politics and politicians were more rhetorical than real, and regional authorities were accessible only to the district's wealthiest, most educated minority of men. What emerged, then, was a political culture in which local strongmen-called first caudillos and later gamonales-both amassed and subverted formal political authority, respecting or flouting official laws in accordance with their own interests. The resulting political order inside Carhuanca much resembled the ugly political worlds that Gonzlez Prada and Clorinda Matto described: towns full of unpunished crime; class, racial, and gender exploitation; and violence. Yet Gonzlez Prada's famous formulation that this political abuse was fostered by an alliance between national and local elites is flawed, for the Carhuanca case shows that local rural elites themselves suffered under-and protested against-the state's practices of exclusion, disregard, and neglect. Moreover, these rural strongmen fought against one another just as much as they exploited the poorer, more indigenous peasants in their midst.

Although Carhuanca's political culture was an "unruly order" far more unruly than it was ordered, it was by no means anomalous inside rural Peru. Historian Lewis Taylor has described a "Hobbesian social climate" in Hualgayoc during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting the excessive levels of violence, crime, and impunity. Many Peruvians living during the Aristocratic Republic made similar judgments about their diverse regions. Those judgments reflected the decrepit cast of the Peruvian state during the last years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth. Crippled by the devastating war with Chile and economic ruin, and built on the racist and classist exclusion of indigenous campesinos, Peru hobbled into the 1920s operating on the premise of abandon.

CARHUANCA AND THE POLITICS OF ABANDON

Carhuanquinos' political engagements during the Aristocratic Republic played out inside three overlapping spheres: national, regional, and local. Looking first to the national, we can say that during these twenty-four years-and in sharp contrast to their experiences in the years that follo-wed-Carhuanquinos had only limited connections with national politics. Although Carhuanquinos were conscripted to fight in the war against Chile, they did not form major guerrilla forces like those seen in provinces such as Huanta. Indeed, Carhuanquinos' involvement in the war was so minimal that their participation receives scant mention in Carhuanca...