The Shining Path was one of the most brutal insurgencies ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru explores the devastating effects of insurgent violence and the state's brutal counterinsurgency methods on Peruvian civil society.
While leftist governments have been elected across Latin America, this 'Pink Tide' has so far failed to reach Peru. Instead, the corporate elite remains firmly entrenched, and the left continues to be marginalised. Peru therefore represents a particularly stark example of 'state capture', in which an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations and pro-market technocrats has resulted in a monopoly on political power. Post the 2016 elections, John Crabtree and Francisco Durand look at the ways in which these elites have been able to consolidate their position at the expense of genuine democracy, with a particular focus on the role of mining and other extractive industries, where extensive privatization and deregulation has contributed to extreme disparities in wealth and power. In the process, Crabtree and Durand provide a unique case study of state development, by revealing the mechanisms used by elites to dominate political discussion and marginalize their opponents, as well as the role played by external actors such as international financial institutions and foreign investors. The significance of Crabtree's findings therefore extends far beyond Peru, and illuminates the wider issue of why mineral-rich countries so often struggle to attain meaningful democracy.
Miguel La Serna's gripping history of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) provides vital insight into both the history of modern Peru and the link between political violence and the culture of communications in Latin America. Smaller than the well-known Shining Path but just as remarkable, the MRTA emerged in the early 1980s at the beginning of a long and bloody civil war. Taking a close look at the daily experiences of women and men who fought on both sides of the conflict, this fast-paced narrative explores the intricacies of armed action from the ground up. While carrying out a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare ranging from vandalism to kidnapping and assassinations, the MRTA vied with state forces as both tried to present themselves as most authentically Peruvian. Appropriating colors, banners, names, images, and even historical memories, hand-in-hand with armed combat, the Tupac Amaristas aimed to control public relations because they insightfully believed that success hinged on their ability to control the media narrative. Ultimately, however, the movement lost sight of its original aims, becoming more authoritarian as the war waged on. In this sense, the history of the MRTA is the story of the euphoric draw of armed action and the devastating consequences that result when a political movement succumbs to the whims of its most militant followers.
The Andean region is perhaps the most violent and politically unstable in the Western Hemisphere. Politics in the Andes is the first comprehensive volume to assess the persistent political challenges facing Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.Arguing that Andean states and societies have been shaped by common historical forces, the contributors' comparative approach reveals how different countries have responded variously to the challenges and opportunities presented by those forces. Individual chapters are structured around themes of ethnic, regional, and gender diversity; violence and drug trafficking; and political change and democracy.Politics in the Andes offers a contemporary view of a region in crisis, providing the necessary context to link the often sensational news from the area to broader historical, political, economic, and social trends.
Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
Since the early twentieth century, technological transfers from the United States to Latin American countries have involved technologies of violence for social control. As the chapters in this book illustrate, these technological transfers have taken various forms, including the training of Latin American military personnel in surveillance and torture and the provision of political and logistic support for campaigns of state terror. The human cost for Latin America has been enormous—thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered, disappeared, or tortured, and whole communities have been terrorized into silence. Organized by region, the essays in this book address the topic of state-sponsored terrorism in a variety of ways. Most take the perspective that state-directed political violence is a modern development of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests weigh heavily. Others acknowledge that Latin American states enthusiastically received U.S. support for their campaigns of terror. A few see local culture and history as key factors in the implementation of state campaigns of political violence. Together, all the essays exemplify how technologies of terror have been transferred among various Latin American countries, with particular attention to the role that the United States, as a "strong" state, has played in such transfers.
Illustrated most dramatically by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, violence represents a challenge to democratic politics and to the establishment of liberal-democratic regimes. Liberal-democracies have themselves not hesitated to use violence and restrict civil liberties as a response to such challenges. These issues are at the centre of global politics and figure prominently in political debates today concerning multiculturalism, political exclusion and the politics of gender. This book takes up these topics with reference to a wide range of case-studies, covering Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. It provides a theoretical framework clarifying the relationship between democracy and violence and presents original research surveying current hot-spots of violent conflict and the ways in which violence affects the prospects for democratic politics and for gender equality. Based on field-work carried out by specialists in the areas covered, this volume will be of high interest to students of democratic politics and to all those concerned with ways in which the recourse to violence could be reduced in a global context. This book has significant implications for policy-makers involved in attempts to develop safer and more peaceful ways of handling political and social conflict. This book was published as a special issue of Democratizations.
Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country. This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.