An Interview with dad who lived through the era of The Shining Path

To read a brief overview of Abimeal Guzman and the shining path click here for my zettelkatsen literature note

What was the general opinion on The Shining Path inside and/or outside Lima?

Most everyone in Lima believed the shining path to be a monstrous organization, people in Lima generally had more acsess to information about the group compared to people in more rural places like Juancayo, yet people in Lima still didn’t really know who Guzman really was, or what he was really about. Very few people sympathized with the cause in Lima because all they saw was the terror without reason. However outside of Lima was a different story, my dad recalls occasionally seeing “People’s War” spray painted or murals of shining path fighters in places outside Lima.

What was the scale of fear felt towards Thr Shining Path? It fluctuated, early on it didnt seem terrible, yet when they started to force small villages into submission they knew the worse was yet to come, people tend to forget that a the Shining Path was heavily active for almost over 20 years, and small factions still remain to this day, when the Shining Oath took the war to Lima, the fear really set in, but again sometimes there would be months with no attacks or major fights in Lima, yet other times there would be a bombing every week. For a good 5 years though many people would stay clear places that were heavily bombed like banks or certain types of cars. The Shining Path was made up of scared Villagers following a strong voice just as much as it was made up of radicalized idelogical belivers of the “people’s war”

When did you realize the real ness of the threat that was The Shining Path? For my dad, it was when the Shining Path heavily bombed a very busy main street about 10 blocks from his house. This was in early 1992 and was after my dad had moved to Canada yet, he had a friend that died in that bombing and an uncle in law who had half his face maimed with large shards of glass. His brother was also at home during the attack and felt the ground shake when the bombs hit. Acts like these is what led most people in Lima to antagonize the shining path, not because of politics but because their means could never of justified their ends.