ABSTRACT
The armed insurgency of the PCP-SL and the MRTA emerged in Peru in the 1980s, precisely when this country and Latin America in general initiated its ‘third wave of democratization’. Moreover, SP was an extremely dogmatic, excluding and violent organization, unlike the MRTA and all other Latin American armed uprisings which had regional and international references and linkages. How to understand this dynamic, so dissimilar of what was happening in the country and the entire region? Here I argue that an answer about these paradoxes can be found analyzing the legacies of the military dictatorship of the 1970s. On the one hand, the national-popular character of this military government emphasized mass mobilization and offered the Left a strategy of takeover of power by violent means. This is very distinctive from what happened in other countries in the region, where repressive dictatorships produced the abandonment of a revolutionary paradigm in exchange of a democratic paradigm. On the other hand, the reforms of the military government radically changed the situation of rural Peru and generated potentially conflictive situations (mainly associated with new social differentiation processes and the allocation of communal lands). This explains why SP in its zones of war acted in such an authoritarian manner and triggered extremely violent dynamics.
