ABSTRACT
The major Peruvian guerrilla movements of the 1960s were the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR). The Cuban Revolution has been the principal stimulus for groups and individuals to initiate the guerrilla struggle in Peru. Additionally the Cuban Revolution encouraged the conviction that it was not necessary to wait until all the conditions were present to initiate armed struggle because the very beginning of the guerrilla focus would help to create them. The ELN and the MIR considered the armed struggle the principal road to socialism. Both organizations were rapidly defeated in 1965, although the ELN resurged when it intended to form a guerrilla unit in support of Ernesto Che Guevara’s continental guerrilla project that had to take shape on the basis of the guerrilla in Bolivia (1966-1967). The principal causes of the defeat are of political and socioeconomic nature. Also, politico-military errors contributed to the guerrilla fiasco. The defeat of the ELN and the MIR did not mean that their ideas were buried. The military governments of the armed forces (1968-1980) and the armed insurgencies in the 1980s and 1990s built on their ideas and practices.
