The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency

摘要

Why did some indigenous peasants support Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL) while others fought against it? Miguel La Serna's The Corner of the Living attempts to answer this question. Like Jaymie Heilman's Before the Shining Path (Stanford University Press, 2011), this book is part of a growing literature on the insurgency produced by historians, albeit historians comfortable with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies. Like Heilman, La Serna also focuses on two communities in Ayacucho, the department of Peru most affected by the conflict. In La Serna's case, these are highly emblematic communities. Chuschi, in the province of Cangallo, was the location of SL's first armed action, when, in 1980, its militants burned the ballot boxes during the presidential elections. Huaychao, in Huanta province, was arguably where the peasant-led counter-insurgency against the movement began in 1983, when a group of Senderistas was captured and killed by comuneros.