[magician]

sorry to inflict this on you...but this is an excerpt from a study I did back in the early 1990's on Sendero.

Origins

Shining Path is the product of national, regional and international processes. Nationally, Shining Path emerged from the wreckage of the Peking-line communist parties in the late 1960’s, which themselves split from the orthodox Marxist movement and the Castroite guerrilla groups earlier in the decade. In regional terms, educated, mestizo Shining Path cadres exploited the economically, socially, and politically marginalized Quechua and Aymara Indian populations of the Andean highlands. Internationally, Shining Path was midwifed by the Sino-Soviet split of 1965, and energized by Maoist revolutionary ideology.

National Origins

During the IVth National Conference of January, 1964, the orthodox Communist Party of Perú fissioned into the Moscow-line PCP (Unidad) and the Maoist PCP (Bandera Roja). PCP-Unidad advocated evolution towards socialism through participation in elections and other, primarily non-violent, methods. PCP-Bandera Roja conversely embraced the Maoist strategy of “protracted people’s war,” and declared its intention to violently seize political power.

After the Vth National Conference of November, 1965, in Abimael Guzmán’s words, “the Party exploded,” with a faction called PCP-Patria Roja expelled for “...negating Chairman Mao, negating Mariátegui, (and) negating the existence of a revolutionary situation in Perú.” Four “fractions” remained in PCP-Bandera Roja, all claiming to be the legitimate Communist Party of Perú: PCP-Puka Llacta, PCP-Estrella Roja, the “PCP-Marxist-Leninist,” and Guzmán’s group, which consisted mainly of student militants from the National University of Engineering and the University San Martín de Porres, both in greater Lima, and the Ayacucho Regional Committee (“José Carlos Mariátegui”) at the University San Cristóbal de Huamanga.

The young doctor of philosophy Abimael Guzmán was PCP-Bandera Roja Secretary of Propaganda, and responsible for “youth work” as a leading communist in Ayacucho. The etiology of the name Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path that the modern-day PCP eschews also dates from this period: among Guzmán’s supporters at the University San Cristóbal de Huamanga, the Revolutionary Student Front (FER) published a newspaper with the subtitle, “On the Shining Path of Mariátegui.” Known as the Ayacucho fraction, Guzmán’s group remained within the Bandera Roja Communist Party for the moment. But they were not idle.
In 1968, the Peruvian military deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, seeking to prevent the APRA Party from taking power after looming elections. The golpe de estato was also triggered by near-chaos in Perú: unprecedented economic crisis, paralyzing labor strikes, corruption scandals at the highest levels of government, diplomatic disputes with the United States and Chile, and growing peasant unrest in the highlands.

Radicalized by the suppression of Castroite guerrilla groups from 1962-65, and imbued with a paternal and nationalistic self-image, the Revolutionary Military Government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado preemptively dismantled the largest, most productive latifundias, and implemented crippling land reforms that were applauded by leftists worldwide. For the moment, peasant land seizures abated.

Expulsion of US military attachés punctuated the nationalization of the International Pretroleum Company’s Peruvian facilities, further alienating a Nixon administration already testy over seizures of American fishing trawlers sailing within the self-de-clared 200-mile Peruvian territorial limit. The Velasco government, dominated by the most nationalistic officer strata, then moved to import large amounts of Soviet weaponry, accompanied by Soviet military advisers.

For their part, the Peruvian Moscow-line Communist Parties followed Fidel Castro’s lead, supporting Velasco. Cuban-supported guerrilla groups in Perú subsequently withered. The original PCP-Unidad gravitated to a coalition of other left-wing parties that became the modern-day United Left (IU), which was represented in the Peruvian Congress until President Fujimori’s April, 1992 autogolpe. In the late 1970’s, splinters from the IU and the APRA Party of former-President Alán Garcia Pérez (1985-90), devolved into the other violent revolutionary organization in Perú, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which prosecutes a Castroite form of armed struggle. While it perpetrates significant guerrilla attacks, MRTA lacks Shining Path’s peasant base and proven activating ideol-ogy. It is consequently far less relevant to this study, and not considered a future contender for state power. While the Peking-line Parties were in disarray, the radical Ayacucho fraction enjoyed superlative leadership which adroitly forged a disciplined, focused organization.

Keep in mind that this excerpt was written circa 1992 or thereabouts...and it betrays a bias: I am dismissive of the "old school" Communist Parties, where you are, perhaps, are not.

I guess one thing has happened to me in the long course of years studying Shining Path: I know a communist when I see one. The gentlemen who call themselves "communist" and sit around in tweed jackets and argue dialectics in universities cannot hold a candle to that nefarious old jackal who raised his fist and chanted in a Lima courtroom mere days ago. That guy is a communist, and the party that he nurtured and led, that was a communist party, a real communist party.