[magician]

If you ever spoke to campesinos who had run from villages administered by Sendero comites popular, you would know that these guys had a real handle on nuts and bolts socialism at the grass roots level. They had studied the Chinese revolution in detail, in fact, many of them, and I believe that Abimael was one of them, had even gone to China on study programs earlier in their careers.

Everything was organized, there was no individual liberty. Everyone worked together, everyone was involved. Where you fit into the paradigm was dictated by your class consciousness. It was not uncommon to find youths in charge of older people, and God help you if you showed the slightest disrespect, or inclination to disobey.

It all began with village assemblies, where everyone was addressed by cadres. At that point, local village members who may have gone away for a time to "join the revolution" might make a reappearance, and suddenly, they would be in charge. The women were organized in women's groups. These were both study sessions where they were taught how to read and write, with political subjects at the heart, and they were also used to gauge suitability: those who were more bourgeois would be subjected to "rectification" and required to engage in "self-criticism," though everyone did this. Men had their own groups, as did the young.

Work details were meted out, and military training was conducted, and military units formed. There was no free time. The village was run like a military encampment. All your time belonged to the revolution. As they phrased it, your life belonged to the people, el pueblo.

When we walked through these villages....they were absolutely eerie. Unlike the average village in the Upper Huallage, with chickens and dogs and hogs running around, kids everywhere, Sendero villages were ordered, clean, quiet....and hostile. When they were not deserted, the people just stared. Revolutionary slogans would be painted on the walls....there would be lessons carefully lettered on the blackboard in the school....rice would be cooking in a communal kitchen...there would be a village medical clinic, it would be locked up, it would be stocked, and no one would have a key. The people would be remarkably healthy.

Of course, no one had seen colochos or terrucos, and you could see from their eyes that they would as soon stick a knife in us as talk to us. The Peruvian police that I advised in those days knew, of course, that we were walking through a Sendero village, and were on alert...I was careful to advise correct behavior, cautioning the utmost respect for derechos humanos. The cops got it, to their credit.

In those days, early 1990, in the Upper Huallaga, the US was proscribed from formal involvement in the insurgency. The spooks were involved, they had their programs, but I will not get into those here. Formally, we were fighting the drug war, under the artificial premise that it was possible to target the trafficking infrastructure without coming into conflict with Sendero. Events would demonstrate the fallacy of this concept, but the Andean Strategy was still new, we were allied with the Peruvian police, and ended up fighting Colombian traffickers, Sendero, and the Peruvian Army, pretending all the while that we were only chasing narcos.

Sendero was far from a bunch of elitists who merely sought state power. They were definitely a Leninist vanguard, a so-called "party of a new type," but they saw this as a development which was required to elevate the class consciousness of the people so that they could be led by professional revolutionaries in seeking goals far beyond a five day work week, or an eight hour day, or even a fair working wage.

In sum, Sendero was a Maoist communist party. And what that means, by way of definition, is that Peru was merely a vital first step to a regional war that was itself just a component in a global historical transition to worldwide communism.

Were they dreaming? No doubt. And this is why they have ended up, so to speak, on the proverbial dustbin of history. And thank God for that. They clearly overreached.

This does not make them any less dangerous. Abimael himself said that the revolution would continue as long as a single cadre remained free. These are people who interpret defeats as temporary reverses. They view communism as an historical process, an inevitability.