Deep Currents

Peru’s “Shining Path” used to be Maoist revolutionaries earned a reputation for terrifying violence against the population. Now they’ve reinvented themselves in classic global guerrilla fashion: by getting into the coca trade to earn money, targeting military and drug enforcement forces, and promising to protect the public. The interesting factor here is that their motivation is far more commercial than it is political. While today’s forces share a name and a history with yesteryear’s violent Maoist revolutionaries, their motivations and operations are that of a corporation. The only stark difference is that most corporations traffick within the law and under the protection of a government, whereas the cocaine-trafficking operations of the new Shining Path operate outside the law and require paramilitary efforts to carve out a zone of autonomy where they can carry out business without interference. Nowhere in this mix is an attempt to take over political power. This was captured well in the astute comment below from my colleague Nils Gilman:

In some ways the transition from liberationist-revolutionary
organization to criminal organization might be seen as a victory of
counterrevolutionary efforts. That would be a 20th century way of
looking at what’s happened with the Sendero (or likewise with the
FARC, and arguably with other groups, like Fatah or the Wa State
Army).

By contrast, the twenty-first century way of looking this
transformation is that these organizations are now undefeatable,
because their ambition is primarily commercial and secondarily
political — and cracking down on their commercial operations is now
simply a cost of doing business for them, rather than block to their
fundamental ambitions. The key quote in this article is that “Today
the Shining Path is working as if it were a company”:
professionalization and commercialization are the name of the deviant
globalization game, and once that transition gets made, they become
largely ineradicable.

In this sense, I think that David Scott Palmer, the BU professor
quoted in the article below, gets the story essentially backward. He
thinks that the primary ambition is still political, and that the
commercial activity is meant simply as a “renewed effort to build the
base.” He still thinks that the commercial horse is still being yoked
to the wagon of politics. But I suspect this is no longer true.
Rather, commercial opportunity is the driver, and the delivery of
political goods is simply a way to enable the commercial activity.

If that analysis is correct, it implies that the strategy for dealing
with the Neo-Sendero needs to be essentially rethought, since denying
them their political objectives not only is not at odds with their
primary motivation (to make money), but will only succeed in making
bystanding peasants suffer.

Written: November 17th, 2008