The Discourse of Shining Path. Educational Counter-Text

One wonders whether, beyond the successes, one of the greatest errors of those of us who have approached the study of Sendero Luminoso may have been to speak more about ourselves than about the phenomenon we sought to analyze. By placing interpretations ahead of the necessary and indispensable search for meaning in Sendero Luminoso's own discourse, in many cases we have ended up constructing a parallel discourse that has bracketed what was actually said and privileged instead what we wanted to see, describe and interpret. In this context this work emerges. Because as educators we understand that everything that is said (or left unsaid) about Sendero Luminoso today implies a teaching responsibility in our society, and because in this sense it seemed essential to us to forget about ourselves, approach Sendero Luminoso's verbal discourse and seek meaning there — the expressive potential, what the texts say in themselves independently of what we might interpret. (Excerpt from the introduction).