Revolution or Provocation

In this book we attempt to demonstrate that, in the ideological field, Sendero Luminoso is merely a poor imitation of Maoist ideas about revolution in backward countries, with total ignorance of the true nature of Peruvian society, to which it clamorously attributes the character of semi-feudal, complete with landlords-gamonales and the rest. And consequently, by starting from false premises, its characterization of the revolutionary process in Peru is equally false, since in a country like ours, where the rural area and the peasantry as a class today constitute fairly secondary elements within the economic, political, and cultural whole of society, a protracted war from the countryside to the city, in the Chinese style, constitutes a glaring anachronism and anatopism, to use the term popularized by Jorge Basadre. The Senderista threat, in our view, does not stem from its alleged comprehensive understanding of Marxism, but from exactly the opposite: that is, from the application of an irrational voluntarism, founded on the psychological exploitation of social resentments accumulated in marginal and displaced sectors, both in the countryside and the city, including teachers, students, the unemployed, uprooted peasants, and others. (Excerpt from introduction).