Peru 1990. The Lost Opportunity

The book is divided into eleven chapters. In the first, which bears the same name as the book, an attempt is made to provide a general overview of the process and to explain why, in the view of IDL, a great opportunity to address the issue of national pacification on new terms was squandered during 1990. In chapter two, a balance sheet is drawn of the performance of the government of Alan García in matters of human rights policy, and we conclude that its errors in this area were one of the factors explaining the incessant growth of violence during the period. In chapter three, the complex process experienced by Sendero Luminoso is analyzed, based on the debate about the crisis this movement is said to have gone through over the course of the year. In chapter four, we approach the MRTA, which we characterize as a secondary actor in the violence scenario. In chapter five, we seek an interpretation of state strategies for confronting drug trafficking and their effects on the problem of political violence, particularly in the Huallaga region. In the following chapters we take a regional approach to the problem, privileging those areas that seem to us to have been the most important. (Excerpt from the foreword).