The Shining Path of Destruction
Like other Latin American cases, Peru has experienced over the past twenty-five years a series of traumatic events that exacerbated its longstanding problems, and whose consequences continue to haunt individual and collective imagination and behavior. Of all those experiences, the most dramatic has been the actions of the Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso. The destruction and deaths caused by its bloody terrorist acts contributed, together with other factors, to aggravating the traditional weakness of State institutions, deepening the social and political divisions and confrontations that ultimately wore down and neutralized their protagonists.