Discourse and Political Violence in Shining Path
Until 1977, Sendero Luminoso was one of the numerous groups of the Peruvian radical left that preached the necessity of armed struggle to seize power. The present work analyzes the importance of the elaboration of a discourse, the emergence of a "cosmocratic figure," and the construction of a "discourse-community" around it, in order to explain the transformation of SL, until then a marginal provincial grouplet that, through the accumulation of "symbolic capital," became a "war machine." SL had a decisive impact on Peruvian political life in the 1980s and 1990s, even after the capture of its supreme leader (1992) and its subsequent collapse.