RURAL SOCIETY AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE: THE NEW SCENARIOS

Talking about violence and rural society involves drawing a boundary that is in some measure arbitrary, because it is difficult to separate city and countryside, urban society and rural society in Peru today. Despite this, given the nature of this seminar, the present essay draws that boundary and refers above all to social and political violence in the Andean rural areas. Investigating the new scenarios of violence requires going back at least to the immediately preceding scenario, the 1960s and 1970s, to find causes, continuities, and ruptures. In doing so, we observe that before 1980, the year in which Sendero Luminoso initiated its armed actions, there was certainly a high degree of violence in the Peruvian countryside. Sendero represents a break with respect to the main trend of development of rural society, especially of the peasantry, which reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. But at the same time, it represents in some measure continuity and qualitative advancement of the old culture of mistis and gamonales. A series of traits such as corporal punishment, floggings, and the hair-cutting that SL carried out in the areas where it was building its power were inherited from the old misti power, whose authoritarianism was amplified by the adoption of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.