THE STATE AND PEASANT SELF-DEFENSE. Social Debt and Vindication of the Counter-Insurgency Struggle
From 1980 until the early 1990s, Peru experienced an internal war or political violence that called into question the country's viability and generated a high social cost and enormous economic loss. But in the early 1990s, the general course of political violence in the country began to change. The southern Andean ronderos, alongside the security forces, inflicted the first and decisive social and political defeat on the Shining Path insurgency in what had been its "Main Front": Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurímac. A political defeat that, with the capture of Abimael Guzmán in September 1992, constituted the strategic and total defeat of this movement — the most perverse and murderous that the annals of our republican history have known and recorded.