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Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru's Northern Highlands, 1980-1997. By Lewis Taylor. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2006. ISBN1-84631-016-4. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibiliography. Index. Pp. xi, 232. $32.50.
Based on extensive field work, personal contacts, and interviews from the late 1970s to the 1990s, this account of Sendero Luminoso's (Shining Path's) bloody attack on Peruvian state institutions via a Maoist-inspired guerrilla war (1980-97, and beyond) focuses on Peru's northern highlands. After surveying the ideological and socio-cultural foundations of the Shining Path movement, and the eclectic blend of the analysis of Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui with Mao Zedong's guerrilla doctrines that framed Sendero's strategies, Lewis Taylor takes the reader to the landscape and socio-economic history of the Cajabamba-Huamachuco region. His objective is to compare and contrast the evolution of Sendero Luminoso in the north with the experience in the Ayacucho region (where Sendero was founded) and other zones in Peru. He introduces this part of the study by asking: "How, then, did Sendero set about the task of building up its network of cadres in Cajabamba-Huamachuco and launch its protracted people's war'?"
In answering this question, Taylor's main original contribution is microhistory, with names, dates,...