Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; only mobilizing the masses and relying on them can wage it.
People’s WarPeru’s Maoist guerrilla movement, known as Shining Path, was far and away the most radical and violent in Latin America. The group’s founder and leader, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, claimed to be a devoted Maoist and a faithful interpreter of Mao Zedong’s ideology, strategy, and tactics as he directed a people’s war based largely in rural, impoverished, and predominantly indigenous areas of Peru between 1980 and his capture in 1992.
However, Guzmán was trained in China as a potential Third World guerrilla during several extended visits beginning just before the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and continuing during it, as were several other members of his organization. As a result, he and other Shining Path central committee members were much more influenced by the post-revolutionary ideological dogmatism of the Gang of Four than by Quotations from Chairman Mao, also known as the Little Red Book, or Mao’s reflections on the course of the Chinese revolution itself. However, by 1976 the Gang of Four had lost its struggle for political control in China, which meant that Shining Path was cast adrift and left to fend for itself.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.