When I started my college education in Peru in the late 1990s, a professor who had spent his early youth as a committed “card-carrying” leftist militant shared a seemingly popular old joke: “How do you found three leftist parties? Lock two comrades in an elevator for an hour.”
As with most humor, this joke embedded a profound (and hurtful) truth. As a result of both hemispheric and domestic processes, throughout the 1960s and 1970s Peru’s leftist political parties experienced a seemingly endless atomization. Most Peruvian communist parties, plural, required an adjective as an identifier in the midst of a truly convoluted landscape of partisan politics—Unidad, Bandera Roja, Patria Roja, among others, contributed to the creation of a seemingly endless list of complicated acronyms that structured the country’s political history for decades.
Due to the tragic depth and long-lasting impact of the 1980–2000 internal armed conflict, communism in Peru became a synonym for terrorism. The Partido Comunista del Perú–Sendero Luminoso (Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path) violently targeted civil society, including other leftists and their parties, and claimed to monopolize an ideological niche of alleged revolutionary values. While the neoliberal resolution of the war unfolded in the form of the bureaucratically authoritarian administration of Alberto Fujimori, the preceding collapse of the legal communist parties became an omen of what was yet to come.
Tamara Feinstein’s The Fate of Peruvian Democracy is a much-needed historical compass for understanding the institutional and political tragedy that engulfed the rise and demise of political parties, the party system, the Left, and democracy at large.
Feinstein’s project entailed a number of major challenges for any scholar interested in Peru’s recent history. Chief among them is the fact that the history of the Left is plagued by sociopolitical trauma. Between Sendero Luminoso’s terrorist actions and the Peruvian state’s systemic violation of human rights, political violence killed approximately 70,000 Peruvians over the course of two decades. While limited in comparison to similar scenarios in Central America’s civil wars, Peru’s death toll made it the most devastating conflict in the country’s republican history. Partly due to the geographic and ethnic component of the conflict, with violence largely focused on rural regions of the south-central highlands and primarily targeting Indigenous populations, the historical appraisal in the aftermath of the conflict has become a truly divisive issue in contemporary Peru.
For many Peruvians—primarily Lima-based, sometimes affluent but also aspiring working-class people—Sendero Luminoso epitomized the terrorist drive of communism, and the state rightfully defended civil society from a latent domestic manifestation of a global threat. For many others, including relatives and survivors of violence as well as liberal Lima-based middle classes, the state’s racially framed decisions to militarize a low-intensity conflict contributed to its massive escalation and daunting results.
Echoing similar hemispheric post-conflict developments, Peru hosted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Despite a comprehensive research process, the TRC’s final report proved unable to foster a remotely consensual understanding of the what, why, and how of the internal armed conflict. In order to write The Fate of Peruvian Democracy, therefore, Feinstein skillfully navigated complex intellectual and affective networks—past and present—of information.
Much of Feinstein’s work is an exemplary case of oral history. While conducting the research that informs The Fate of Peruvian Democracy, many of the historical actors in the book were still alive. Those interviewed include Héctor Béjar, a former Cuba-trained guerrilla, member of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR), and founder of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional; the late Hugo Blanco, a member of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR), leader of the Federación Departamental de Campesinos del Cuzco and of the campesino uprising and subsequent agrarian reform of 1963; the late Javier Diez Canseco, a member of Vanguardia Revolucionaria (VR), founder of the Partido Unificado Mariateguista (PUM), and many times elected congressperson; the late Ricardo Letts, founder of VR, consultant for the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP), and prominent politician; and the late Carlos Iván Degregori, Peruvian anthropologist, member of the Maoist faction of the MIR, and probably the most important expert on Sendero Luminoso.
While many of these important voices had been interviewed before, Feinstein’s work puts them in a unique and fairly unprecedented conversation available to public audiences. Along with research in private and public collections, archival records, and partisan periodical publications, Feinstein weaves these voices together and presents a collective meditation about the place of the Left in Peru’s recent history.
The text is organized into seven substantial chapters, chronologically arranged, along with an introduction and conclusion. After setting the groundwork and making some thought-provoking assertions, the book begins with the entangled political developments of the 1960s, when a revolutionary horizon seemed within reach. This initially took the form of Peru engaging with the hemispheric dynamics of post-Cuban Revolution guerrilla warfare and ultimately materialized in the baffling and oxymoronic form of a self-labeled “military revolution”—a dictatorship established in 1968 by Army General Juan Velasco Alvarado, whose nationalistic rhetoric attempted to convey supposed emancipating values.
A second chapter is devoted to the birth of Izquierda Unida (IU), perhaps the most ambitious experiment of Peruvian leftist parties. After 12 years of military dictatorship, and in the midst of promising electoral results during the democratic transition, historically atomizing leftist leaderships attempted to consolidate under a single proposal for municipal elections in 1980 and 1983 and national elections in 1985 with important wins. The 1980s, however, brought pivotal challenges for IU—namely, the escalation of the internal armed conflict and the electoral triumph of the Partido Aprista Peruano (APRA), Peru’s historical centrist populist front.
Chapters three, four, and five document IU’s convoluted responses to APRA’s administration under President Alan García, the devastating impact of the infamous 1986 Lima prison massacres—when García ordered the military to repress and extrajudicially kill dozens of inmates in response to widespread prison riots, and the demise of IU after years of puzzling international and domestic dynamics, including the decline of global communism and the violent institutional damage inflicted by a decade of internal war.
The last two chapters of the book deal with historical events beyond the rupture of Izquierda Unida and, in many ways, could be read as a series of epilogues. In the aftermath of the Huampaní Congress of 1989, the last meeting of IU, the elections of 1990 empowered political outsider Alberto Fujimori and inaugurated a new age of Peruvian politics. Displaced from the electoral sphere, leftist dynamics moved to the grassroots level and battled the combination of enduring civil war violence and fully fleshed-out state terrorism, led by Fujimori and paramilitary groups.
Among many grassroots leaders, María Elena Moyano—an Afro-Peruvian organizer and activist based in Villa El Salvador, one of Lima’s peripheral districts—became a symbol of the vitality of legal leftist options in an age of democratic crisis. Named “Woman of the Year” by a major newspaper, awarded an international prize for her defense of human rights, and sometimes questioned by the political establishment, Moyano turned out to be the ideal target for Sendero Luminoso’s last displays of terror. She was murdered in Villa El Salvador on February 15, 1992, her death invoking a sharp decline in sympathy for the Sendero’s cause.
In the wake of Moyano’s assassination, Fujimori’s authoritarian turn deepened on April 5, 1992, through the so-called autogolpe, or self-coup. Claiming that the incompetence, inefficiency, and lack of cooperation of politicians and state officials were preventing the country from being rescued from a sociopolitical meltdown, Fujimori intervened in all branches of government and abruptly began his descent into autocracy. Throughout the rest of the decade, Fujimori remade the political landscape, canceling “traditional parties” and inaugurating what some political scientists refer to as the politics of antipolitics. The last chapter deals with post-war Peru and its manifold and contested struggles for historical memory.
The Fate of Peruvian Democracy is an ambitious work. In the conclusion, Feinstein shares a collective bafflement about the incapacity of a 21st-century New Left to organize and present a viable electoral option to counter the several members of the corporate-controlled mafioso establishment. While some “anti-system” national options claiming a left-leaning identity have emerged over the last two decades, including the projects led by the late Alan García (2006), Ollanta Humala (2011), and Pedro Castillo (2021), they boomed and burst into neoliberal flames without making any contribution to a long-term revitalization of the Left. In seeking to understand this apparent structural failure, The Fate of Peruvian Democracy offers a comprehensive political autopsy and a map of how things fell apart. The fall of the Left, Feinstein persuasively explains, is the fall of democracy at large—in Peru and beyond.
Javier Puente is a scholar of Andean peoples and places. He is author of The Rural State and currently serves as Associate Professor and Chair of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program and Faculty Liaison of the Lewis Global Studies Center at Smith College. He is a member of NACLA’s Editorial Committee.
