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→Women Opposed to the Shining Path
===Women Opposed to the Shining Path===
The violence of the 1980s and 1990s threatened Peruvian families, compromising parents’ ability to protect their children, separating men from their families and leaving women to organize associations to defend and heal their communities. During the 1970s labor and political movements were almost exclusively male, but as men left rural communities, joining or fleeing the Shining Path, women “filled the void,” and formed groups that resisted the Shining Path.[31] <ref>Coder, “Women in W,” 348.</ref> Some women, like Maria Elana Moyano, had been politically active for years, others formed in reaction to the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian State. The conditions in Peru, the violence, the hunger, and the terror of the areas affected by the violence, necessitated the fusion of the roles of mother and political actor. The power and significance of Peruvian women may have previously been invisible, dormant, or even repressed, but was now brought to the fore by women’s compelling resistance to the Shining Path.
Maria Elana Moyano’s years of political activism had their roots in the incomplete land reform of the Vargas regime. In 1971, when she was twelve years old, Moyana accompanied her parents in a land take over, after their expectations of land redistribution had been unmet.[32] <ref> Kirk, <I>The Monkey’s Paw</I>, 106.</ref> The land they and the neighbors occupied outside of Lima became the Villa El Salvador.[33<ref>Cecilia Blondet, “Villa El Salvado,” <I>The Peru Reader</I>, 272</ref>] Moyano remained politically active in the town; she was a member of a church group that was influenced by Liberation Theology, president of the Villa El Salvador Womens’ Federation, and in 1987, Vice Mayor of the town.[34] <ref>Kirk, <I>The Monkey’s Paw</I>, 106.</ref> In 1989, the Agency for International development showcased Villa El Salvador as a model town. Moyano’s power was neither invisible nor radical, she worked within legal institutions and pursued social change.
The Shining Path aggressively pursued obedience and loyalty from the inhabitants of Villa El Salvador, using violence and terror to achieve the townspeople’s cooperation. Moyano would not endorse the People’s War and gave an interview to journalist Mariella Balbi in 1991, after the Shining Path had blown up a food ware house that supplied ninety-two soup kitchen.[35] <ref>Kirk, <I>The Monkey’s Paw</I>, 106.</ref> “Until a little while ago, I thought the Shining Path was wrong-headed but that they in some way wanted to fight for some kind of justice,” she said, “…now they have touched grassroots organizations, made up of the poorest people. Who participates in the soup kitchens and the ‘glass of milk’ program? People who can’t afford to eat in their houses, so I don’t understand this unbalanced group. They want to snuff out survival organizations so that levels of malnutrition and death rise.”[36] <ref>Maria Elana Moyano, “There have been Threats,” <I>The Peru Reader</I>, 372.</ref> Moyano led a march to protest the violence of the Shining Path and gave interviews like the one cited above criticizing the movement’s tactics. On February 15, 1992, Moyano was murdered by female Shining Path members at a community chicken barbeque she had organized.[37] <ref>Kirk, <I>The Monkey’s Paw</I>, 106.</ref>
Moyano was able to make a political space for herself in Peru, before the Shining Path invaded her town. She was neither silent nor disempowered in Villa El Salvador because her position gave her power to defy the Shining Path as a politician and a woman. Other women resisted the Shining Path informally, without political clout. Peruvian women collaborated in “Mother’s Clubs,” soup kitchens and glass-of milk programs, functional organizations that addressed nutritional needs of children and communities. Yet the violence and terror of the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state, these women’s federations became politicized. In August, 1988, the Mother’s Clubs Federation organized a march for peace, one participant saying, “Because we give life, we defend it.”[38] <ref>Corder, “Women in War: Impact and Responses,” <I>Shining and Other Paths</ref>, 360.</ref>
Senderistas attempted to disrupt the march and intimidate those advocating peaceful solutions, but they were expelled by the female marchers. Without the support of women, the Shining Path struggled for legitimacy and control, in the face of explicit opposition from Peruvian women, the group asserted their influence though violence and repression. The potential contribution of Peruvian women may have been overlooked by the masculine organizations that formed in the 1970s, but within the extraordinary conditions of the war, women’s foundational position within society became clear.
The war also inspired women in the Peruvian countryside to act in the public sphere in order to protect their children and their communities. As the number of casualties grew and the men left, women in Andean communities formed self-defense organizations, or Rondas Campesinas.[39] <ref>Corder, “Women in War,” 356.</ref> Although accounts of the successful opposition to the Shining Path often include gendered language and references to masculine resistance, women, or Ronderas, played central roles in the community organization.[40] <ref>Kimberly Theidon, “Disarming the Subject: Remembering War and Imagining Citizenship in Peru,” 70.</ref> Although some described their activities as “making ourselves macho,” or “put[ting] ourselves in the position of men,” the efforts of women to oppose the Shining Path dealt the People’s War a serious blow.[41] <ref>Theidon, “Disarming the Subject,” 74.</ref> Gendered language aside, the outcome of the Ronderas’ involvement in the war against the Shining Path was significant, communities cooperated with the Peruvian state to identify, attack, and purge Senderistas.[42]<ref> Starn, “Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in the Central-South Andes,” Shining and Other Paths, 232-233.</ref> Andean women recognized the value of their political participation, and sought to ensure their continued political involvement. In Ayacucho in 1994 and 1995, Andean women created the “Proposal of the Women of Ayacucho.” <ref>Corder, “Women in War,” 165-170.</ref> The women demanded guarantees they would retain their position in the economy, state aid for nutrition and health programs, women and children displaced by the violence and attention to the mental health of Peruvian children. They recognized their role in maintaining their visibility, and pledged to coordinate and organize local, regional and national women’s groups, learn Spanish and engage in family planning.<ref>Corder, “Women in War,” 165-170.</ref> This effort to claim space for themselves in the public sphere shows the dedication of these women to their goals, and according to historian Steve Stern, “women’s new prominence as citizen-subjects, with their own political organizations and agendas, has left an important and probably irreversible legacy.”<ref>Steve Stern, <I>Shining and Other Paths</I>, 343.</ref>
===Women Remember the Shining Path===
The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) found that the Shining Path was responsible for fifty-four percent of the deaths during its war against the Peruvian state, and was principally guilty for the violence because the organization had deliberately sought to elicit a violent response from the state. [46] One key distinction between the terror perpetrated by the Shining Path and that of the military and police was the state officials’ systematic application of sexual violence against women. [47] The use of sexual violence by state representatives, such as military and police, was widespread under military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, and state repression and civil wars elsewhere in South and Central America during the twentieth century. These violations were generally committed against civilian women, while in Peru, the presence of women in the Shining Path complicates the understanding of this distinction.
