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→Women Remember the Shining Path
===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] <ref> PTRC II, 13.</ref> 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] <ref>PTRC III, 46.</ref> 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.
The inclination toward rape and sexual torture, as seen in Peru during the violence of the 1980s and early 1990s could speak to the need of the state’s military and bureaucratic machine to break down and reorganize marginalized and indigenous populations. Raping with impunity is a powerful tool, it breaks down family bonds and degrades the mothers and sisters of the families, damaging and disempowering the victims of state violence in ways that undermine entire communities. In Peru, as elsewhere, sexual violence was used against women to assert state control over target populations, the results were damaging to the women and their bodies, their communities, and the legacy of the Peruvian state’s victory over the Shining Path.
Testimonies continue to speak to scholars and other members of the international community. The state-sanctioned sexual violence recorded in the PTRC is personalized by interviews and testimonies by both victims and torturers. For example, Betty was a militant Shining Path member, but left the party after becoming pregnant. She lived in fear of being found by either the Shining Path or state authorities. Eventually the police began questioning her about rumors of her Shining Path involvement, periodically arresting, torturing and raping her. Betty’s life was ruined by this violence, she lived in constant insecurity and “never knew when one of the policemen who had raped her would pass her on the street and smile that secret smile of knowing.”[48]<ref>Kirk, <I>The Monkey’s Paw</I>, 109.</ref>
“Pancho” was a veteran of the Navy and fought in the early 1980s against the Shining Path in Ayacucho, and he gave an interview that is recorded in The Peru Reader, History, Culture, Politics. He matter-of-factly told of raping and abusing girls and women, “When I searched women, the first thing I did was undress them. Old or young, I stuck my fingers in them just the same. You may not believe me, but there was one time when I found one explosive, pardon me, two. It’s because they have big cunts,” he said, “So from that moment I began to search all the cholas…sometimes little girls thirteen years old. They were sluts.”
“Pancho’s” interview shows that as he battled the Shining Path, he victimized women he felt could be enemy combatants, perhaps this allowed him to justify his crimes, while racism also allowed him to distance himself from the pain he caused. He narrated his participation of another rape and murder of a young indigenous girl with his military comrades, asking his interviewer, “You understand don’t you. This happens the world over.”[49] <ref> “Pancho,” “Vietnam in the Andes,” <I>The Peru Reader</I>,345.</ref> He then reminded his interviewer of Vietnam, as if to establish their mutual culpability in wartime rape. Yet, by the time the PTRC released its report; sexual violence was increasingly acknowledged and condemned by an international community that was more responsive to reports of systematic sexual violence. Women testified to the PTRC, and their experiences will forever be a part of Peru’s official history. Remaining adherents to the Shining Path, such as the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru (CSRP) exploited the PTRC’s report, as seen in an article in the weekly newspaper, Revolutionary Worker, and reprinted by the CSRP: “One of the most heart-wrenching sections of the Commission report documents case after case of torture of women revolutionaries by the military and police,” the article goes on to describe acts of torture, and ends by quoting the PTRC, “The Commission concludes that sexual violence against women by the armed forces of the state was a ‘generalized practice that took on a systematic character connected to the repression of the subversives in the provinces of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac.'”<ref>CSRP, “Who is Oppressing the Revolutionary Women of Peru?”</ref> In the production of memory, the Shining Path has won an important victory, and even after its destruction in the mid-1990s, the movement continued to celebrate its treatment of women. Later in the article the authors remarks, “One of the things that really stands out about the People’s War in Peru is how steadfastly the PCP (Peruvian Communist Party) has struggled against women’s oppression, and how it has led the masses against every form of degradation faced by women in Peru.”CSRP, “Who is Oppressing the Revolutionary Women of Peru?”
===Conclusion===
The power of women becomes explicit when it is shown in the public sphere. Under the kind of conditions created by the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state, Peruvian women were able to act in ways both maternal and political, and show the influence they wielded in a variety of ways. Women acted as revolutionaries, soldiers, community organizers, and national consciences because of a combination of factors, among them: their dedication to party doctrine, the Marxist appeal to female inclusion, the dwindling number of men in many communities, their need to feed their children, and their decision to testify to the PTRC. Although the Shining Path and its remaining followers claimed to be instruments of the emancipation of the women of Peru, it was the organization that benefited from the women’s membership.
