Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1980 - Rilegato

Heilman, Jaymie Patricia

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0804770948 ISBN 13: 9780804770941

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2010

Riassunto

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, Before the Shining Path is the first long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued.

The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. Heilman reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Jaymie Patricia Heilman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alberta.

Jaymie Patricia Heilman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alberta.

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Before the Shining Path

Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1980By Jaymie Patricia Heilman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7094-1

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................ixMap.....................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction............................................................................................................11. Small Towns and Giant Hells: The Politics of Abandon in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1919....................................152. To Unify Those of Our Race: The Tawantinsuyo Movement in 1920s Ayacucho..............................................423. We Will No Longer Be Servile: Peasants, Populism, and APRA in 1930s Ayacucho.........................................714. When the Ink Dries: The Politics of Literacy in Midcentury Ayacucho..................................................965. The Last Will Be First: Trotskyism and Popular Action in the Belande Years..........................................1206. Unfinished Revolutions: Ayacucho and the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, 1968-1978.....................1487. Abandoned Again: 1978 Onward.........................................................................................173Conclusion..............................................................................................................191Notes...................................................................................................................201Bibliography............................................................................................................233Index...................................................................................................................243

Chapter One

Small Towns and Giant Hells

The Politics of Abandon in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1919

* * *

Handing me the flower held tucked beneath his faded lapel, ninety-three-year-old Hernn Carrillo invited me to sit down beside him in Carhuanca's central plaza. That afternoon, Don Hernn spoke to me of his district's history, recounting tales of abusive authorities, priests, and the local gentry. Shrugging his shoulders and sighing, Don Hernn remarked, "small town, giant hell." That same summation of political life inside Peru's rural indigenous communities-"our minor towns, rightly called major hells"-appeared in Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner's acclaimed 1889 work Aves sin nido. Matto de Turner's portrayal of malicious governors, lustful priests, and corrupt tax collectors very much resembled the stories Don Hernn told me about Carhuanca's politics and echo Peruvian thinker Manuel Gonzlez Prada's argument that nineteenth-century indigenous communities suffered "the tyranny of the justice of the peace, the governor, and the priest, that unholy trinity responsible for brutalizing the Indian." These comments all push for a closer consideration of the mechanics of local authority and the processes of rule inside Ayacucho's rural, indigenous communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period that cemented the local power relationships and abuses, as well as the practice of state neglect, that propelled and delimited Ayacucho campesinos' political struggles from 1919 forward.

Known as the "Aristocratic Republic," the period between 1895 and 1919 consolidated a national political order premised on the exclusion of indigenous campesinos. Broadly defined by political stability and economic development, these twenty-four years amounted to a period of reconstruction following the disastrous 1879-1883 War of the Pacific, a conflict fought among Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. The story of indigenous campesinos' participation in the War of the Pacific and their subsequent exclusion from national political life has been well told. Historians like Nelson Manrique, Mark Thurner, and especially Florencia Mallon have shown that indigenous peasants served as patriotic fighters in this devastating war, only to face brutal demobilization and racialized scorn after the fighting was over. As the dust settled and the bodies were cleared away, nonindigenous national authorities revised Peru's constitution to deny citizenship rights to the men and women they deemed ignorant and dangerous Indians.

For the men and women living in the rural and predominantly indigenous district of Carhuanca, politics in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth were defined by abuse exacted in a context of political neglect. During the Aristocratic Republic, Carhuanquinos' connections to national politics and politicians were more rhetorical than real, and regional authorities were accessible only to the district's wealthiest, most educated minority of men. What emerged, then, was a political culture in which local strongmen-called first caudillos and later gamonales-both amassed and subverted formal political authority, respecting or flouting official laws in accordance with their own interests. The resulting political order inside Carhuanca much resembled the ugly political worlds that Gonzlez Prada and Clorinda Matto described: towns full of unpunished crime; class, racial, and gender exploitation; and violence. Yet Gonzlez Prada's famous formulation that this political abuse was fostered by an alliance between national and local elites is flawed, for the Carhuanca case shows that local rural elites themselves suffered under-and protested against-the state's practices of exclusion, disregard, and neglect. Moreover, these rural strongmen fought against one another just as much as they exploited the poorer, more indigenous peasants in their midst.

Although Carhuanca's political culture was an "unruly order" far more unruly than it was ordered, it was by no means anomalous inside rural Peru. Historian Lewis Taylor has described a "Hobbesian social climate" in Hualgayoc during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting the excessive levels of violence, crime, and impunity. Many Peruvians living during the Aristocratic Republic made similar judgments about their diverse regions. Those judgments reflected the decrepit cast of the Peruvian state during the last years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth. Crippled by the devastating war with Chile and economic ruin, and built on the racist and classist exclusion of indigenous campesinos, Peru hobbled into the 1920s operating on the premise of abandon.

CARHUANCA AND THE POLITICS OF ABANDON

Carhuanquinos' political engagements during the Aristocratic Republic played out inside three overlapping spheres: national, regional, and local. Looking first to the national, we can say that during these twenty-four years-and in sharp contrast to their experiences in the years that follo-wed-Carhuanquinos had only limited connections with national politics. Although Carhuanquinos were conscripted to fight in the war against Chile, they did not form major guerrilla forces like those seen in provinces such as Huanta. Indeed, Carhuanquinos' involvement in the war was so minimal that their participation receives scant mention in Carhuanca intellectuals' otherwise ample and detailed recollections of their district's history. Carhuanquinos' nonparticipation did not stem from any lack of patriotism or heroism but instead from the simple reality that eastern Ayacucho was not a major theater of the war. That minimal war involvement, though, meant that the national presidential struggles fought between Andrs Avelino Cceres and Nicols de Pirola were a matter of only small concern inside Carhuanca.

Carhuanquinos' engagement with national politics during the Aristocratic Republic first came to the fore with a 1909 election uprising, when supporters of opposing national congressional candidates came to blows. On May 25, 1909, Carhuanquinos watched as their district's local notables gathered to vote for departmental candidates seeking a seat in Peru's national congress. A fundamentally public affair, the elections took place at a voting table stationed in front of Carhuanca's town hall. Turning the very public electoral process into an equally public brawl, partisans of the two competing congressional candidates led their relatives, supporters, workers, and friends into verbal and then physical confrontation. Supporters of one candidate approached the town hall, led by a prominent district resident named Lencio Crdenas. All were armed with revolvers, carbines, slingshots, sticks, and daggers. Supporters of the other congressional candidate likewise neared the town hall, led by the local hacendados Benjamn and Miguel Carrasco. When the two groups of supporters met, they traded insults and then exchanged punches, stones, and bullets, and the battle bled out from the central plaza and town hall into the district's church and surrounding properties. By six that afternoon, three Carhuanquinos were dead, numerous homes were pillaged and burned, and countless bullets had been spent.

While this uprising did connect with national political matters, triggered as it was by an election for national congressmen, the fight was as much about local animosities as it was about national politics. The conflict between the Carrasco and Crdenas factions involved not only political differences but also disputes over land and the control of women. Paralleling interelite fights in other parts of early-twentieth-century Peru, the Carrasco-Crdenas battle was a conflict between rural strongmen. The Carrascos were not themselves Carhuanquinos; natives of the neighboring province of Andahuaylas, they had come into Carhuanca in the late nineteenth century and used land purchases and illegal land seizures to establish two haciendas, Encuentro and Virn, in Carhuanca's fertile lower valley. Many Carhuanquinos living today remember the Carrascos as abusive hacendados who stole district land, mistreated and manipulated the campesinos who labored on their holdings, and stole Carhuanca's prettiest women from their suitors and even from their husbands.

The Crdenas family was only slightly more popular inside the district. Like the Carrascos, the Crdenas family was not from Carhuanca but rather from Andahuaylas. And like the Carrascos, the Crdenas family used its preexisting wealth to amass considerable amounts of land in Carhuanca, simultaneously assuming a prominent place in local politics. Although both the Carrasco and Crdenas families had their share of enemies inside Carhuanca, their most bitter enemies were each other. Frequently fighting over the borders that divided their respective estates as well as over control of district government, the Carrascos and Crdenases turned their enmity into a public uprising with the 1909 election. The very personal and highly local nature of their dispute is perhaps best revealed by the fact that three months after this clash, Benjamn and Miguel Carrasco's cousin Roberto was murdered, and the man widely thought responsible for the killing was Lencio Crdenas.

It is too big an interpretive stretch to label the 1909 election skirmish an uprising rooted in national political sympathies. There is no written documentation that suggests strong party loyalties among either the Crdenases or the Carrascos, and oral history testimonies cast the upheaval as a fight based on personal hatreds and angers. Which Carhuanquinos fought alongside which family-and, more crucially, why they fought alongside those families-is a question that finds no answer in the written or oral record. The historian can only guess that both the Carrascos and Lencio Crdenas drummed up support among those local notables and peasants most tightly connected to them through the bonds of patronage and friendship and among those who most hated the opposing faction. In the end, the 1909 uprising offers little insight into Carhuanquinos' ideas, attitudes, and opinions about national politics.

Those ideas and opinions about national politics and the Peruvian state did, however, find frequent expression in Carhuanquinos' protests and complaints. Carhuanquinos regularly invoked the national state in their letters and petitions, referencing the rights afforded them by the national constitution, behaviors outlawed by national legislation, and their status as citizens. Two indigenous Carhuanquinos cited their rights as citizens in a 1915 protest, for example, charging that Governor Francisco Allende was committing abuses "to the extreme of depriving us of our rights in a democratic country such as ours." Their comment was not short of irony: As both men were illiterate, they were denied formal political participation in their "democratic" country.

Yet however ironic it was, this sort of complaint emerged repeatedly during the 1910s. An April 1917 protest from ten self-defined Indians and varayocs (customary indigenous authorities) showed the men seeking guarantees "using the rights extended to us by the Constitution of the State." Similarly, three Carhuanquinos who labeled themselves "indigenous men" appeared before the Cangallo subprefect to denounce Carhuanca's governor for whipping, kicking, and beating them solely because they were varayocs. They also charged that instead of providing them the guarantees deserved by "a Peruvian citizen," the governor had imprisoned and tortured them. Lastly, a December 1917 letter of protest showed Carhuanquinos demanding that their persons and interests "be protected from the most cruel and unheard of outrages and exactions of which we are victims, making use of our popular sovereignty and shielded by the constitutional laws to which all Peru's pueblos [towns] have a right."

These spoken and written references to the national government and its legislation did not reflect a broad sense of inclusion or participation in national political life or the promotion of any sort of national political project. Instead, Carhuanquinos' words were little more than formulaic phrases used to compel provincial and departmental authorities into action on their behalf. Through their allusions to the law, the constitution, and the rights of citizens, Carhuanquinos and their scribes were mobilizing the only real capital they had with distant regional authorities: legal capital. As impoverished, disenfranchised, indigenous men and women, Carhuanquinos had few resources to use for political leverage other than the promises laid out in national legislation. However illusory and empty those promises were, Carhuanquinos still tried to use them to their benefit. They had little else to use.

While Carhuanquinos often used national legislation to try to protect themselves, many also believed themselves the victims of the national government's policies. This sense of victimization was especially sharp in relation to two elements of national rule, the military and taxes. Most Carhuanquinos staunchly rejected the national government's demand for their young men's military service. While national, regional, and sometimes even local authorities sometimes cast compulsory military participation as the duty of all Peruvian citizens, there was no doubt that conscription specifically targeted the indigenous population. Carhuanca's mayor explained in 1913 that he had selected Manuel Ochoa to conscript eligible Carhuanquino men because Ochoa was "an influential person among the Indians." The mayor also instructed the subprefect to order Carhuanca's governor to "notify the Indians" about conscription. At the district level, then, it was clear that military service was for indigenous men, and indigenous men only.

Carhuanquinos' broad rejection of military service showed in their consistent opposition to conscription. In 1902, Carhuanca's governor discussed "the grave inconveniences we have always run into in the remission of conscripts," relaying that in the previous year armed attackers had liberated three conscripts being sent to Lima for service. Flight from conscription was also a constant problem. The provincial subprefect explained in 1906 that all those men eligible for conscription "have hidden in the mountains, leaving only the elderly and the infirm in all the towns of my jurisdiction." Similar problems continued in subsequent years. Carhuanca's authorities repeatedly informed the subprefect that conscripts refused to travel, that local varayocs refused orders to force the conscripts to travel, and that eligible conscripts had fled from the district. In 1913, Carhuanca's Governor Jacobo Marabitto explained that it was difficult to conscript men between twenty-one and twenty-five years old because "without exception, all have fled." Some Carhuanquinos even tried to avoid the service by registering for conscription using a false name. Those unable to resist conscription sometimes fled after their incorporation into army ranks. The Carhuanquino Juan Mendoza Flores, for example, stood accused of desertion from army. Beyond flight and desertion, there was also the option of revolt. Cangallo's subprefect relayed in 1917 that there had been an armed assault on Cangallo city with the end of freeing conscripts remitted from Carhuanca and Cangallo. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that documents referencing conscription repeatedly show authorities using the word capture for recruits, likening the men to wayward chattel or criminals.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804770948
• ISBN 13: 9780804770941
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 254
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile