Sendero Raids a Town in Ayahuanco

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated October 16:

Columns of the Shining Path raided villages in the Viracochán, Ayahuanco and Santillan Districts of Huanta Province in Ayacucho Department, distributing leaflets and painting slogans on the walls. This is known as armed propaganda. They have been active in this region for a very long time.

A really nice map of Ayacucho. It's all in Spanish, but no matter. One of the best maps of this area on the Internet.

If this group would completely renounce it's evil behavior of the past, when they wantonly killed men, women and children for obscure reasons, such as being neutral, executed fair employers solely for being bosses and therefore "exploiters", and on and on, maybe they could actually get somewhere.

As it is, they were so brutal and stupid for so many years that they have enemies all over Peru. It's stupid for guerrillas to kill the people. What's the point of that? Terrorize people into supporting you? Get real.

Police said that this was the first time Sendero had been in this region this year, although they have been active in La Mar.

Huanta Province is in the far north. It's a mix of Andes and jungle. Sendero has been very active here since the beginning of the war, and they never really left. Many people left in the mid-1980's due to the war and went to Lima and they started coming back in the mid-1990's.

It's really the northern half of Ayacucho that has seen all the fighting - La Mar, Ayahuanco, Victor Fajardo, Huanta, Huamanga, Cangallo, Sucre, Huancasancos, Vilcashuaman. The war started in Cangallo Province on May 17, 1980.


A photo from President Alan Garcia's previous term, apparently taken in Ayahuanco. Those are peasants lined up against the side of the road for some creepy reason. Sendero's brutality was probably exceeded by the military, but you would never know that from reading most histories of the war.


A convent in Huanta Province, Ayacucho. Pretty typical terrain for the region. It's more forest than Andes.

Some of you may be wondering why I am writing so much about Sendero. It's not that I support them, love them, hate them, or am even obsessed with them. It's similar to why I write a lot about Jews. I ended up reading and learning a lot about Jews for several years, so now I know a lot about them and they are interesting to me.

I have been studying Sendero for around 20 years now and I have read almost every book that has ever been written on them, plus many magazine articles and pieces on the Internet. So I'm sort of an amateur Senderologist.

I will say that the Peruvian system in general is complete shit and needs to be gotten rid of - I would go so far as to say wipe it off the face of the Earth. Some sort of revolution is probably the only way to do that, but I am not sure if these Sendero crazies are the folks to do not. I've always been bothered by their cruelty and fanaticism.

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