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Tamara Feinstein investigates the bloody Shining Path conflict’s effect on the legal Left in late-twentieth-century Peru, illustrating the catastrophic impact state and insurgent violence can have on the growth and resilience of democratic political actors during times of war.
In this engaging historical study, Tamara Feinstein chronicles the late-twentieth-century Shining Path conflict and argues that it significantly contributed to the rupture and disintegration of the noninsurgent legal Left in Peru by deepening preexisting divisions and eradicating an entire generation of leaders. Using a combination of oral histories, archival documents, contemporary media accounts, and participant observation of commemorations, Feinstein maps the trajectory of the Peruvian Left’s rise and fall by analyzing two emblematic human rights cases that occurred at the Left’s zenith and nadir: the state-based violence of the 1986 Lima prison massacres and the 1992 Shining Path assassination of leftist shantytown leader María Elena Moyano. The lessons found in The Fate of Peruvian Democracy reach beyond Peru to connect with other Latin American countries. Peru’s story illustrates the difficulties of accumulating political force during times of violence, underscores how struggles for self-defense can complicate ideological stances on violence, and helps explain the unevenness of the resurgence of the Left (the so-called “pink tide”) in Latin America in the twenty-first century. The book contributes to debates on memory and human rights in Peru and Latin America where divisions over how to remember the war retraced the fault lines of earlier debates over democracy and violence.
“This is a riveting analysis of the rise and fall of Peru’s left during the 1970s–1990s. Drawing on scores of personal interviews, Feinstein puts us in the room where the leaders of Peru’s leftist political parties struggled to cope with the challenge posed by the savage Shining Path insurgency.” —Cynthia McClintock, author of Electoral Rules and Democracy in Latin America
"This book should become a standard for twentieth-century Peruvian political history. It is an extremely important contribution to this literature. It is also an important addition to the history of leftist politics in Latin America." —The Americas
"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." —North American Congress on Latin America
"...reading Feinstein’s book in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the series of political crises the country has witnessed since 2016, one wonders about the enduring impacts of such stressors on the visions, proposals, and actions of a new generation of left and progressive activists. Feinstein’s book serves as a model for investigating links between political action and wider historical processes in a nuanced and sophisticated way." —A Contracorriente
"In The Fate of Peruvian Democracy, Tamara Feinstein makes a significant contribution to the historiography of modern Peru, human rights, and the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980–2000) by centering the disintegration of the Peruvian Left amid the escalating political violence of the 1980s." —Hispanic American Historical Review
Tamara Feinstein is an assistant professor of Latin American history at Murray State University. She is editor of the online archive Peru: Human Rights, Drugs, and Democracy, 1980–2000.
Acknowledgements
List of Maps and Images
Spanish Language Terms
Acronyms List and Glossary
Regional Maps
Introduction
1. Revolution from Above or Below? (1960s-1970s)
2. Entering the Democratic Game – The Birth of Izquierda Unida (1980-1983)
3. To Support or Oppose the Populist Center? (1983-1986)
4. Days of Barbarity – The 1986 Lima Prison Massacres
5. The Center Cannot Hold –The First and Last Congress of Izquierda Unida at Huampaní (1989)
6. Fighting Against the Tide: María Elena’s Last Stand (1992)
7. The Afterlife of War: Post-Conflict Memory in Peru (2000-2019)
Conclusion
Bibliography