La desunión hace la fuerza: el surgimiento y el fracaso del maoísmo peruano antes de Sendero Luminoso (1960-1979)

Abstract

In 1964, amid the schism of the world communist movement, the Peruvian Communist Party split between the pro-Soviet faction and the pro-Chinese or Maoist faction. While the latter initially had a significant numerical advantage, their dogmatism and intransigence regarding the national and international events and the internal struggle would prevent them from putting the Maoist theory into practice and cause them to split into multiple parties themselves over the course of the following two decades. The successive divisions critically weakened Peruvian Maoism, to the point that, by the late 1970s, most of the breakaway Maoist parties had dissolved, fallen into political irrelevance or chosen the electoral way. The only one with the disposition and means to carry out the “people’s war” was the Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso [Communist Party of Perú – Shining Path], whose emergence and recruitment was facilitated by the “paper wars” that had plagued Peruvian communism for almost twenty years.

Keywords

• revisionism
• Marxism-Leninism
• Sino-Soviet split
• Peruvian Maoism
• dogmatism