How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

Peru’s modernization carried with it a series of economic and political measures put in place by the military government of the 1960s and 1970s. Not least among them were agrarian land reforms designed to expropriate land from large private estates (haciendas) and cut it up into smaller parcels within state-controlled cooperatives. The prospect of having their own land raised peasants’ expectations but unfortunately not their circumstances: their overall condition worsened, as hacienda owners fled and poorly managed government cooperative programs faltered. The result was deepening frustration. Wanting to institute their own changes, rural dwellers in 1974 organized a grassroots demonstration of 15,000, agitating for land and against state reforms. When firmly put down by the police, they moved underground. There was no room for compromise and no outlet for dissent. The peasant was presented with a choice between the cooperatives, resented for taking away their historic right to land; and the state, hated for a legacy of allying with the landlords and for its bungled reform. The third way was to cooperate with the Shining Path.