We have chosen the guerrilla attacks against the Allpachaka agricultural station in Ayacucho in 1982 and the IER Waqrani rural development program in Puno in 1989. There are intriguing parallels between the two case studies. Both were symbols of regional demands for development. Both had the backing of institutions with representativity: in the first case, the University of Huamanga and, in the second case, the Sur-Andino Church. Both were attempts to produce change in the most impoverished, isolated regions of the country. The two cases, however, differ on the crucial issue of the means through which they aimed to attain their goals.
We also try to show that although the aggression came from Sendero, there was another side to the conflict, the hostility from security forces and regional entrenched interests which preconditioned the attacks.
We have included detailed accounts of the antecedents, attacks and aftermaths because news information at the time was scarce and frequently incorrect. At time, Lima media may intentionally distorted reports for political purposes or simply ignore them. These accounts frequently end up incorporated into general evaluations, especially when analysts fail to filter the raw information.
We feel that those concerned about political violence should not see it as an abstract phenomenon. Death and destruction affect concrete communities, institutions and individuals. The different manners of responding to the crisis are also telling of methodology and institutional nature of the participants.
However, we should be careful of seeking overly sophisticated explanations for Sendero or the military's aggressions. Some of the fine points of this analysis may be mere coincidence or superficial features. The risk is that GSO staff, donor agencies and others may use this analysis as a means of arguing that Sendero will never attack them. As stated elsewhere, Sendero needs little justification to strike at outsiders or power figures when it claims its preeminence in a zone.
The experimental station at Allpachaka was the first case in which Sendero took reprisals against a center devoted to agricultural investigation and extension work. It was also part of the National University of San Cristobal of Huamanga, closely linked to the founding and evolution of Sendero Luminoso. Since then, Sendero has attacked other university research centers: the Chuquibambilla extension center in Melgar province, Puno and the La Raya stations (belonging to the universities of San Marcos and Altiplano-Puno), Secuani province (Cusco), the San Marcos tropical research facilities in Pucallpa (Ucayalí) and the International Potato Center's installations in Huancayo (Junín). Sendero has also hit at other research centers associated with universities in Lima.
As a prominent Peruvian social scientist who knew Guzmán and his respect of higher learning in the 1960s asked why an insurgent group should try to destroy a pool of valuable information, part of universal knowledge that does not have political colors? Why should its actions also slaughter "capitalist cows," destroy seedbanks and burn down schools built over decades of work on the wind-swept plateau of Allpachaka and other remote zones?
This attack baffled many and led a foreign analyst to write: "Ironically, the University of Huamanga's experimental farm has a good record for orienting its research towards the needs of the local peasantry and was by no means working solely to the benefit of medium-scale landlords, as happens with other universities in Peru." (Taylor 1983, 21) However, there were elements in the Allpachaka program and the broader context which allow us to understand the incident more adequately.
The National University of San Cristobal of Huamanga set up the Allpachaka agricultural center in 1965. More than 20 hacienda owners offered their estates to the university in hopes of avoiding being affected by the 1964 Agrarian Reform. (Díaz Martínez, 1985, 35) For decades, the Ayacucho countryside had been in decline, with migration and falling productivity as a constant. The experimental station was meant to inject agricultural research new technologies and forms of application and peasant extension into this backward environment. Assistance and funding came from the Swiss Technical Cooperation, the World University Service, the Dutch government, the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Institute of Andean Crops.
The experimental farm lies 72 kilometers south of the city of Ayacucho, at an altitude of 3,580-4,200 meters above sea level. It has 1,588 hectares of land. Research covered studies of soil, pastures and livestock, Andean crops (potatoes, mashua, oca and olluco) and seed banks. The university had a second experimental farm in Huayapampa, a few kilometers outside of the town. A third center, proposed for the jungle foothills of the Apurimac river valley, never got past the planning phase. (UNSCH 1977, 94-8) The idea was to give students, professors and investigators practical experience and research opportunities in the three ecological zones of Ayacucho -- the puna, the Quechua valley bottoms and the jungle valley. Conceptually, this program complemented with the university's mandate to turn out "rural engineers" and other professionals who would have the necessary skills to aid in the transition from a rural backwater to a modern, progressive society.
The agricultural research and extension program was the brainchild of the rector, Efrain Morote Best, one of the individuals who shaped the university. He came to represent the cosmopolitan, educated provincial elite in the university and the community, linked up with Lima intellectual circuits. He found himself pitted against the other leading figure on campus and in town, Abimael Guzmán. He represented a more political line of thinking, strongly influenced by the Maoism in vogue in university circles at the time. This feud would determine public discussion and the alliances of power which revolved around the university and its outreach efforts for the next two decades. It also marked the political birthright of the Allpachaka project -- it was the child of the anti-Guzmán block. After Morote Best left the rectorship in 1968, the university administration fell into Guzmán's control. Between 1970 and 1975, this rivalry, though veiled behind other issues, came to a head. The dispute was mainly about of the Guzmán clique's practices in controlling university administration, but had other ramifications. While anti-Guzmán allies criticized hiring practices and the allotting of the cafeteria and housing quotas according to party allegiance, the Senderista faction counterattacked by criticizing the Allpachaka program.
The Guzmán faction's criticisms were: that Allpachaka was not functioning as an educational center because students visited the center briefly and did not get involved in concrete activities; it was not making serious effort to spread knowledge and research among the surrounding communities; the peasants did not accept the research and technical proposals in their farming practices. Antonio Díaz Martínez (1985, 37), an agronomist and leading spokesperson for the faction, charged that Allpachaka was following the path of the Prussian Junker class towards capitalism and an enclave of imperialism in the Andes.
Díaz Martínez made a counterproposal for developing Allpachaka. It called for a collective management of the workers' holdings, including 10 hectares of collectively farmed fields, unified communal herds and a model village, emphasizing the ayni and minka Andean communal work systems (Díaz Martínez 1985, 205-8). Although the proposal manifested a concern for the wellbeing of the workers and surrounding communities, it did not go beyond paternalism and an idealized concept of the Ayacucho campesino community.
In response to some of the criticism, the University under a new administration without participation of the Guzmán faction set up a Centro de Capacitación Campesina (Peasant Training Center, CCC) in 1975. The program marked a new tack for standard university practices and a reassessment of popular education and rural development programs in the region. From 1977 to 1982, with the assistance of two Dutch development advisors, the CCC worked with peasant communities in the Pampas river valley and the high pasturelands above it. Sendero cited the presence of the two Dutch advisors as additional proof of the capitalist and imperialist penetration hidden in the Allpachaka program.
The presence of Allpachaka experimental station had consequences which went beyond its mandate of agricultural research and extension. The university purchased the Allpachaka hacienda from the Capeletti family. With the land, the university also inherited 16 feudatarios (sharecroppers) and their families. They lived on the hacienda, working the land in exchange for small individual plots. Instead of expelling the serfs from the land, the university placed them on its payrolls as workers. Eventually, the former serfs joined the university union and received other privileges, like guaranteed employment or studies for their children in the university.
The university provided other improvements. A bilingual school started functioning on the experimental farm, first for the primary grades and, later, incorporating secondary grades. It had four full-time teachers supplied by the university. The university also set up a medical post with a health promoter, nurse and visiting doctor. These services were also available to the surrounding communities. In comparison, the CCC staff surveyed 16 peasant communities in the Pampas river valley and found that 14 had primary schools, two sanitary posts, one potable water, five road access. None of the communities had sewage disposal, electricity or secondary schools (Gianotten and others 1987, 216).
The workers maintained their right to cultivate their individual plots of land with the advantage of improved seeds, fertilizers, herbicides and farm equipment supplied by the university. They also grazed their livestock on the station land. The peasant communities around Allpachaka were moving away from the traditional communal system of cultivation and rotation of the land. This process, called parcelization, means the breaking up of land into individual holdings and a stronger dependency on urban markets. The Allpachaka workers began buying land around the station.
These advantages soon began to differentiate the former serfs from the surrounding peasant communities. By 1970, a Sunday market functioned at Allpachaka. The workers were the merchants, buying the local produce and selling urban consumer goods to the peasants, serving as the intermediaries between the countryside and the Huamanga market. By the late 1970s, the Allpachaka workers had incomes which averaged six to seven times more than peasants from the surrounding communities. They started buying up land outside the experimental farm. They sought and received positions of prestige in the religious processions and other festivities which play an important role in Andean culture. The young women of neighboring communities aspired to marry one of the Allpachaka sons.
Finally, the university workers began to press the administration to help lobby for Allpachaka to achieve the status of district and have a police post opened there. The promotion of a hamlet or town to district has been a traditional means of "declaring independence" and strengthening direct ties to the provincial or department capital (Favre 1987, 26-27). There was also a strong resistance to the police presence in the Pampas River valley (Degregori 1986, 42) so there was a major change in attitude on the part of the Allpachaka workers to request a police post. We cannot not attribute all these changes exclusively to the University's program. Similar changes occurred in other areas of Huamanga province, but Allpachaka did accelerate them.
Contrary to what Díaz Martínez criticized in the late 1960s, the former feudatrarios turned out to be strongly favored by the project. As employees-landowners-merchants, they gradually rose above the stature of Ayacucho campesinos. There was actually little that the university could do to stop this process of differentiate, once started. The employees and workers union would have protested if the university decided to discriminate against the Allpachaka workers.
Little of the agricultural research found its way back to the countryside. Teachers and investigators found it hard to translate their studies into effective programs for the peasants. Allpachaka always had a vertical structure and the surrounding communities were always the least benefited by its programs. At most, the university hired local campesinos as extra help (peones) when needed.
The Centro de Capacitación Campesina (CCC) took a different approach and began to strike differences with the experimental station itself. For the first three years, the CCC continued operating a campesino school in Allpachaka where community leaders came for courses. Classes were examples of abstract learning in language which was over the heads of the peasants and removed from their real-life experiences. The CCC staffers soon found that communities did not send their leaders to the courses. Instead, the students were young people, easily spared from field work, who did not have the communal standing to pass on their learning experience to the rest of the community.
The staff gradually placed more emphasis on anthropological and agrarian studies of communal systems so the extension work could begin from the campesinos' own level. After 1979, the center actively sought direct contact with the communities and helped plan, finance and carry out small rural development projects in Pampas river valley. After 1980, Allpachaka no longer served as the campesino school and remained a supply depot. Eventually, the CCC program aimed to bring together the individual communities into a single peasant federation to address the social and economic problems of their region.
Sendero always had a position of sharp criticism against the centers and international financial support in Ayacucho. Foreign investigators and development staff may have had good intentions, but their reports and articles ended up published abroad to form a pool of intelligence against the revolution brewing in the Andean hinterland. Once guerrilla activities started, there was also a serious concern on Sendero's part that the field trips and encounters with the campesinos would lead to intelligence leaks to security forces. The small works carried out by the centers were "detouring the people from revolution and delaying its ignition," deceiving them into thinking that the works would contribute to their wellbeing. The head of the Allpachaka bilingual school was Sendero's pointman in the zone and actively intervened to sabotage the CCC's efforts to relaunch the center's extension work. Sendero was, however, never aware of the CCC proposal of bringing the communities together in an intra-communal organization, staff workers say. In fact, the CCC never suffered an attack from Sendero during this opening phase, mainly because there was nothing physical to hit at. All the small-scale infrastructure was absorbed into the campesino communities.
In May, 1980, Sendero launched its armed insurrection and gradually built up momentum. Through small, carefully planned actions, Sendero was sweeping the countryside clear of obstacles. (Gorriti 1990)
On August 3, 1982, a Senderista column appeared at Allpachaka. It rounded up the neighboring comuneros and forced them loot and burn the center (DESCO, 85-6). In a conspicuous deviation from Andean respect for livestock, the attackers slaughtered four Brown Swiss breeding bulls and 18 dairy cows, by plunging a knife into the base of the skull and the thorax repeatedly. However, when they started killing the animals, campesino women threw their arms around the cows and asked why they did not kill them too. The guerrillas distributed the remaining livestock among the peasants, who saw themselves as taking custody to return them to the university. However, when police arrived later and started searching the neighboring communities, they arrested those campesinos who had possession of livestock and took them to Lima. The University had to intercede to get them out of jail.
The guerrillas dynamited and burned the installations, burning documents and research archives. They burned two tractors and destroyed seed banks, wiping out 2,000 samples accumulated over 16 years of research. The attack also wiped out installations for cheese and wine making. Damages were roughly $2.2 million (Taylor 1983, 21).
The news of the attack against Allpachaka stirred up an uproar in Huamanga. The university community thought that Sendero would never dare to attack it because the party had always defended the democratic space within the university. It was the forger of revolutionaries. The buzz in town was that "Sendero has really botch it this time." The university organized a caravan of buses, trucks and other vehicles, loaded with students professors and workers to visit the farm. The university rector, agronomist Enrique Moya who had been crucial in starting the CCC program, proposed to reconstruct Allpachaka, clean up the damage and put in back in operation. For the first time, Sendero broke its vowed silence and stopped the vehicles to explain why it had destroyed the center. Three armed cadres stopped the buses on the way to Allpachaka and informed the Huamanga students that the university could continue with its work at Allpachaka but it would have to "change its ways." They gave three month's time to produce results.
Within weeks of the incident, however, public opinion in Huamanga shifted from rejection to justification of the attack. Sendero and its sympathizers cited the social changes brought about by the program's existence, how the cheese and wine production ended up on the tables of the town middle class and the absence of effective results in the research. Sendero was also reaching its peak in popular support during the later half of 1982, marked by the massive turnout for the funeral of the girl guerrilla commander, Edith Lagos.
Meanwhile, Sendero was taking action in the southern Ayacucho provinces. Shortly after the attack, 2,000 peasants from communities throughout the Pampas river valley came to Allpachaka. With 100 yoke of oxen, the campesinos plowed and planted the fields communally. The armed conflict intensified with the intervention of the army a few months later. The communities never harvested the crops. Sendero also brought 200 head of sheep liberated from neighboring Huancasancos and distributed them among the Rio Pampas communities. The high point was a feast in which the guerrillas slaughtered six bulls and distributed the meat equitably to every man, woman and child. "They announced that they had established the New State of Peru which would develop so campesinos would be self-sufficient," writes Billie Jean Isbell, an anthropologist who reconstructed the events from conversations with peasants several years later. They also distributed red wine brought from the coast (or more likely, taken from Allpachaka's warehouses since the Huayapampa experimental station's vineyards used Allpachaka to age wine). (Isbell 1988: 10)
Although Senderistas condemned capitalist encroachment through the Allpachaka experimental station and the CCC efforts, it proved less capable of developing a viable alternative for the local communities. Isbell pointed out that the cadres completely misinterpreted the Andean agrarian system, trying to force a collective cultivation on the peasants in Chuschi. "...(The) organizers of the insurgency had identified the appropriate conflicts and stereotypical enemies to target in order to engender peasant support. But they failed when they tried to impose an idealized view of the maiety system that had no bases in local reality. They were as ill-informed as Velasco's agrarian reform planners." (Isbell 1988, 11)
Ayacucho promotion workers also report that Sendero engaged in similar experiments in large-scale communal agricultural efforts in northern part of Ayacucho, around Huanta.
On November 16, a Sendero column returned and destroyed what remained of the installations, including the bilingual school which they had spared in the first attack because of the pleading and weeping of women and children. This second time, the neighboring communities were wary about getting involved and Sendero was distrustful of the communities. Complete destruction and slaughter was the command. To reinforce its presence, Sendero brought in campesinos from communities as far away as Sarhua and Quispillacta, which meant walking for two or three days.
This was part of Sendero's strategy to seal off the countryside from outside influence, to increase pressure on Huamanga and other urban holdouts and also to provoke a stronger reaction from the Lima government.
One interpretation for Allpachaka attack is that the university ran it as a "profit center" for university finances and it had little direct, beneficial effect for the surrounding communities. The administrator of the unit was appointed by the accounting department, to whom he had to answer for all his decisions, and not to the agronomy program. The center aided "pure research," but did not have much bearing on the academic program or extension work among the communities. The campesinos did not benefit from the breeding program because few of them could afford to buy a Brown Swiss. Only in 1989 did the agriculture program set up research for improving the breeding of the native cattle stock.
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Other agronomists think that Sendero struck at Allpachaka simply because it represented a real alternative for regional development. It was, however, more a symbol of a kind of development which university professors and the Huamanga middle class wanted for the region, one that would be driven by technology, university-educated expertise and government funding. A collateral effect of the Allpachaka attack was that all the small landholders left the region, mainly concentrated in Andahualyas province (Apurimac). These were the main beneficiaries of extension work, improving potato yields and cattle fattening.
The real reasons for the attack were two-fold. The strategic military value of Allpachaka made Sendero Luminoso want to clear out the zone of outside influence. Sendero Luminoso was playing off 10 years of ground work in the countryside. Its obsessive concentration on military aspects made them unwilling to permit other players in the game. Sendero had also entered into a phase in which it wanted to escalate the conflict, drawing in the armed forces. (Gorriti 1990, 278-283)
The attack also delivered a political message to the university in Huamanga -- for those who did not have the resolve or the conviction to set out on Sendero's revolution. The nucleus of a political option that centered on Moya as rector and encompassed Izquierda Unida, independents and a technical-productive option found itself blocked and demoralized from developing a coherent response to the Senderista insurgency. Despite having won the administrative skirmishing for control of the university, Sendero laid out claims on spheres of activities and vetted others' presence.
The Allpachaka incident is indicative of other factors. Development work, especially the more traditional approaches involving straight-forward transfers of technology and investigation, opens up local divisions. Frequently, the pure research seems more valuable to international interests than to local peasants. Research was more successful in establishing the university and its professors' reputation nationally and abroad than in yielding results for the campesino communities. At the same time, the cash flow resulting from research (hired labor, services and other payments) had an impact on the local impoverished economy.
In 20 years, the university failed to breed a regional development program. Despite concerted efforts to adequate technology to local conditions (cattle breeding, pasturelands and native crops), the university had serious problems in making these findings available to communities. There was no matching up between a technical proposal and the communities. Neither the CCC, the university or the other centers of Ayacucho (much less the State) ever got around to proposing a development strategy for the region.
Once under direct military command as of January, 1983, the GSOs' reaction was to pull back their presence to areas within the province of Huamanga. Most of them pulled back to areas to which Sendero did not assign an operation priority. Second, the emphasis shifted to technical programs and away from organizing and leadership building. Compared to other regions, like Cusco, Puno or Piura, GSOs were recent arrivals in Ayacucho. Centers did not start programs until the late 1970s when Sendero had already laid the groundwork for insurrection. Although some government and university program had brought some innovations, they were limited in scope.
On the new, reduced scale, GSOs did not seem to have a serious problem in the countryside among their local partners. In fact, the pull-back corrected a dispersion of efforts in several centers, which tried to cover immense territories. The problem was getting there and maintaining an urban base of operations, which could be targets of sabotage or bombings. All the major centers (CEDAP, TADEPA, IER Arguedas) received threats because they represent a left wing option in municipal or regional government. The centers and individual staff members also take a role in the popular movement in Huamanga, especially the Federación Agraria Departamental de Ayacucho (FADA), affiliated to the Confederación Nacional Agraria.
One fatal consequence of the retreat was the abandoning of the organizing and promotional work in the Apurimac valley where there was the germ of a modern, export-oriented economy and new peasant organizations. Sendero and, later, the military's priorities precluded any outside presence in the zone.
The one exception to the retreat was the CCC. It maintained a presence on the northern slopes of the Pampas river valley. It escaped reprisals because the institution received oversight from the university and because most staffers were local people. The other GSOs also have foreign financing and superior pay scales while the CCC works with university-level salaries. One of the drawbacks of the CCC's efforts is that its staff did not have a regional or national vision and ended up unaware of the worsening conditions and the worsening conditions.
The CCC accepted the "methodological challenge" of continuing its work in the Pampas river basin. They were still stuck in the question of how to keep a presence in the communities, when to hold courses, when and how to provide inputs and other resources to the communities. Yet the most striking conclusion from this center's work is its capacity to mold itself to the potential of its local partners, accepting the methods and procedures that expose the communities to the least risk.
However, centers were slow to realize both the problems and the potential of Ayacucho campesinos communities. A large part of the Ayacucho elite in the university and centers underestimated the capacity of campesino communities to resist the onslaught of violence. Not until after 1985 did most centers and investigators wake up to the resilience in campesino communities. Most centers did not realize there were other needs arising in those circumstances. The war was leading to a recomposition of the family productive unit because of the loss of male members, decapitalization and loss of work inputs and tools, migratory processes, lack of communication with the interior.
Amazingly, the campesino communities were prepared to accept the risks of joining rural development programs. During the 1986-1988, a window of opportunity for breaking the spiral of violence, peasants lined up to receive credits from the Agrarian Bank and drive off with their tractors. In mid-1989, campesinos appeared at the doorsteps of GSOs with assembly petitions to restart contacts for development programs.
However, there can be a self-deluding component in centers' efforts to continue with their work, despite the odds against them. A manifestation of this can be found in a 300-page published text of a conference on development projects in Ayacucho which took place in October, 1987 (PRATEC 1988). Admittedly a technical event, strongly influenced by a group of experts rescuing and systematizing native Andean agricultural methods, there was only a minimal discussion of how eight years of violence has had an impact on the local partners, institutions and work methods. The impression is that the violence is a battle between Sendero and the Lima government and has little to do with those who have not taken sides.
In 1988, ten Ayacucho centers set up a coordinating body, the Inter-Institutional Committee for Regional Development of Ayacucho (CIDRA) to try to keep from stepping on each others' toes and to work with government institutions. This attempt to centralize coordination and information came surprisingly late in the process to alter the dynamics of violence.
When the national GSOs finally woke up to the problem that violence was going to be a constant ingredient in their fieldwork in 1989, a first reaction was to turn to Ayacucho as a case which could show how to continue with development under dire circumstances. They did not find an environment typical of the rest of the country. The nine years of conflict in Ayacucho have closed down most broad social spaces where centers can exercise an influence and civilian reserves were depleted. Violence, assassinations and threats have annulled municipal government and communal arenas.
The Ayacucho GSOs had several advantages for keeping a foot in the countryside. There has been a ready supply of agronomists, anthropologists and other professionals graduated from the University of Huamanga. The University was the founding stone of regional awareness. The staff members have close relationships with the community, through a series of mechanisms which are extremely important in the Sierra. These include kinship, compaternity, blood brothers.
During the period starting in October, 1989 through the municipal and national election campaigns, Sendero began a phase of intense harassment of all possible nuclei of organization. The military reciprocated, especially after general elections. The city lost a massive block of its middle and professional classes, which fled to Lima. The countryside deteriorated into a condition of upheaval and mayhem, with vigilante groups pillaging neighboring communities. Peasants displaced from the countryside flooded the already overstretched urban services. The GSOs finally had to withdraw from the countryside, using the opportunity to review and critique their fieldwork and programs. In September, 1989, CEDEP had its staff workers detained by a Senderista column and its vehicle destroyed, as a warning to stay out of the countryside during the municipal election period.
Despite these adversities and handicaps, 17 centers remained in Ayacucho in mid-1990 and have gained a place alongside the University as pillars of the regional society. The centers had shown a remarkable perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. They remain a valuable resource in rebuilding a ravaged community, both as a pool of trained and experience staff and as a clearinghouse of contacts with rural communities. This investigation may criticize aspects of their operations and methods, but it cannot minimize their dedication and courage.
There were obvious structural and global problems in confronting the problems facing Ayacucho and rural development. The university had to defend itself from the distrust and aggressions from the Lima government. Despite the rising attention on the plight of Ayacucho, there was no concerted effort on the part of the Lima government or other civilian institutions to reinforce local efforts. When half-hearted efforts to reverse the situation began to falter, the national forces tried to ignore the signs of failure. A national response to a regional problem is the opportunity to draw several steps back from the issues and examine them more dispassionately, to draw on external resources and perspectives to get a fresh grasp of the crucial factors.
Finally, the introduction of a political-military command in the Ayacucho emergency zone meant that the university and the community had to grapple with a counterpart which defied the traditional means of negotiations. The political-military command was a wild card in the intricate relationships of a closed provincial society. Each year was a Russian roulette on what type of commander the government would appoint. For all purposes, the commander was a temporal prince in a realm under siege by dialectic barbarians. Each regent was supremely ignorant about how Huamanga society worked, much less the rural communities of Ayacucho.