The Environmental Making of Sendero Luminoso: Drought, Famine, and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes, 1983–1986

Javier Puente, Smith College

Research Grant, 2017

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My original research project aimed to explore the intersection of two major events in Peru’s recent history. On the one hand, the militarization of the Internal Armed Conflict, a sociopolitical conflagration between the state and Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist terrorist organization.

On the other hand, the impact of the 1982–1983 El Niño, and the subsequent drought that engulfed the Andean region. As seasons of harvest failures and political violence collided and made a socioenvironmental catastrophe, thousands of villagers came to experience the intertwined wrath of nature and the militarization of their everyday lives. The enduring disenfranchisement and displacement of Andean livelihoods became the unequivocal outcomes of this process. 

As seasons of harvest failures and political violence collided and made a socioenvironmental catastrophe, thousands of villagers came to experience the intertwined wrath of nature and the militarization of their everyday lives.

During the course of my research, I visited archives and localities in Ayacucho and Puno, focal regions of the conflict, and major document repositories in Lima. Throughout six months of ethnographic and archival work, I was able to document quantitatively and qualitatively the merged impact of this socioenvironmental catastrophe.

Quantitatively, I collected statistical information about the harvest failures of the 1983–1986 period and their impact on the domestic, local, regional, and national economies. Qualitatively, I compiled testimonies—archivally and ethnographically—about the experience of rural villagers and the collapse of their agrarian livelihoods amid violence, drought, and floods. 

Since receiving a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar grant, I have been able to publish some partial results of this project in the form of research articles in both peer-review journals and public outlets. In particular, I coordinated the publication of a special issue of Global Environment on “The Environmental and Ecological Impact of Guerrilla and Irregular Warfare.” In that issue, I published the introduction to the dossier, titled “Irregular Conflicts, Disrupted Ecologies: The Environmental Impacts of Unconventional Warfare in the Global South,” as well as an article titled “The Enduring Climate of Conflict: Drought, Impoverishment, and the Long Aftermath of Civil War in Peru.”

Additionally, in collaboration with Adrián Lerner, I co-organized a dossier for Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana on “Modelando Regiones Naturales: Capitalismno, Medio Ambiente y la Geografîa del Perú Pos-Colonial,” co-authoring an introduction with the same title. 

Bibliography

1. Javier Puente. The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.