Generals, Guerrillas, Drugs, and Third World War–Making
For much of the past fifty years a sizable share of the world was locked in a geopolitical battle that pitted the United States and its clients against the Soviet Union and its satellites. The most violent events in this political battle often were set in the developing world, where the superpowers spent billions of dollars on aid and armaments to support governments or to back opposing or insurgent forces (Nietschmann and LeBon 1987). Countries in which the superpowers supported opposing groups included but were hardly limited to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba, Korea, and Afghanistan. In many an instance, internal policies of the governments or revolutionary groups relating to such matters as human rights or education and to the welfare of their citizens factored not at all into their receiving or being denied support. The defining factor was alignment: the stance of a movement or government toward the United States or the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the two primary sources of funding and weaponry vanished, leaving many revolutionary groups and governments without a powerful sponsor. As the familiar glow of Soviet influence faded from the international landscape, many a former political proxy was forced to alter strategies and policies, the better to adjust to the "new world order." No longer could a country claim to be anticapitalist and routinely receive Soviet aid, as Cuba learned to its considerable dismay and fiduciary disarray. Nor did claiming to be anticommunist guarantee a deluge of financial, political, and military support from the United States. Numerous civil wars thus came to an end, elections were held in many countries, and former hard-line Soviet allies reached out with grasping hands to the West for recognition and financial support. Nicaragua, Vietnam, and numerous Eastern European states come to mind as examples. However, termination of the cold war did not end all of the military ventures in the developing world. Conflicts continue in countries such as Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the Congo; and low-intensity, sporadic outbreaks of political violence persist in such sites as Myanmar, Lebanon, and Mexico. Without the support of superpowers, participants in military conflicts have been forced to seek financial aid from alternative sources. In this note I discuss the implications of a particularly insidious funding source: the production and export of illegal narcotics. [1] What are known in Spanish as narcotraficantes have become a new financial "superpower" employed to prop up--or, in some cases, becoming--unsavory governments and revolutionary groups. A raffish relationship has been consummated, and the offspring threatens to be of insalubrious character and demeanor. A SETTING FOR SUBVERSION Current conflicts in Colombia and Myanmar demonstrate the relationship between narcotics production and revolutionary movements or rogue governments. The connection between them is anything but recent: Historical examples include British control of and profit from opium sales in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's covert support of opium production among ethnic-minority hill tribes in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and Nicaraguan Contra leaders profiting from cocaine shipments through their territory in the 1980s (McCoy 1991; Cox 1996). For the most part, the geographical and financial scope is larger than it was in the past. Revolutionary movements and governments control vast amounts of territory and command thousands of combatants, and all derive a majority of their financing--and power--from the production of narcotics (Robinson 1998; McCoy 1999). Unlike past examples, some current political groups and governments are completely dependent on narcotrafficking to further their agendas. Also, with the increasing ease of travel to and from once-remote lands, drug smugglers can send greater quantities of their product almost directly to the streets of the developed world. …
Geographical Dimensions of the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru
THE effective control of geographically based regions leading to the establishment of an insurgent state is an axiom of modern revolutionary movements. The creation of an insurgent state may be conceptualized as a three-stage military-political process, with each stage characterized by distinct territorial expressions (McColl 1969, 624; 1975, 303). The first stage, mobile warfare, is typified by the ephemeral nature of insurgent activities and the insurgents' tentative confrontation of state power. At this stage the insurgents have no fixed base or permanent territorial presence. Guerrilla warfare, the second stage, is marked by the insurgents' increasing ability to confront the state openly and by establishment of a core area which they control. In the later phases of this stage, additional insurgent core areas controlled by insurgents are established. The final stage is the creation of a full-fledged, territorial-based insurgent state. This stage is characterized militarily by the insurgents' ability to compete openly with the forces of the established state and administratively by imposing territorial units and structures of governance. In 1980 a Maoist faction of the Communist party in Peru, known as the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, initiated an armed insurgency against the Peruvian state. The effects of the Shining Path on the economic, social, and political life of Peru have been widespread. The strategy and tactics of the Shining Path have included important geographical elements in the movement's efforts to overthrow the successive democratic governments. This article identifies the territorial dimensions of the Shining Path insurgency and analyzes its progress toward the establishment of an insurgent state. Beginning in the mid-1960s the Shining Path established a vast network of supporters and sympathizers in the rural areas of the southern Andean departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac, primarily through control of the education faculty at the Universidad Nacional San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho (Degregori 1990). Control of faculty and curriculum provided adherents of the Shining Path with a mechanism for recruiting revolutionary cadres from the population of provincial youths who accounted for the majority of the students at the university. Many of those early revolutionary cadres completed their studies and became school teachers in the district capitals and hamlets of Ayacucho and Apurimac. They provided the Shining Path with invaluable opportunities, including the use of teaching positions to diffuse its revolutionary message, the establishment of a widespread network of adherents and sympathizers in the countryside, and the geographical basis for the creation of territorial strongholds and eventually of so-called liberated zones once the armed struggle was initiated. THE REGIONAL CORE During the late 1970s the Shining Path left the university in Ayacucho and relocated to relatively inaccessible areas of the countryside, where it created "popular schools," worked closely with peasants, and began forcibly to disperse the representatives of the state, local capitalists, and large landowners (Gorriti Ellenbogen 1990, 86). Several provinces in northern Ayacucho and the province of Andahuaylas in neighboring Apurimac formed the principal territorial focus of these activities. Securely established in these areas, the Shining Path initiated its armed conflict in Ayacucho in 1980. It followed a Maoist model that called for liberation of the countryside, an end to market-oriented agricultural production, and disarticulation of the capitalistic marketing system. Theoretically those policies would eventually cut off the supply of basic food commodities to cities, increase urban social disorder, and allow the Shining Path to encircle the principal urban areas, culminating in the downfall of the Peruvian state. The Shining Path pursued its three-stage strategy successfully during the early 1980s in Ayacucho and Apurimac. …
Taking the High Ground: Shining Path and the Andes
In November 1988, guerrilla units of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP-SL), better known as Shining Path (SL or Sendero), laid the final crossbeam in an Andes-spanning strategy. They knocked down a vital power line between Lima and the Mantaro hydroelectric plant in the Central Sierra. When the state electricity company moved to repair the downed pylons, Sendero quickly blasted others. SL also sabotaged the rail line between the mining center of Cerro de Pasco and Lima. Sendero columns moved viciously into the peasant communities and agrarian cooperatives in the countryside around Huancayo, the breadbasket of the national capital.1