“Now Peru is Mine!” The Revolutionary Life of Ayacucho's Manuel Llamocca Mitma

“Now Peru is Mine!”: The Revolutionary Life of Ayacucho’s Manuel Llamocca Mitma

Conscripted into the Peruvian military in the early 1940s, Manuel Llamocca Mitma thought to himself, “Now, Peru is mine!” This young, indigenous man from rural Ayacucho spent the next five decades of his life working to bring revolutionary transformation to his community and to his country. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Llamocca organized and led peasant land recuperation efforts in Ayacucho’s Cangallo province. Llamocca ran as a congressional candidate in the 1962 elections, representing the revolutionary Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN). By 1963, he had become secretary general of the Confederación de Campesinos Peruanos (CCP).  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Cangallo officials dedicated much paper to Llamocca Mitma, warning that he was a “communist leader” and the “principal organizer of the Indian masses.” Those characterizations were not wholly unfounded: during the late 1960s, Llamocca belonged to the Maoist PCP-Bandera Roja, and he later became a prominent member of the Maoist Shining Path party. Llamocca Mitma, however, ultimately rejected that organization because of the extreme violence of its armed struggle.

            This paper will argue that Llamocca Mitma’s political trajectory provides a unique but nonetheless crucial lens for interpreting Ayacucho’s vibrant twentieth-century history. As a key political actor in the department that both generated the Shining Path party and suffered the most war deaths, Llamocca Mitma’s life can help scholars understand the course and contours of Ayacuchan political struggles from the 1940s to the 1990s. Based on archival evidence from both regional and national archives, periodical literature housed in Peru’s national library, and Llamocca Mitma’s interview testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this paper will highlight the centrality of a political activist essentially ignored in the scholarly literature to this point.