Broken Paths: Elites, Ethnicity, and Modernization in Ayacucho, Peru, 1924–69

Located in the heart of Peru's south-central Andes, Ayacucho City is known worldwide as the birthplace of the Shining Path terrorist movement. This paper offers a better understanding of the historical roots and dimensions of this insurgency by examining the effects of state modernization projects on the city between the 1920s and 1960s. Unlike most Latin American experiences of guerrilla warfare, Ayacucho offers a case in which modernization did not come through economic transformations such as the expansion of agrarian capitalism or the dispossession of peasant land. Rather, it came through “intellectual modernization,” expressed above all in the reopening of the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in 1959. Drawing from a range of written and ethnographic sources, this paper explores the impact that the university and previous "development" projects had on elite political consciousness and practices in this Andean city in the decades leading up to the Shining Path insurgency. As frequently discussed in the Peruvian social sciences, the failure of several state-sponsored modernization projects—especially in higher education—was at the root of the discontent that made the insurgents’ discourse more appealing to the local populace. Building on these studies, I argue that  downfall of Ayacucho's ruling class—and the emergence of new urban actors—left the region bereft of influential brokers who could channel the region's political demands to the central state.