Attacking Power in Peru: Blackouts, Technology, and Shining Path Violence

This paper explores the destruction of electrical towers and the accompanying blackouts that became a way of life in Peru during the Shining Path revolutionary movement
(1980-2000). The brutal Maoist insurgency, which began in the Andean highlands but soon migrated to the capital city of Lima, dynamited the electrical power delivery system to sow fear and chaos during its war against the bourgeois state. The first major attack on the electrical system in March 1982 initiated a new violent phase that shook coastal residents, who previously had watched the movement unfold far away in the sierra. This tactic was almost unimaginable. President Belaúnde Terry doubted that Peruvians had blown up the towers because those who “share our honorable nationality” could never have committed such an act. The costly attacks on hundreds of electrical towers into the early 1990s offer a rich opportunity for social and cultural research. First, this paper examines how the destruction of vulnerable electrical towers in the sierra altered the way capital residents imagined themselves and the Andean highlands. Did the blackouts, which underscored Lima’s reliance on sierran power sources, subvert or reinforce the capital’s economic and cultural hegemony? Second, this project explores how technology, especially at the moment of its failure, mediated how Peruvians experienced and confronted the country’s deep social and cultural fissures. A 1989 study concluded that the loss of washing machines, ovens, televisions, blenders, and traffic lights during blackouts generated not only individual but societal unease. Finally, this paper broadly contextualizes how the Peruvian experience illuminates attacks on electrical grids elsewhere in the world. Indeed, recent reports have signaled the vulnerability of the United States’ power grid to cyber attacks in the post-9/11 era.