Matthew Rothwell - Transpacific Revolutionaries - The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (2013, Routledge)

Transpacific Revolutionaries
This book shows how Maoism was globalized during the 1949–1976
period, highlighting the agency of both Latin American and Chinese actors.
While Maoism has long been known to have been influential in many social
movements and guerrilla groups in Latin America, author Matthew Roth-
well is the first to establish the way in which Latin American communists
domesticated Maoism to Latin American conditions and turned Maoism
into an influential political trend in many countries. By utilizing case studies
of the formation of Maoist guerrilla groups and political parties in Mexico,
Peru and Bolivia, the book shows how the movement of Chinese commu-
nist ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort
that involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the
People’s Republic of China. It represents a major contribution to three devel-
oping fields of historical inquiry: Latin America in the Cold War, the global
1960s, and Chinese Maoist foreign relations.
Matthew Rothwell is assistant professor of History at Texas Southern Univer-

sity in the United States.
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10 Transpacific Revolutionaries
The Chinese Revolution in Latin America
Matthew D. Rothwell
Transpacific Revolutionaries
The Chinese Revolution in Latin America
Matthew D. Rothwell
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rothwell, Matthew D.
Transpacific revolutionaries : the Chinese revolution in Latin America / by
Matthew D. Rothwell.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in modern history ; 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Latin America—Foreign relations—China—Case studies. 2. China—
Foreign relations—Latin America—Case studies. I. Title.
F1416.C6R68 2012
327.8051—dc23
2012029208
ISBN: 978-0-415-65617-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-07808-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Lina
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 China and Latin America 11
2 Mexico: The Wayward Disciples of Vicente Lombardo 28
3 Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism: The Chinese Revolution

and Peru’s Shining Path 48
4 Bolivia: Nationalists and Maoists Diverge 71
5 Conclusions 88
Notes 97
Bibliography 115
Index 125
Acknowledgments
I first became interested in Latin American Maoism when I stumbled upon it

in Mexico City in 1993. I was in Mexico visiting friends over winter break,
and we came upon a massive plantón (a sort of long-term, sit-in protest)
in support of Abimael Guzmán, the Peruvian Shining Path leader who had
been captured in 1992. Over the course of the next two years, substan-
tial portions of which were spent in the regions of Chiapas controlled by
the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), I met all variety of Latin
American and European leftists, and my curiosity about this Chinese ideo-
logical transplant to Latin America deepened. I have been aided by many
friends, colleagues and teachers during the almost twenty years since I first
became interested in Latin American Maoism. I cannot thank them all by
name, but I hope those who I don’t name know who they are and know that
they are appreciated.
Serious research on this project, initially as a PhD dissertation, began
under the guidance of Christopher Boyer and Bruce Calder in 2005. Chris
read innumerable drafts of the dissertation patiently and with a critical
eye, which has vastly improved the book and my own writing. Without
Chris’s mentorship, I suspect this book would not exist, and I am deeply
thankful for all he has done for me and for this project. Bruce has been
endlessly encouraging of my scholarship and convinced me to pursue a
PhD at a time when I had serious doubts about pursuing the life path that
I am on (and that has been so rewarding). Bruce’s support was a constant
and much appreciated part of my time in graduate school. James Searing,
Nils Jacobsen and Javier Villa Flores rounded out my dissertation commit-
tee and provided valuable feedback which I incorporated into the book.
I am indebted in large part to Laura Hostetler and Andrew Eisenberg for
my knowledge of Chinese history, which has been so important in writing
this book.
My research benefited from the aid and cooperation of many people in
the United States, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. In the United States, I would
particularly like to thank Vicki Cervantes. Vicki put me in touch with net-
works in Mexico and Bolivia and, in so doing, probably saved me months
of work. Joel Andreas gave me permission to look through the papers of
x Acknowledgments
his mother, Carol Andreas. During research trips to Denver and New York
City, I enjoyed the hospitality of Doug Vaughn and Monica and Paul Shay
respectively.
I conducted a large number of oral history interviews and informational
meetings with Latin Americans, Europeans, North Americans, Indians and
Filipinos who traveled to China or had knowledge of pro-Chinese political
activities that are not directly cited in the text. Several of those I interviewed
or met with requested anonymity for a variety of reasons. Among those I
can acknowledge publicly, I would like to thank Irving Zuckerman and Sid-
ney Gluck in the United States. Monica Shay (who traveled to China in the
1970s as Monica Newbold and asked that her interview be cited under that
name) from the United States and Tron Ogrim of Norway both gave fasci-
nating and helpful interviews before their untimely (and unrelated) deaths.
They were both friends of mine and are missed.
In Mexico, I would like to thank José David Quiñones, Yolanda Fernán-
dez, Alberto Híjar, Adolfo Mexiac, Andrea Gómez, Enrique Cisneros, Iseo
Noyola, José Narro, Manuel Rodríguez, Martín Rodríguez, Víctor Reyes,
Camilo and Simitrio Tzompazquelitl.
In Peru, I would like to thank Laura González and Laura Balbuena for
their hospitality. The food and conversation at the hostel they run is out-
standing. The staff of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission archive at
the Defensoría del Pueblo was always helpful. In particular, I have to thank
Ruth Borja and Renzo Aroni Sulca. The interviews I conducted with Zenón
Naveda and Oswaldo Reynoso were very important, and I am grateful for
their time. Many other people gave generously of their time to help me make
connections with sources and orient me on doing research in Peru. For help
in this regard, I want to thank Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Carlos Alberto
García, Ricardo Caro, Ponciano del Pino, Iván Hinojosa, Juan Luis Pérez
Coronado, José Coronel and Enrique González Carré. The various street
vendors and others who helped me track down old and current Sendero
documents cannot all be thanked by name (especially since many of them
carry this material under the counter), but they have my gratitude.
In Bolivia, my research was greatly facilitated by the generous and con-
stant aid of Iván Nogales, Oscar Vega, Ramiro Fernández and Luis Oporto.
Thanks also to Edgar Ramírez, Jorge Echazú, Hugo Borda, Félix Muruchi,
Diva Arratia, Víctor Reinaga, Emilse Escóbar, Oscar Zamora, Norma Bil-
bao, Jesús Taborga and Eduardo Ayllón.
Casey Harison, Tamara Hunt and Niharika Banerjea, colleagues of mine
during my time at the University of Southern Indiana, all gave me valuable
feedback on early drafts of some chapters. Eric Zolov read several chapter
drafts and my exchanges with him helped to concretize my thinking on some
key aspects of the book. Routledge’s three anonymous reviewers provided
very valuable feedback, for which I thank them.
Thanks to Roberto Márquez for permission to use his and David Arthur
McMurray’s translation of Nicolás Guillén’s “La canción del regreso.”
Acknowledgments xi
Research for this book was funded in part by grants from the University
of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Southern Indiana and the American
Historical Association.
Judith and Tom Dillon, my parents, have always supported my efforts
and are appreciated more than they realize. Pauline and Albert Gordon are
models of kindness and love that I strive to emulate. Above all, I thank my
wife, Lina, for her patience and sacrifice in helping to see me through with
this project.
Introduction
Is it clear to you,
the land of rice and of bamboo?
Isn’t it clear to you?
I have seen Peking:
Peking,
no mandarin
nor palanquin.
I have seen Shanghai:
I cry,
no more Yankees in Shanghai.
It’s awesome
how life’s begun to blossom.
It’s strange
how life’s begun to change.
Sing with me, brother,
and speak as I speak!
I cry,
no more Yankees in Shanghai.
Peking:
the coffin of the mandarin.
Run, behold it . . . you,
the land of rice and of bamboo!
—Nicolás Guillén, “Song of Return”1
Between 1949 and 1976, thousands of Latin Americans traveled to the

socialist People’s Republic of China. Many of these Latin Americans who
visited China were interested in adapting aspects of China’s policies to
Latin American conditions. Some, such as Mexico’s Vicente Lombardo
Toledano, were mainly interested in China’s potential to show how a
Third World country might break out of the dependent economic develop-
ment paradigm. Others, such as Peru’s Abimael Guzmán, hoped to learn
how to reproduce China’s experience of revolutionary warfare. At least
a thousand of these Latin American visitors were trained in politics and
military matters while in China. The efforts of these Latin Americans who
visited China to domesticate what they saw as the lessons of the Chinese
Revolution created a pro-Chinese political trend that played a substantial
role in Latin American social and guerrilla movements in the second half
of the twentieth century.
In Peru, at least 69,000 people died during the Shining Path insurgency,
which began in 1980. The Shining Path is known for carrying out ideologi-
cally driven actions that many people not well-versed in the Shining Path’s
worldview found incomprehensible. By understanding how Chinese ideas
influenced Shining Path members, we can better comprehend some of the
Shining Path’s more bizarre actions, such as hanging dead dogs from lamp-
posts in the streets of Peruvian cities. Understanding how the Shining Path
saw itself as applying Maoist ideology to Peru also helps us to understand the
decision-making dynamics behind the Shining Path’s destructive response to
flagging peasant support in the face of the dirty war waged by the Peruvian
government, a phenomenon that many observers have found bewildering.
A key part of understanding how the leaders of the Shining Path thought
about their own Maoism, and how they hoped to reshape Peru in a Maoist
mold, is understanding the experience of those leaders in China. Almost all
of the top Shining Path leadership spent considerable time in China, and
their efforts to imitate Chinese political forms they experienced firsthand in
China illustrate the importance of travel to China in the formation of the
Shining Path’s political vision.
Examining the influence of Chinese revolutionary ideas also sheds new
light on several recent episodes of Bolivian history. Some members of the
left-wing of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement government (MNR,
1952–1964) were interested in China as a model for economic policies
and political reforms that they hoped to pursue in Bolivia. And the Chi-
nese hoped that the Bolivian revolutionary nationalists might be the first
government in the western hemisphere to give diplomatic recognition to
the People’s Republic of China. While the pro-Chinese faction of the MNR
failed to redirect Bolivia’s economics and politics away from dependence on
the United States, the existence of a faction within the MNR that favored
Chinese-style policies complicates our understanding of the dynamics of
Revolutionary Nationalism in Bolivia.
Maoist ideas also played an influential role in the Bolivian miners’ move-
ment. In the middle of the twentieth century, Bolivia was dependent on
exporting tin. Bolivian miners’ political influence sometimes matched the
decisive role of their industry in the country’s economy, such as when they
insured the 1952 Revolutionary Nationalist revolution’s success. The mili-
tant mining center of Catavi was a hotbed of Maoist activity, “the proletar-
ian university” according to a former Maoist leader I interviewed.2 It was
here that Federico Escóbar Zapata, a popular leader of the miners, held the
founding congress of the pro-Chinese Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-
Introduction 3
Leninist) in 1965. Both Escóbar, the general secretary, and his deputy secre-
tary, Oscar Zamora, had already been to China.
In Mexico, Chinese ideas contributed to the eclectic and heady intellec-
tual mix that circulated in the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Chinese influence combined with the influence of the Cuban Revolution
to divide both the Communist Party and the adherents of Vicente Lom-
bardo’s brand of Marxism between those who hoped to continue trying to
pressure the government to adopt more socialistic policies and those who
hoped to overthrow the state with armed force. As the guerrilla experience
of Florencio Medrano demonstrates, the post-1960s guerrilla movements in
Mexico cannot be properly understood without coming to terms with earlier
efforts to bring Chinese ideas to Mexico.
While efforts to domesticate Chinese ideas to Latin America yielded
different results in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico, in each country the process
of transmission of these ideas was remarkably similar. Key individuals
traveled to China and upon their returns to Peru, Bolivia and Mexico dis-
seminated their understandings of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution
via party meetings and public forums, and in articles and books. Parties
and organized networks of activists worked hard to distribute propaganda
promoting Maoist revolutionary ideas, much of which was produced in
China. Thus, in each country considered here, the movement of Chinese
ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort that
involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the
People’s Republic of China.
THE ORGANIZED INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY

IDEAS: A NEW DIMENSION TO OUR UNDERSTANDING
OF LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL AND GUERRILLA
MOVEMENTS OF THE 1950S–1990S
In the past, scholars who investigated the influence of Maoism in Latin

America were more concerned with the international maneuvers of a Cold
War enemy of the United States than with Latin American social and political
movements per se. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a series of scholarly articles
and a single book were published that examined China’s attempts to spread
its influence in Latin America.3 These works on the Chinese influence in
Latin America reflected the Cold War focus on containing communism and
countering the threat of communist revolution. China was more the focus
of concern than Latin America, and so these works emphasized how China
was trying to spread its ideology in Latin America, neglecting the questions
of why or how Latin Americans might be interested in Chinese communism.
Indeed, with the rapprochement between China and the United States in the
early 1970s, this whole field of scholarship disappeared. The agency of Latin
Americans in the transfer of ideas was almost completely neglected.
The concerns that animate the current study—that is, the nature of the
transfer of ideas across the Global South and the role of Maoism within par-
ticular Latin American social contexts, were almost entirely absent from this
first generation of scholarship on the spread of Maoism to Latin America.
In contrast, I emphasize the Latin American agency in the transfer of Maoist
ideology. Although China was eager and willing to promote its revolution-
ary ideology among Latin Americans, there could be no question of those
ideas gaining any traction without an enthusiastic effort by Latin American
sympathizers. The Cold War–era scholarship on China and Latin America
did get most of its facts right most of the time, and for that I am grateful.
I am standing on the shoulders of those cold warriors when it comes to
the not very easy task of actually reconstructing key events and points of
contact in the process of the creation of Latin American Maoism. Most of
those events and points of contact were secret at the time and are still kept
secret today by China and most former participants. But the “what are those
nefarious Chinese doing now to undermine the U.S. sphere of influence in
Latin America” interpretive standpoint of those early cold warriors means
that their work does not tell us much of value about how Maoism played
out within particular Latin American societies.
For example, let’s examine a quote from the 1970 book Communist
China and Latin America, which illustrates the problems with a China-
centered viewpoint on the transfer of Maoism to Latin America: “The Chi-
nese have also attempted to expand their influence in Latin America through
the use of films. As early as March, 1959, they were showing Chinese films
in remote Bolivia, where they were seen by crowds in La Paz, Cochabamba,
and Catavi. Altogether they scheduled showings of the films in forty other
Bolivian cities, including Sucre and Santa Cruz.”4 While China no doubt
provided films free of charge to sympathetic Bolivians (for reasons and
through mechanisms that I will detail in later chapters), such a film series
could only have been organized by Bolivians who wanted to promote Chi-
nese ideas in Bolivia. The author ignores the agency of Bolivians in this
process, despite acknowledging that China did not have a single state repre-
sentative on the ground in Bolivia at the time (indeed, it seems that China’s
ability to organize the film series without having a representative on the
ground was taken by the author as evidence of the mysterious power of the
dangerous and crafty Chinese, rather than as evidence of Latin American
agency). Sadly, the above quote is representative of the approach of the
1960s and early 1970s literature on Chinese influence in Latin America. In
reality, the broad distribution of Chinese films in Bolivia demonstrated the
scope of pro-Chinese efforts by Bolivians rather than China’s ability to reach
into all parts of Bolivia.
As much as I would like to take full credit for the, in retrospect, rather
simple idea that it might be fruitful to examine the formation of Latin Amer-
ican Maoisms from a Latin American–centered perspective, I am heavily
indebted to two recent trends in the study of the globalized Cold War. The
Introduction 5
first of these trends emphasizes how a variety of actors outside of Moscow,
Washington, Beijing and other power centers shaped the history of the Cold
War.5 The second trend in recent global Cold War scholarship is to focus on
the ways in which the Cold War was meaningful to cultures and societies
far removed from global power centers.6 The expanded sense of agency that
historians have developed in regard to subordinate actors in the Cold War,
combined with an expanded sense of the ways in which the Cold War was
meaningful to different sets of people, helped me to recognize that the exist-
ing scholarship on the transfer of Chinese ideas to Latin America ignored
Latin American agency.
Thus, my concern is with how Latin Americans exercised agency in forg-
ing a Maoist identity and politics in the Latin American context. Along with
asking how China sought to influence Latin America, I am asking how and
why Latin Americans reached out to China. And then, how did the Latin
American intellectuals, activists and revolutionaries try to apply the con-
cepts that they studied in China to Latin America? My concern is with the
formation of Latin American Maoism as a continental social phenomenon,
rather than with the particular histories of particular Maoist organizations.
To that end, I examine the formation of Maoist organizations and move-
ments in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia as case studies in the creation of Latin
American Maoism, with an eye to what these cases can tell us about the
overall, continent-wide process through which Maoism was transplanted in
Latin America by Latin American travelers to China.
While a “chase for resemblances” between the three cases examined here
is central to the overall project, the “recognition and appreciation of dif-
ferences” is not being cast aside for the sake of the chase.7 Although Latin
Americans from different countries did meet and interact in China, the spe-
cific features of each party or organization’s own practice of Maoism was
decisively shaped by the particular national political conjuncture of each
case. Mexican, Peruvian and Bolivian Maoists had dramatically different
histories and fates. A significant part of the richness of the story told in this
book lies in the particular paths that the Mexicans, Peruvians and Bolivians
followed. But, despite the divergent directions each country’s Maoists went
once they had managed to transplant Maoism to Latin American soil, there
was a striking resemblance in the dynamics of the initial transfer of ideas
from China to Latin America. A common process yielded different results in
each particular national situation.
The emergence of Maoism on the Latin American scene coincided with,
and formed a part of, the emergence of a New Left that was “socially diverse,
ideologically complex, and engaged in countercultural politics.”8 Yet, the
Latin American New Left had important continuities of tradition and per-
sonnel with the pre-1960s Old Left. As Jeffrey Gould has demonstrated,
the “shared vision between young and old, worker and student, shaped the
utopian moments that punctuated” 1968, and there “is simply no way of
understanding the three largest movements” of the 1960s in Latin America
“without recognizing the active role of the Communists.”9 The Maoists
demonstrate this link between the New and the Old Lefts perhaps more
clearly than any other New Left political tendency. Many of the Maoist
leaders at the time of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s were respected,
if young, leaders within their respective communist parties or in the global
apparatus of the international communist movement. On the other hand,
Maoist parties gained their strength from the massive upsurge of rebellious
youth, particularly students, during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Maoists
were also firmly situated in the camp of those New Leftists who broke with
the Old Left by preparing for and engaging in armed struggle.
While each Latin American country had a different experience, there are
some common ways in which activists, politicians and intellectuals in each
country tried to domesticate Chinese ideas. Latin Americans involved in
domesticating Chinese ideas had a variety of responses to their experiences
in China. What they saw as valuable in China’s experience was strongly
influenced by what they wanted to accomplish in their own countries. In
general, a basic division can be drawn between those who were most inter-
ested in China as a model for economic development in a Third World coun-
try and those who saw China as offering a model experience for revolutionary
warfare. However, these were not hard and fast lines. Those who wanted to
reproduce the Chinese guerrilla experience also wanted to reproduce Chi-
na’s development experience. The converse was not usually the case, how-
ever. Those who mainly extolled China as demonstrating a path to economic
modernization independent of U.S. control or influence usually had little or
no interest in replicating China’s guerrilla experience. The particular forms
that these two general trends took comprise a substantial portion of the case
studies of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia in this book.
THE “COMMON WIND” BLOWING FROM BEIJING
Travel to China and personal contact with leaders such as Mao Zedong
or Zhou Enlai, however brief, conferred an authority that allowed Latin
American activists and intellectuals to plausibly challenge the dominant nar-
ratives about the Chinese Revolution and win adherents to Maoist efforts
in Latin America. The forms that Latin American Maoists used to commu-
nicate Maoist ideas to their home countries often depended on establishing
the authority of the author or speaker based on their firsthand experience
of Chinese socialism. The main ways in which Maoist ideas were spread in
Latin America included travel narratives, political forums, the distribution
of propaganda produced in China and through party meetings.
Travel narratives of trips to China, both as testimonials delivered in orga-
nized forums and in the form of books that recounted trips to China, played a
particularly important role in Latin American intellectuals’ attempts to coun-
ter the dominant narrative of communist China by utilizing the authority of
Introduction 7
their own experiences. In the following chapters, I examine travel books writ-
ten by figures as diverse as the Mexican Marxist leader Vicente Lombardo,
left MNRistas from Bolivia and an important ideologue of Peru’s Shining
Path. Despite their different political perspectives and social positions, each
of these authors used their travel books both as a way of establishing their
authority as interpreters of the Chinese revolutionary experience and as a
way of describing Chinese events or conditions that they hoped could be
reproduced in Latin America.
Likewise, the testimony of activists who visited China served as the cen-
terpiece of organized forums. In all three country case studies examined in
this book, pro-Chinese Latin Americans organized both public forums and
private small group meetings where China travelers related their experiences
in China as a way of building support for politics that Latin Americans
derived from Chinese experience. Indeed, as we see in the Mexico chap-
ter, rival interpretations of what appropriate lessons Latin Americans could
draw from China were sometimes highlighted in forums that competed with
each other by being held simultaneously. In that case, forums on Chinese
science and art dueled with forums on women’s participation in the armed
struggle to liberate China.
The organized distribution of Chinese and locally produced agitation
and propaganda materials also played an important role in the ideologi-
cal transfer. In all three cases examined herein, Latin American activists
used the Chinese magazines Peking Review and China Reconstructs (in
their Spanish-language editions) as well as Chinese pamphlets and books
to train themselves and others in Maoist ideology. While activists utilized
regular distribution outlets such as bookstores and newspaper stands for
these materials, they also set up portable literature tables on the streets and
handed out mimeographed flyers and locally produced agitational materi-
als. These street actions were often accompanied by oral political agitation.
Classrooms were another venue for ideological transfer in all three cases.
In Peru in particular, Maoist professors sometimes had great freedom to uti-
lize Chinese materials, such as Quotations from Chairman Mao (the “little
red book”), as required texts and to force students to learn Maoist ideas as
a course requirement. This was particularly the case at the National Univer-
sity of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, which served as an incuba-
tor for the Shining Path. Many Maoists held administrative positions there
and thus had tremendous freedom to shape the curriculum along Maoist
lines. In Mexico and Bolivia, the communication of Maoism in university
and secondary school classrooms took a more muted form, but teachers still
played an important role in communicating Maoism to students.
Many of the activities of Latin American Maoists were organized by pro-
Chinese communist parties and solidarity organizations. Ideological train-
ing in Maoism, and debate over which Chinese ideas were most relevant
to Latin Americans, were central elements of the internal life of these par-
ties and solidarity organizations. Recruits would commonly attend internal
party meetings and classes in order to be trained in Maoism. The more
advanced cadre would debate the finer points of Maoist doctrine and par-
ticipate in the process of deciding what was most relevant to their country’s
particular context. Thus, these parties and organizations were important
sites for the transfer of Maoism from China to Latin America, as well as
vehicles for propagating Maoist ideas more broadly in Latin American soci-
eties. Cadres who had traveled to China enjoyed greater authority in party
discussions over Maoist doctrine and played the leading roles in interpreting
the relevance of particular Maoist ideas for their own countries.
The importance of subterranean networks and personal authority based
on experience for the diffusion of Chinese ideas in Latin America is remark-
ably similar to what Julius Scott has called the “Common Wind.” Scott
has shown how expansive, subterranean, word-of-mouth networks of com-
munication played the key role in the movement of radical ideas through
the African diaspora during the period surrounding the Haitian Revolu-
tion. Other scholars have expanded Scott’s concept of the Common Wind to
encompass the movement of radical ideas among the Black diaspora up
through early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanism.10 In the case of the Haitian
Revolution, ideas were transmitted within the context of an already exist-
ing slave community. Later, Black sailors relied on established connections
within the African diaspora to spread Pan-African propaganda and organi-
zational ties. The personal experience of those who witnessed the revolu-
tion (or the revolutionary society) firsthand or had personal contact with a
prophetic leader such as Marcus Garvey enabled them to claim the authority
to put forward a counter-narrative against the dominant narrative and also
to claim privileged status in interpreting the meaning of the revolution for
their own society.
The example of Black sailors as vectors for radical ideas, particularly in
the case of spreading the influence of the Haitian Revolution, is helpful in
conceptualizing the role of travelers to China in the spread of Maoist ideol-
ogy. As Julius Scott has shown in the Haitian case, sailors and former slaves
who had seen the Haitian Revolution firsthand served as bearers of the idea
of the revolution, conveyors of its lessons and example. Later, “the ship
remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communica-
tion before the appearance of the long-playing record.”11 While the Chinese
Revolution took place in a world with much more advanced mass media
and international communication systems, these media were very limited
in what they could report on events happening inside China (indeed, even
many China scholars during these years faced great restrictions on their
ability to understand events taking place inside China12). Certainly, Latin
American, U.S. and European media outlets delivered little news that com-
munists would have found either trustworthy or inspiring.
The usefulness of the Common Wind model for understanding the com-
munication of Chinese ideas to Latin America lies in the key role of personal
experience and the communication of that experience to others in ways that
Introduction 9
circumvented standard mass media. The particular social mechanics of com-
munication differed, of course, from those of the African diaspora described
by Scott. Despite the fact that the transfer of Maoist ideology to Latin Amer-
ica took different forms in each of the case studies I examine, the dynam-
ics of the transfer are very similar. In each case, Latin Americans who had
traveled to China utilized the same methods for spreading Maoist ideology
in their home countries. These methods of transmitting ideology included
oral testimony in organized political forums and smaller group meetings;
memoirs of travel to China; the structures of political parties and solidar-
ity organizations; propaganda teams that passed out agitational political
literature in public places while conducting oral agitation; and classroom
instruction by pro-China professors.
The aptness and also the limitations of the parallel with Scott’s Common
Wind model are illustrated by comparing Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the
Shining Path, with Denmark Vesey.13 After spending some years of his youth
in Saint-Domingue, Vesey was inspired by the example of the Haitian Revo-
lution and relied on the networks of the African diaspora to keep abreast of
Haitian events. In 1822, Vesey organized a rebellion against slavery, which
was betrayed before it could be initiated. Guzmán was also animated by
a great social revolution and likewise sought to imitate it. Whereas Vesey
derived inspiration from Haiti and had a close knowledge of Haitian affairs
through study, lived experience and correspondence with comrades in Haiti,
Guzmán derived both inspiration and authority from his formal connections
with China and from attending training courses in China. His mastery of
Maoist texts gave him further authority that would not have been possible
in Vesey’s case due to the importance of ideology in the case of Maoism. The
differences between Vesey’s betrayed rebellion and the civil war that Peru
endured for over a decade are many and obvious. What is interesting, how-
ever, is how international connections sustained by subterranean networks
that spread the influence of great revolutions were at work in both cases,
and personal contact with the revolutionary country and with revolution-
aries in that country played an important part in shaping both Vesey and
Guzmán as revolutionary leaders.
CHINESE COMMUNIST INFLUENCE ON LATIN AMERICA
The period of influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America coin-

cides with the Cold War. Gilbert Joseph has described this period of Latin
American history as being characterized by “a particularly ferocious dia-
lectic linking reformist and revolutionary projects for social change and
national development and the excessive counterrevolutionary responses
they triggered.”14 When the Chinese Revolution triumphed in 1949, Latin
America had just emerged from the first cycle of that dialectic. A wave of
democratic openings that occurred toward the end of World War II was cut
short in the years following the war by a series of coups as the Cold War got
underway and the United States began to view Latin American reformists
and nationalists as essentially servants of international communism and the
Soviet-led bloc.
The success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 initiated a new and more
intense cycle in this dialectic. Cuba’s success in implanting a progressive
regime through military force so close to the United States, and its continued
success in defying U.S. efforts to undermine the regime, spurred the devel-
opment of new revolutionary initiatives across Latin America. The Cuban
Revolution set off a new and intense period of leftist mobilization across the
continent, far beyond the relatively small numbers of activists and guerrillas
who tried to copy Cuba’s foco guerrilla strategy. This wave of protest and
mobilization culminated in 1968. Although major efforts to bring Chinese
ideas to Latin America began during the 1950s, it was in the 1960s, as part
of a broader wave of protest and mobilization, that those ideas found a solid
foothold.
The pro-Chinese political trend created by Latin Americans who trav-
eled to China circulated ideas and formed organizations that influenced and
acted within the various national movements for social change. Sometimes
they played a leading role and sometimes they were only bit actors. But
across the continent, they formed a substantial contingent within this wave
of protest and mobilization. The following case studies of the influence of
the Chinese Revolution in Peru, Mexico and Bolivia amount to an argu-
ment that Chinese ideas played a significant and hitherto underappreciated
role in the social movements and guerrilla struggles that constituted the
radical “projects for social change and national development” mentioned
by Joseph.
1 China and Latin America
On May 8, in Chengchow, chairman Mao Tse-tung received friends from

eight Latin American countries then visiting China.
At the reception, he first extended a warm welcome to the friends
from Latin America and then spoke to them about the experiences of
the Chinese people in revolutionary struggle and socialist construction.
The friends from the eight Latin American countries gave him their
impressions of China gained during their visit. They warmly praised the
achievements of the Chinese people in their work, China’s general line
for building socialism, the big leap forward and the people’s commune,
as well as the contributions made by the Chinese people to world peace
and the cause of human progress. They also talked about the histori-
cal ties and the ever-growing friendship between the peoples of Latin
America and China. The Latin American people and the Chinese people,
they said, have a common enemy—that is, U.S. imperialism. They spoke
of the struggles waged by the peoples of Cuba and other Latin American
countries against U.S. imperialism. They expressed the view that the
Latin American people, with unity among themselves and unity with the
Chinese people and the peoples of the rest of the world, could certainly
win the final victory in the struggle against imperialism.
Chairman Mao Tse-tung thanked these friends for their friendship
with the Chinese people. The Chinese people, he said, just like the Latin
American people, had for long suffered from imperialist oppression and
exploitation.1
During the Maoist period, from 1949 to 1976, thousands of Latin Ameri-
cans attended receptions in Beijing like the one recounted above. In the
following chapters, we will consider case studies from Mexico, Peru and
Bolivia. In each of those case studies, we will examine the activities of revo-
lutionary activists and intellectuals who traveled to China and then sought
to apply the lessons they learned from the Chinese revolutionary experience
to their own Latin American countries. In order to follow the case study
narratives in the chapters that follow, it will be helpful for the reader to have
some information about the Chinese Revolution, the experience of socialist
construction in China, and the international affairs of the People’s Republic
of China, particularly in regard to Latin America. In this chapter, we will
quickly summarize the history of the Chinese Revolution and discuss Maoist
China’s foreign relations, including the Sino-Soviet split and the creation of
Maoism as a trend within international communism. We will look closely at
Maoist China’s foreign relations with Latin America, both in the traditional
diplomatic and economic sense, and also in terms of party-to-party relations
between the Chinese Communist Party and its Latin American counterparts.
THE CHINESE REVOLUTION IN A NUTSHELL
The Chinese Communist Party, which led the Chinese Revolution and came
to power with the triumph of that revolution in 1949, was founded in 1921.
Two major events contributed to the foundation of the Chinese Communist
Party, one domestic and one foreign. The international event was the Rus-
sian Revolution of 1917. The domestic event was the May 4th movement, a
nationalist political and cultural movement named after the 1919 day of pro-
test in Beijing when students and other Chinese citizens protested the decision
of the great powers meeting at Versailles to adjudicate the post–World War I
world order to grant defeated Germany’s concessions in China to Japan.
Some students who mobilized as part of the May 4th movement formed
a study circle around Beijing revolutionary intellectual Li Dazhao to study
Marxism and to domesticate Marxism to Chinese conditions. Li interpreted
Marxism in such a way that the rural Chinese peasantry might occupy the
role of a revolutionary subject that Marx had not envisioned for peasants.
The success of the Russian Revolution, and the betrayal of China by the
liberal imperialist powers, motivated Li and his students to study Marx-
ism. As Mao Zedong put it in 1949, “Before the October Revolution, the
Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin, they did not even know
of Marx and Engels. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us
Marxism-Leninism.”2 But the example of the Russian Revolution was not
enough. The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921 with the direct
aid and intervention of several representatives of the Communist Interna-
tional (Comintern), including the Dutch communist Hendrikus Sneevliet,
who presided over the founding congress of the Chinese party.
During their early years, the Chinese communists allied with the Nation-
alist Party (often known by its Chinese name, Guomindang) to end warlord
rule in southern China. In 1927, the Guomindang launched a surprise purge
of communists which led to an extended period of civil war, as the Chinese
communists, led by Mao Zedong, formulated a strategy of carving out rural
base areas initially for survival and then as havens from which they could
both attempt to extend the revolution and model policies and social rela-
tions that they would later try to extend to all of China. The most famous of
these base areas, Yan’an, was founded in northern China after the commu-
China and Latin America 13
nists were forced to make a year-long strategic retreat, known as the Long
March, from southern China beginning in October 1934.
Mao established his absolute leadership of the Communist Party during
the Long March. While he had been a founding member of the party and
had led the establishment of the communists’ largest base area, he had not
previously always prevailed in internal policy debates. His ideological oppo-
nents often derived authority from Moscow. In 1930, the Communist Inter-
national dispatched a group of inexperienced and dogmatic young Chinese
communists who had been trained in Russia to lead the Chinese party. These
“returned Bolsheviks” maintained close contact with Moscow, and their pol-
icies sharply diverged from Mao’s (suspiciously, an obituary for Mao ran in a
Comintern journal in 1930). As repression in the cities forced party leaders to
relocate to the rural base area that Mao had established, they removed him
from the leadership of the base area. Some sources even indicate that Mao
was held under house arrest during 1934 because of his disagreements with
the recently relocated party leaders. A German agent of the Comintern, Otto
Braun, led the Chinese party from 1933 to 1935, when Mao displaced him
and firmly established his own leadership during the Long March.3
Japanese aggression against China mounted during the 1930s, culminat-
ing in a full-scale invasion in 1937. In response, the communists and the
nationalists allied once more. During this time, called the period of the Sec-
ond United Front, the communists moderated their earlier policies of class
struggle and united many progressives under their banner, as well as rural
people from all class backgrounds who opposed the Japanese invasion in
the northern areas where the communists had their strongest support bases.
Many patriotic young Chinese migrated to Yan’an, which they saw as the
center of the most effective and principled resistance to the Japanese invasion.
The communists and nationalists fought a final civil war after World
War II. By 1949, the communists had achieved a clear military victory across
the country, leaving only Taiwan and a few small off-shore islands in the hands
of the nationalists. The new People’s Republic of China (PRC) soon signed
a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union and began to receive copious
amount of Soviet aid. The United States backed the nationalists in Taiwan and
resisted giving a seat in the United Nations to the PRC until 1971. Mao laid
out what he considered fundamental principles for Chinese foreign policy in
the post-victory period as early as 1945. At the Seventh Congress of the CCP,
he stated that “when you are making revolution, you need foreign aid; after
you have achieved victory, you ought to support foreign revolution.”4
CHINESE FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1949–1956
Mao’s belief in the need for socialist states to support revolutions abroad
characterized the foreign policy of the newborn People’s Republic. The dan-
gers of this policy were also quickly revealed, as military engagement with
the United States held the threat of nuclear war and military defeat. In any
case, military support for revolution abroad proved expensive for a Chinese
economy that was only now recovering from decades of occupation and civil
war. The tension between supporting revolution abroad and building social-
ism at home manifested itself in a sometimes contradictory foreign policy,
with China emphasizing world revolution at some points and peaceful coex-
istence at others. These divisions reflected broader divisions between revo-
lutionaries and moderates within the Chinese Communist Party. Moderate
figures, such as the skillful diplomat Zhou Enlai, were associated with the
peaceful coexistence line, while more radical figures such as Lin Biao were
associated with the line of spreading world revolution.
In his November 16, 1949, speech at the opening proceedings of the
Union Conference of the Countries of Asia and Australasia held by the
World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Beijing, Liu Shaoqi promoted
the Chinese Revolution as a model that revolutionaries across the devel-
oping world should emulate when he stated that “the path taken by the
Chinese people in defeating imperialism and its lackeys and in founding the
People’s Republic of China is the path that should be taken by the peoples
of the various colonial and semicolonial countries in their fight for national
independence and people’s democracy.”5 As we will see at the beginning of
Chapter 2, when we examine the experience of the leading Mexican Marxist
and labor organizer Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Chinese Communists
played an active role at the WFTU conference in determining in what par-
ticular ways the Chinese Revolution could serve as a model for revolutionar-
ies in other parts of the world.6
In addition to setting themselves up as revolutionary teachers for other
Third World revolutionaries, the Chinese Communists took an active mili-
tary role in advancing revolution in their immediate neighborhood when they
intervened to save the North Korean armed forces from being defeated by
the United States. The Chinese were tied down in the Korean Peninsula from
November 1950 until July 1953. Although the Chinese and Soviets had signed
a treated of “friendship, alliance and mutual assistance”7 in February 1950,
the burden of the fighting and much of the cost of the war fell on the shoulders
of the Chinese. Fear of renewed warfare with the United States and a desire to
refocus the country’s energies and resources on the task of economic develop-
ment, concentrated in the First Five-Year Plan, which the Chinese began in
1953, led China to reevaluate its aggressive international posture.
At the 1954 Geneva Conference on the war in Indochina, the Chinese
pressured Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party
to accept a peace agreement rather than push for nationwide victory after
they defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. Although Mao would later criti-
cize himself for this decision, at the time the Chinese were anxious to avoid
being drawn into another conflict as had happened with the Korean War.8
In 1954, the Chinese communists also urged the Malayan Communist Party
to leave off their armed struggle and switch to peaceful and democratic tac-
tics.9 At the same time, the People’s Republic sought warmer relations with
noncommunist neighboring countries, such as U Nu’s Burma and Thailand.
As part of this diplomatic initiative, China’s leaders pledged not to support
communists in Thailand and Burma.10
This diplomatic effort at promoting “peaceful coexistence” with estab-
lished capitalist governments rather than promoting socialist revolution in
capitalist countries reached its climax at the Bandung conference in 1955.
Zhou Enlai played a prominent role in Bandung, promoting the idea of
peaceful coexistence with the goal of winning African and Asian nations to
the idea of establishing equitable relations with each other and not support-
ing the United States in its containment of China and its Cold War against
the Soviet Union. Peaceful coexistence was shorthand for the Five Principles
of Coexistence: mutual respect for territorial sovereignty, mutual nonaggres-
sion, mutual nonintervention in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit,
and peaceful coexistence.11 Clearly, to the degree that China had genuinely
recentered its foreign policy around the idea of peaceful coexistence, it had
come a long way from promoting revolution abroad. An observer in 1955
might reasonably have thought that the Korean conflict had tamed China’s
revolutionary ardor and that the People’s Republic had settled the contra-
diction between promoting its own peaceful development and supporting
world revolution firmly on the side of peaceful development. With the begin-
ning of the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward, however, things
would change again.
THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT AND THE CREATION OF MAOISM

AS AN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL TREND
After midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev summoned the

delegates of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union to a surprise session where he criticized many of Stalin’s errors and
crimes. This secret speech12 began a process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet
Union, during which many of Stalin’s repressive policies were reversed or at
least relaxed. Khrushchev criticized the mass political repression that char-
acterized periods of Stalin’s rule, as well as Stalin’s cult of personality and
the arbitrary nature of Soviet justice during periods of political terror and
mass mobilization. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for Yugoslavia’s estrangement
from the Soviet bloc and criticized Stalin’s domineering approach to dealing
with fraternal communist parties. Khrushchev also put forward the ideas
of “peaceful co-existence” and “peaceful competition” between the social-
ist and capitalist worlds, in contrast to previous communist doctrine that
socialism could only triumph through violent revolutions and warfare with
the capitalist world.13
One might expect the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev’s speech to have
been favorable. After all, the Chinese Communist Party had repeatedly suffered
from Stalin’s interference both during the armed phase of the revolution and
during the early years of socialist construction. Indeed, Khrushchev revealed
the identities of all the Chinese KGB agents operating in China as an early
act of atonement for Stalin’s treatment of the Chinese party.14 While the
Chinese communists welcomed the admission that the Soviet Union had
mistreated its weaker allies, because of domestic political concerns, the ini-
tial Chinese reaction was mainly negative. Faced with an economic crisis
caused by adopting the then-current Soviet economic model, which empha-
sized industrial development at the expense of agriculture, in 1955 the Chi-
nese communists instituted a series of agricultural policies that emphasized
mass mobilization for the collectivization of agriculture in the hopes that
the agricultural sector of the economy could catch up with the projected
needs of industry. This move by the Chinese was not only a break with the
current Soviet orthodoxy, championed by Khrushchev, but also reminiscent
of the mass mobilizations for agricultural collectivization and rapid indus-
trialization of the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and 1930s. As in the
earlier Soviet experience, the Chinese combined high-minded appeals with
substantial coercive force and a ramped up cult of personality. Just as the
Soviet Union was moving to de-Stalinize, the Chinese communists, led by
Mao Zedong, rejected the new Soviet policies in favor of the revolutionary,
heroic tradition of the early Stalin years.15 De-Stalinization in the Soviet
Union was a direct threat to the policies of China’s leaders.
In early April 1956, the Chinese communists published “On the Histori-
cal Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” their first response to
Khrushchev’s speech. In this article,16 the Chinese communists put forward
a summation of Stalin’s years of leadership that was much more positive
than Khrushchev’s evaluation. The authors of the article, a writing com-
mittee working under Mao’s supervision, stated that “some people consider
that Stalin was wrong in everything; this is a grave misconception. Stalin
was a great Marxist-Leninist, yet at the same time a Marxist-Leninist who
committed several gross errors without realizing that they were errors.”17
The Chinese recognized that Stalin had committed errors, but the attitude
of “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was
in line with Mao’s summation of Stalin, that “we maintain the estimate of
30 per cent for his mistakes and 70 per cent for his achievements.”18
After the revolts against Soviet-dominated regimes in Poland and Hun-
gary later in 1956, the threat of de-Stalinization became more urgent to the
Chinese. In late December, the CCP published “More On the Historical
Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”19 The new article was
more sharply worded than the eponymous April article and indicated that the
Chinese leadership felt that de-Stalinization was a serious error that threat-
ened the stability of the socialist bloc. The Chinese leadership reconfirmed its
opposition to de-Stalinization when the Thousand Flowers campaign, which
involved mild political liberalization, revealed broader and deeper discontent
with Communist Party rule in early 1957 than Mao had suspected.20
In 1958, the Great Leap Forward marked an extension of Mao’s creative
development of the revolutionary, heroic model of socialist development
derived from the early Soviet experience. At the same time, and for separate
reasons, the Chinese began to criticize the Soviet policy of peaceful coexis-
tence with the capitalist world. Simultaneously with the launch of the Great
Leap Forward (indeed, to facilitate popular mobilization for the Great Leap),
the Chinese provoked the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis without informing the
Soviet Union of its plans. The United States, perceiving a threat to Taiwan,
threatened nuclear war. Thus, the Soviet Union was brought to the brink of
being forced by treaty obligations to support China in a nuclear war without
even having been informed of Chinese military plans beforehand.21 The Chi-
nese military provocation in the Taiwan Strait amounted to a forceful rejec-
tion of the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence. The Chinese leadership had
decided that peaceful negotiations would not lead to the recovery of Taiwan
and that, in any case, Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful competition with the
capitalist world and the concomitant idea of a peaceful transition to social-
ism were ideas treasonous to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Mao challenged
Soviet superpower connivance with the United States by almost provoking
a nuclear war. But the crisis also pushed the Soviets to further their negotia-
tions with the United States by scaring the Soviets about the possibility that
without achieving détente with the United States, the Chinese might be able
to force the Soviets into a war that they did not wish to fight.22 From this
point on, the Chinese Communists counterposed the role of anti-imperialist
revolutionary movements in Third World countries in achieving socialism
against the Soviet position on peaceful coexistence. This was a reversal from
China’s recent claim that “we have consistently held and still hold that the
socialist and capitalist countries should coexist in peace and carry out peace-
ful competition.”23
The Sino-Soviet split became more and more hostile over the following
years. By 1963, the Chinese called on their international followers to break
with parties dominated by supporters of the Soviet line. Already in 1959,
the Chinese began to prepare the ground for this split by sponsoring train-
ing schools for foreign communists from the developing world that sought
to propagate Chinese positions within the international communist move-
ment. We will see examples of Latin Americans who attended these schools
in the case studies on Mexico, Peru and Bolivia in the chapters that follow.
As China distinguished its own politics from those of the Soviet Union in
the course of the Sino-Soviet split, Maoism began to come into focus as a
distinct and new international political trend. The Cultural Revolution of
1966–1976 completed the process.
The Cultural Revolution was a chaotic series of events with many differ-
ent facets. At the highest levels of power, it was a struggle waged by Mao
Zedong and his supporters against other high-level Communist Party lead-
ers (most prominently Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping) who Mao accused of
“taking the capitalist road,”—that is, pursuing a set of policies that would
lead to a capitalist restoration in China just as they claimed had happened
in the Soviet Union. During the course of the Cultural Revolution, the Com-
munist Party apparatus was shattered and then reconstituted as the struggle
going on at the highest levels of the party was reflected on the regional and
local levels. As with all mass revolutionary upheavals, the Cultural Revolu-
tion was a mix of idealism and opportunism at all levels of participation.
The Cultural Revolution was also a youth rebellion against authority,
both educational and parental (albeit in the name of Mao Zedong as the
single highest authority). Early in the Cultural Revolution, youth traveled
the country and exchanged experiences. They also traveled from urban areas
to more “backward” areas to impose the upheaval of the Cultural Revo-
lution on areas where it had not taken off. Later, many youth would be
“sent down” to the countryside to learn from the peasantry, in an important
expression both of Maoism’s emphasis on the importance of the peasantry
and of Maoism’s epistemological principle that revolutionary knowledge is
gained through sharing the lives of the basic masses.
In the course of the Cultural Revolution, Mao and his supporters articu-
lated a series of policies meant to keep China on the revolutionary road
toward communism. During the Sino-Soviet split, Maoism was initially
articulated in a negative sense, in opposition to the Soviet Union. In the Cul-
tural Revolution, Maoism was further articulated and fleshed out in more
positive, forward-thinking terms. Apart from the set of short quotations
contained in the “Little Red Book,”24 there was no one book that laid out
Maoist principles, and the major publications on Maoist ideology some-
times contradicted each other in important points, leaving international
adherents a lot of room to emphasize one point or another at the expense of
an idea that another Maoist adherent might consider a cardinal question (a
process that was played out repeatedly in the political schisms of the interna-
tional New Left).25 But despite the ad hoc way in which the Chinese Maoists
formulated and created their ideas during the course of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Maoism became a coherent international political trend at this time. As
a result, international Maoism was deeply marked by the culture and ethos
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its visceral enthusiasm for violent
rebellion and emphasis on the ability of human willpower to triumph over
even the most adverse of objective material conditions.
CHINA AND LATIN AMERICA, 1949–1976
Throughout the Maoist period, and especially after the Sino-Soviet split,
the propaganda of the Communist Party of China emphasized the impor-
tance of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the world. In particular, the
Communist Party held that “the whole cause of world revolution hinges
on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American
peoples.”26 Despite the clear importance that Latin America had in Chinese
propaganda statements as one of the main battlegrounds where the cause of
world revolution would be decided, the literature on Chinese foreign rela-
tions during the Maoist period barely mentions Latin America at all. There
are several possible explanations for this, all of which may be operative
to some degree. First, and perhaps most obviously, topics such as China’s
relations with the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Korea and the United States are
of larger overall significance in the history of Chinese foreign relations and
have occupied the time and energy of those concerned with Chinese foreign
relations in the Maoist period. Second, apart from China’s relations with
Cuba, which went sour after the Sino-Soviet split in any case, Chinese rela-
tions with Latin America cannot be studied as state-to-state relations until
many Latin American countries gave diplomatic recognition to the People’s
Republic in the early 1970s. By then, the Maoist period was almost over, and
in any case, those governments clearly weren’t what Lin Biao meant when
he wrote about the importance of the revolutionary struggles of the Latin
American people. That being the case, Latin American relations with China
have to be studied by examining the hazy and deliberately hidden world of
communist parties and militant guerrilla organizations that adopted Maoist
politics in Latin America. For the time being, Chinese archives that might
assist in this research are not open.27
The People’s Republic began developing its capacity to interact with and
influence Latin American revolutionaries from the earliest days of its found-
ing. Among the many experts that came from the Soviet Union in 1949 to
assist in the creation of China’s new foreign ministry and propaganda opera-
tions were a group of Spanish refugees. The Spaniards had been living in
the USSR since the end of the Spanish Civil War and now came to China to
help in developing the People’s Republic’s ability to interact with the Spanish-
speaking world. Until Latin Americans began to take their place as party-
to-party relations were established between the Chinese party and its Latin
American counterparts, these refugees from Franco’s Spain were China’s
main Spanish teachers and were the early polishers of Spanish translations
of Chinese propaganda materials.28
China pursued two main diplomatic tracks in Latin America. The first
track was in the vein of traditional state-to-state relations and was directed
at promoting trade and securing diplomatic recognition. The second was
clandestine and involved party-to-party relations with Latin American com-
munists. While no Latin American countries gave diplomatic recognition
to the People’s Republic during its first decade (and it would be another
decade until Chile recognized the PRC after Cuba’s 1960 recognition), the
PRC was able to establish a cultural and economic presence in a number of
Latin American countries during that time. To this end, the PRC formed the
Chinese-Latin American Friendship Association and promoted the forma-
tion of counterpart associations in Latin American countries. The first of
these, the Chile-China Cultural Association, was founded in 1952 with the
participation of the poet Pablo Neruda, who had visited China in 1951, and
the painter José Venturelli, who traveled to China constantly beginning in
1952.29 The activity of the Mexico-China Friendship Society is examined in
some detail in Chapter 2.
In 1952, China also founded the China Council for the Promotion of
International Trade to pursue trade relations with countries that had not
given it diplomatic recognition. China had some initial success in develop-
ing economic ties with Mexico, Argentina and Chile. China’s first trade pact
with a Latin American country was signed with Chile in 1952 for copper
and nitrates. Trade with Latin America grew slowly throughout the Maoist
period, beginning at $1.9 million in 1950, rising to $7.3 million in 1955 and
$31.3 million in 1960, and reaching $475.7 million in 1975 (by comparison,
China’s trade with Latin America stood at $70,218 million in 2006).30
An important aspect of China’s people-to-people diplomacy was the
sending of delegations to Latin America and the invitation of Latin Ameri-
can delegations and prominent individuals to visit China. The delegations
that the Chinese sent to Latin America were quite varied. In 1954, the poet
Ai Qing attended Pablo Neruda’s fiftieth birthday celebration in Santiago.
Delegations of actors and acrobats toured the Southern Cone in 1956 and
1958, followed by journalists in 1959. A delegation of oil workers visited
their counterparts in Venezuela in 1959, and in 1960 a Peking opera troupe
toured Venezuela and Colombia. The purpose of these delegations was to
build up goodwill toward the People’s Republic of China and to influence
public opinion, both broadly and among influential sections of people, for
the diplomatic recognition of the PRC. Leading members of these delega-
tions could also extend invitations for Latin Americans to visit China.31
One scholar estimates that about 1,500 Latin Americans visited China
between 1949 and 1960.32 Aside from travel to China by communists, dele-
gations of students, journalists, lawyers, politicians, workers, artists, actors,
peace activists and many others visited China and met with their Chinese
counterparts. The majority of those who visited China were not commu-
nists, although the average delegation member left China with a positive
impression. New York Times Latin America correspondent Tad Szulc wrote
that “dozens of books, articles, and speeches almost uniformly praising
China—or at least showing a grudging admiration for it—have been written
by Latin American congressmen, intellectuals, artists, and labor- and student-
union members on their return from guided tours of the Chinese main-
land.”33 Returnees from China played key roles in founding and sustaining
the work of the Latin America-China friendship associations. Prominent
Latin Americans who visited China included the former Mexican presidents
Lázaro Cárdenas and Emilio Portes Gil (both in 1959), former Dominican
Republic president Juan Bosch in 1969, Chilean senator Salvador Allende in
1954 (Allende also served as honorary president of the Chile-China Cultural
Association), the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1954, the Bra-
zilian author Jorge Amado in 1952 and 1957, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in
1951 and 1957, and Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias in 1956.34
The Chinese Communists used the Xinhua (New China) News Agency as
an important vehicle for establishing a presence in Latin America. By 1962,
Xinhua had set up branch offices in Cuba, Chile, Brazil and Argentina.35
Later, in the 1960s, Xinhua branches proliferated in other Latin American
countries. As with the Soviet TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union),
Xinhua correspondents often had duties that went beyond news gathering.
In countries where the People’s Republic of China did not enjoy diplomatic
recognition, Xinhua agents sometimes worked to facilitate trips to China by
Latin American delegations and vice versa. Xinhua agents also sometimes had
a role in facilitating party-to-party contacts between the Chinese Communist
Party and Latin American parties. In the absence of a large Spanish-speaking
corps of Chinese diplomats and journalists, Latin American communists were
sometimes recruited (in consultation with local communist parties) to serve
as correspondents for Xinhua. These Latin American Xinhua correspondents
would not have the broad semi-diplomatic portfolio of their Chinese col-
leagues, but they would go to China to receive training and initial instruc-
tions for their work.36
After Cuba gave diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of
China in 1960, a Chinese embassy was established in Havana. The opening
of the Chinese embassy facilitated China’s overtures to progressive Latin
Americans who were drawn to revolutionary Cuba. The example of the
Mexican artist Andrea Gómez is indicative of the way in which the Chi-
nese embassy in Havana facilitated the spread of Maoist influence in Latin
America outside of Cuba. Gómez had won national recognition in Mexico
during the 1950s for her linoleum prints “La niña de la basura” (“The Girl
of the Garbage”) and “Madre contra la guerra” (“Mother Against War”).
In the early 1960s, Gómez went to Cuba to paint murals. While there, she
met the Chilean artist José Venturelli, who had already participated in art
exhibitions in China in the 1950s. Venturelli infected Gómez with enthu-
siasm for visiting China and passed along her request for an invitation to
visit China to the Chinese embassy in Havana.
Gómez visited China for two months. She mainly applied herself to learn-
ing Chinese artistic techniques, but she also toured the country and learned
about the Chinese approach to socialism. Gómez was also invited to several
banquets, including one hosted by Zhou Enlai for visiting Latin American
intellectuals that was attended by the Uruguayan novelist and social critic
Eduardo Galeano. When she later returned to Mexico, Gómez took up
residence in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. Coincidentally, as detailed
in the next chapter, the Mexican Maoist leader Florencio Medrano led an
effort to create an urban base area for a Maoist guerrilla war in Cuernavaca
in 1973 by leading a land take-over on the outskirts of the city and estab-
lishing the self-governing squatter community Colonia Rubén Jaramillo on
the seized land. Gómez took a plot in the community and painted a mural
of Rubén Jaramillo, the veteran of Emiliano Zapata’s army and namesake
of the settlement.37
Gómez’s story is revealing of several important dynamics. During the first
half of the 1960s, until the rupture in Sino-Cuban relations that accompa-
nied the Sino-Soviet split, Latin Americans who were ideologically attached
to the Chinese socialist model, such as José Venturelli, circulated in Cuba.
While in Cuba, Latin Americans drawn to the example of the Cuban Revo-
lution could encounter pro-Chinese Latin Americans and learn about China
from them. Operating under regular diplomatic conditions, the Chinese
embassy could then facilitate travel to China more easily than roving Xin-
hua correspondents or cultural delegations could. For the few years that
China and Cuba enjoyed warm relations, the Chinese embassy in Havana
was well situated for making contact with progressive and revolutionary
Latin Americans from across the continent.
Aside from the pursuit of diplomatic recognition, cultural diplomacy and
economic ties, the Chinese Communist Party pursued a second track in its
foreign relations with Latin America, which involved establishing party-to-
party relations with Latin American communist parties. While the Chinese
party had been in contact with some Latin American parties through the
various networks and mass organizations that were created by international
communism (for example, Cuban communist Lázaro Peña attended the
World Federation of Trade Unions conference held in Beijing in 1949, and
Chinese and Latin American communists had been at events in the Soviet
Union together in earlier years), party-to-party relationships entailed the
creation of formal mechanisms for exchanging ideas, information and
potentially aid. The first Latin American communist party to establish party-
to-party ties with China was the Brazilian party, which sent a delegation to
China in July 1953. In September 1956, leaders from 12 Latin American
communist parties attended the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of
China. By 1960, 22 Latin American communist parties had formal relations
with the Chinese party.38
Chinese efforts to win Latin American communists to their side in the
Sino-Soviet split began immediately after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at
the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when
Latin American delegates to the CPSU congress were invited to visit China.
Many of these delegates first learned of Khrushchev’s speech while visit-
ing China after the congress. The delegates were received by Mao Zedong
and Liu Shaoqi, who discussed their differences with the Soviets with the
Latin Americans. At least one Latin American delegate, the Brazilian Dio-
genes Arruda, the chief aide to top Brazilian leader Luis Carlos Prestes, was
both convinced by Chinese arguments and impressed by personally meet-
ing the top Chinese leadership. Osvaldo Peralva, a Brazilian assigned to
work on the Cominform newspaper For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s
Democracy’s staff, reported on his conversation with Arruda upon Arruda’s
return to Moscow from China in July 1956: “Proudly he told me how he,
together with the rest of the Latin American Communist delegation, had
been received by Mao Zedong, who had talked with them for two hours
and even asked whether they wanted to continue the conversation. In the
Soviet Union on the other hand, he said, he had never had the honor of being
received by even the most obscure member of the Central Committee.”39
Following the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, a group of Latin Ameri-
can communists attended a six-month training course in China. The train-
ing course focused on both ideological and practical questions. Because the
Twentieth Congress of the CPSU concluded at the end of February and the
Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party began on September 15,
1956, it seems fair to assume that some of the Latin American delegates
to both congresses participated in this six-month training program.40 This
1956 training course was the prototype for the six-month program that the
Chinese later institutionalized for training Latin American communists. In
1959, the Chinese party set up a school near Changping, a small town north
of Beijing, where they regularly conducted six-month training courses for
Latin American communists. The most famous graduate of this program is
the Shining Path leader, Abimael Guzmán. We will encounter other gradu-
ates of this program in each of the country case study chapters.41
The institutionalization of the six-month training program in 1959 coin-
cided with Chinese efforts to win over Latin American communists in the
Sino-Soviet dispute. In the second half of 1959, the Chinese held a five-
month political seminar for Latin American communists. The official reason
for the seminar was to teach the lessons of the Chinese Revolution, but it
was also intended to win over adherents in the escalating dispute between
China and the Soviet Union. While it is not entirely clear which countries
were represented at this seminar, the top leadership of the Peruvian Com-
munist Party was in attendance, and it seems likely that other high-ranking
Latin American communists were there as well. The content of this confer-
ence, and its importance for the pro-Chinese faction in Peru, are dealt with
in Chapter 3.42
As the Sino-Soviet split came to a head, Latin American communist par-
ties with substantial Maoist factions divided into separate pro-Chinese and
pro-Soviet groups. The Brazilian party was the first to split, in 1962, shortly
before China adopted the policy of encouraging its supporters to form new
parties. The Brazilian Maoists named their party the Partido Comunista do
Brasil, to distinguish it from the pro-Soviet Partido Comunista Brasileiro.
When the Peruvian Maoists created their own new party in January 1964,
they followed suit, naming their party the Partido Comunista del Perú to
distinguish it from the Partido Comunista Peruano. The Maoist parties that
formed soon thereafter in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and in some other
Latin American countries opted for a less subtle distinction, naming them-
selves “Marxist-Leninist Communist Parties” (as in Partido Comunista de
Bolivia [Marxista-Leninista]). The implication was that the Maoists were
the true followers of Marx and Lenin, while the pro-Soviet parties were
revisionist.43 By the end of the 1960s, most Latin American countries had at
least one Maoist party (some countries had more than one due to splintering
among the Maoists, a process we will examine below in the country case
studies). However, only in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia and Paraguay
did the newborn pro-Chinese parties rival the pro-Soviet parties in size and
influence at the time of their founding.
With the formation of pro-Chinese parties in Latin America in the early
1960s, China stepped up its efforts to aid those parties. In 1963, Chinese
propagandists and Latin American translation polishers began to produce
a Spanish-language edition of the Peking Review (Pekín Informa), a weekly
magazine dedicated to providing “timely, accurate, firsthand information
on economic, political and cultural developments in China and her rela-
tions with the rest of the world.”44 Aside from stepping up the production
of Spanish-language propaganda, Beijing also gave material support to the
Maoist political groups in Latin America. The most basic form of mate-
rial aid was money. In July 1963, a leading pro-Chinese Ecuadorian, José
María Roura, returned to Quito from Europe carrying $25,000, which the
Ecuadorian authorities promptly confiscated.45 Until Chinese archives are
opened up, it will be impossible to say exactly how much money China
gave to Latin American Maoist efforts. Even Latin Americans who readily
admit to having been involved in receiving funds from China are reticent to
discuss precise figures.46
Although we cannot make with any certainty a quantitative estimate of
the amount of Chinese monetary support for Latin American Maoists, we
can make a relatively accurate qualitative assessment of its influence. As a
general rule, Latin American communist parties were short on funds, and
small infusions of money would certainly have eased pressures and facili-
tated party activities. It seems likely that Chinese funds facilitated travel,
allowed publications to appear that might otherwise not have been pub-
lished, and maybe allowed for a few party members to be full-time activists
who otherwise would have had to find other ways to make a living (and thus
would have been available for fewer party tasks). It does not seem likely that
Chinese funding ever made the difference between life and death for a Maoist
political movement in Latin America. No Maoist group in Latin America that
had a mass base relied on Chinese material aid to maintain its base of sup-
port. Chinese funds facilitated Maoist political work in Latin America, but
it was not on a scale that could have sustained parties that failed to develop
their own bases of support. No Latin American Maoist groups failed or suc-
ceeded because of Chinese funds or their lack of access to external funding.
José María Sisón, leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines, discusses
the aid that his party received from China during the 1960s and 1970s in the
following terms: “From among the teachings of Mao, we have learned the
principle of self-reliance in carrying the Philippine revolution forward. We
need moral and material support from abroad but we are not dependent
on it.”47 Sisón’s assessment of having not depended on, but also somehow
having needed, support from abroad is a helpful way of conceptualizing the
importance of Chinese support for Latin America’s Maoists.
Undoubtedly, the reticence of those who received funds from China to
discuss the specifics of that funding has to do with the fact that receiving
funding from abroad can be used to delegitimize a political movement, or at
least to expose it to accusations of having been manipulated by the foreign-
ers who gave the money.48 During the course of many interviews with Mao-
ists and former Maoists, members (or former members) of various splinter
groups sometimes accused their opponents of having misused Chinese funds
for their own personal benefit. Despite the fact that the sums involved were
relatively modest, and despite the way in which Chinese funding can be
easily explained as a form of internationalist solidarity, the act of receiving
money from abroad to fund political activities in Latin America has a certain
taint to it.
China provided other forms of aid as well. Although Latin American
Maoists tended to prefer Europe, particularly France, as a site of politi-
cal refuge, China was available as a place that political exiles could flee
to. China provided other services to some Latin American Maoist leaders
as well. For example, when a member of the Communist Party of Bolivia
(Marxist-Leninist) was injured in a car crash, she eventually went to China
for eye surgery.49 Chinese party leaders made themselves available for regu-
lar consultations with Latin American party members, with certain leaders
traveling to China with a remarkable frequency for such consultations. The
Bolivian leader Oscar Zamora, discussed in Chapter 4, is one such example.
Chinese rapprochement with the United States and diplomatic recogni-
tion by many Latin American countries in the early 1970s did not substan-
tially affect Chinese support for Maoists in Latin America. Chinese foreign
policy in the early 1970s was guided by the belief that the Soviet Union was
a major military threat to China, and the alignment of Allende’s Chilean
government with pro-Soviet forces meant that China had few qualms about
recognizing the legitimacy of Pinochet’s regime. China’s swift recognition
of the Pinochet government after the September 11, 1973, overthrow of
Allende caused China to lose prestige among some Latin American leftists.
Despite China’s friendly relations with Pinochet, the Chilean Maoists fought
against and were tortured and killed by the Pinochet regime along with the
rest of the Chilean left.50
The Chinese Cultural Revolution ended in October 1976 with the arrest
of Mao’s closest supporters, the Gang of Four, less than a month after Mao’s
death. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese policy abruptly
shifted to focus on promoting economic development at home. The aban-
donment of Mao’s revolutionary vision by the new Chinese government
led Maoist forces internationally to target Deng Xiaoping. One of the first
actions of the Shining Path when it launched its insurrection in 1980 was to
hang dead dogs from lampposts with signs denouncing Deng Xiaoping. It is
probably unnecessary to mention that China had stopped giving aid to Latin
American Maoists by that time.51 Over time, Chinese diplomats worked to
reinvent the network of friendship societies that they worked with in Latin
America, emphasizing general sinophilia and not Maoism. In 1991, Chinese
diplomats went to the length of requesting that a Mexico-China Friendship
Society burn their remaining copies of Mao’s works and begin distributing
material on Tai Chi instead.52
LIFE FOR LATIN AMERICAN VISITORS AND RESIDENTS IN

CHINA DURING THE MAOIST ERA
Thousands of Latin Americans visited China between 1949 and 1976, and
many of those visitors stayed for extended periods. There was no single
Latin American experience of being in China during the Maoist period.
But there were certain common experiences of being in China that many
Latin American visitors did share. Many of those who worked on Spanish-
language propaganda activities based in China shared common living and
working conditions. Those who attended the six-month training courses
learned from a curriculum that was relatively standardized. Even visitors
who were traveling on individualized itineraries interacted with a Chinese
apparatus for dealing with foreign visitors that had a set of standards and
practices that were applied to other visitors.53
Most visitors to China were taken on multi-stop tours of the country,
the length of which depended on the amount of time they would be spend-
ing in China. Details of particular trips to China are given in Chapters 2, 3
and 4. Typical tours involved visits to model farms and factories, as well as
more traditional tourist fare, including cruises on the Yangzi River and visits
to major cities and cultural sites, such as the Great Wall. Six-month cadre
training courses also included travel around China as part of the curricu-
lum, in addition to the time spent studying Maoist ideology and the practi-
cal aspects of making revolution. It was not unusual for foreign visitors to
attend a banquet presided over by Zhou Enlai (or, less frequently, by another
major Chinese leader, such as Zhu De). These semi-regular banquets for for-
eign guests were quite large and would unite many of the foreigners passing
through Beijing. The personal touch of Zhou Enlai at these banquets was
noted in numerous memoirs and interviews and clearly generated good will
toward China even among skeptical visitors. It is hard to imagine another
major statesman of the twentieth century who had as much contact with
relatively unknown foreigners on such a regular basis.
Most Latin Americans who worked as language teachers or who helped
with Spanish-language propaganda activities lived at the Friendship Hotel,
a compound in northwestern Beijing that was built in 1954 to accommo-
date Soviet advisers. The Friendship Hotel had cafeterias that served several
international cuisines, ample recreational facilities and even its own stores.
Although it was built to accommodate 3,100 residents, after the departure
of the Soviets it was never full.54 Despite the fact that the Friendship Hotel
had plenty of room available, some Latin Americans lived in other locations
more convenient to their work units. For example, the Latin Americans
who broadcast on the shortwave radio station Radio Peking in Spanish,
Portuguese, Aymara and Quechua lived in an annex next to the radio sta-
tion itself, even though some of them also taught Latin American languages
to the Chinese. Despite their dispersed living situations, many of the Latin
Americans residing in Beijing would gather on the occasional Saturday to
socialize and to discuss Chinese and Latin American events.55
In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, we will examine the process through which Mao-
ist ideas were transferred to Mexico, Peru and Bolivia and domesticated in
those countries, with varying degrees of success. Despite the very different
outcomes of the transfer of Maoism to each of the three countries we are
considering in this book, the role of Latin American travelers to China in
the process was remarkably similar. Each country’s China travelers had their
own experiences in China and their own interpretations of the meaning
of their Chinese experiences for their home country’s politics. But they all
experienced similar conditions in China and interacted with the same Chi-
nese party and state apparatus that supported them in finding ways to adapt
Maoist ideas to the conditions of their own countries.
The incorporation of the story of pro-Chinese communists, intellectuals
and activists into the historical narrative of Cold War Latin America forces
a revision of our understanding of how the Cold War played out ideologi-
cally in Latin America. Recent historiography has almost entirely ignored
the Chinese factor in Latin America’s Cold War.56 Yet, during the 1960s and
1970, Maoist groups seriously contended for leadership of the left in several
Latin American countries, and played influential roles even in many coun-
tries where they were not in serious contention for left hegemony. Including
the Maoists and leftist sinophiles in the historical narrative of Cold War
Latin America leads us to expand our conceptual understanding of the Cold
War ideological framework. It also broadens our concept of who and what
constituted the communist left in Latin America during the Cold War. This
broadening of our conceptual horizons of the Latin American Cold War
does not overturn the current dominant narrative of the Latin American
Cold War, but it does complicate that narrative and indicate areas in need
of revision.
2 Mexico
The Wayward Disciples of Vicente
Lombardo
I toast a new period of fraternal friendship between China and Mexico.

I remember that the only country on the American continent that had
relations with China for many years, starting in the 17th century, was
Mexico, then called New Spain. I recall the fact that the commerce
between Mexico and China influenced various aspects of Mexican life,
particularly in artisan production and in the popular arts, and I refer
to the romantic legend of the China Poblana (Pueblan Chinese Girl),
whose dress, modified by the taste of my people, became the costume
par excellence for expressing the complicated and rich feeling of mes-
tizaje, in the most popular and lucid national dance. Let me end by
voting for the return of the China galleon to the port of Acapulco, not
only to import and export valuable merchandise, as in the past, but to
communicate to Mexico the ideals of the People’s Republic of China
and pick up the highest aspirations of the Mexican people.1
So toasted Vicente Lombardo Toledano at a banquet held by Zhou Enlai in

honor of the Union Conference of the Countries of Asia and Australasia held
by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Beijing from Novem-
ber 16 to December 1, 1949.2 As a member of the executive bureau of the
WFTU, Lombardo formed part of the meeting’s presidium. It was at this
conference that Liu Shaoqi announced Chinese and Soviet plans to promote
the Chinese Revolution as a general model for revolution throughout the
developing world.3 It is in this context that we have to understand Lom-
bardo’s toast to “communicate to Mexico the ideals of the People’s Republic
of China,” and his leading role in beginning that process.
By the time that Mexico’s long 1960s began,4 Maoist ideas had gained
sufficient traction in Mexico to play a significant role in the social move-
ments of that period. The influence of Maoist ideas were manifest in the
formation of explicitly Maoist groups that operated within the larger social
movements, and also in the way that other organizations and movements
took up particular Maoist ideas without committing themselves to the ideol-
ogy as an organic whole. Mexicans who admired Maoist China and devoted
themselves to propaganda work in support of the “ideals of the People’s
Mexico 29
Republic of China” played a key role in the diffusion of Maoist ideas, begin-
ning with Lombardo’s memoir of his 1949 trip to China.
Systematic efforts at promoting lessons of the Chinese Revolution that
began with Lombardo’s memoir were continued by Lombardo’s People’s
Party (Partido Popular), reaching a nodal point with the creation of the
Mexico-China Friendship Society in 1957. This society later divided in two,
as veteran communist and feminist Esther Chapa led a faction that advo-
cated armed struggle and an orthodox adherence to Mao’s ideas. Orthodox
Maoism in Mexico reached its high point in the guerrilla struggles led by
Florencio Medrano in Morelos and Oaxaca in the 1970s, while a variety of
new leftist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s borrowed an eclectic mix
of Maoist ideas and combined them with other influences.
Maoist ideas have had an often unrecognized impact on contemporary
Mexico. The main opposition party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution
(Partido de la Revolución Democrática [PRD]) absorbed many former Mao-
ist activists, while the smaller Workers’ Party (Partido del Trabajo [PT]) was
formed by former Maoists. More surprisingly, Adolfo Oribe, one of the main
advisers of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was a leading ideologue of a
Maoist splinter group that focused on peaceful reformist organizing among the
poor. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary People’s Army (Ejército Popular Revolu-
cionario), one of Mexico’s most prominent guerrilla groups (out of dozens of
small armed guerrilla forces in Mexico today), still claims to adhere to a policy
of Protracted People’s War, a concept that originated with Mao Zedong. The
story of how Maoism played an important role in Mexico’s long 1960s, and
its continued reverberations there today, begins with Vicente Lombardo Tole-
dano’s 1949 visit to the recently founded People’s Republic of China.
VICENTE LOMBARDO TOLEDANO AND THE BEGINNING

OF PRO-CHINA PROPAGANDA ACTIVITIES IN MEXICO
Vicente Lombardo Toledano was one of Mexico’s foremost labor leaders. In

1936, he founded the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), Mexico’s
largest union. The CTM became closely aligned with Mexico’s ruling party,
and Lombardo was forced out of its leadership in 1947. However, Lom-
bardo remained an immensely important labor leader. Despite having been
forced out of the CTM’s leadership, Lombardo maintained a stance of criti-
cal support for (combined with loyal opposition to) Mexico’s ruling party,
subscribing to a form of Marxism that ascribed a leading role in Mexico’s
revolutionary process to the national bourgeoisie. Lombardo’s memoir
of his trip to China and the ongoing propaganda efforts of his People’s
Party (Partido Popular [PP]) (later People’s Socialist Party [Partido Popular
Socialista, PPS]) were the initial conveyor belts of Maoist ideas to Mexico.
These propaganda efforts formed the basis for the influence of Maoism on
splinters from the PP(S)5 such as Arturo Gámiz’s People’s Guerrilla Group
(Grupo Popular Guerrillero) (where Maoism was a secondary influence) and
the Mexico-China Friendship Association led by Dr. Esther Chapa (which
considered itself Maoist).
The WFTU conference required that Lombardo be in China from
November 12 to December 6, 1949. The People’s Republic had only been
founded on October 1, and the Communists were still mopping up Guomin-
dang troops in Sichuan and the southwest. The WFTU was a Communist-
dominated body and the conference was being held in Beijing both to mark
and build on the success of the Chinese Revolution. Prior to the Chinese
Revolution, such a conference would have been held in the Soviet Union.
The conference was an opportunity for the various delegations to come and
see revolutionary China for themselves. Lombardo himself utilized the trip
to have conversations with Chinese Communists about the nature of the
revolution they had carried out.
Lombardo traveled to China through the Soviet Union, flying across the
USSR as part of a convoy of four airplanes carrying delegates to the WFTU
conference. Apart from Lombardo’s wife, Rosa María, only one other Latin
American was present, the secretary general of the communist Confedera-
tion of Cuban Workers, Lázaro Peña.6 On their arrival in Manchuria, the
delegation was welcomed by singing children and a feast.
Despite the snowstorm and the wind that keeps you from opening your
eyes, hundreds of workers and schoolchildren wait for us at the station.
One of these, standing in front of his comrades, who look like porcelain
dolls, leads the chorus that sings the March of the Eighth Route Army—
the hymn of the famous army of the Chinese Revolution, equivalent to
La Adelita of the Northern Division of the Mexican Revolution—, that
we would afterwards frequently hear during our stay in the country.7
Lombardo and the rest of the executive bureau of the WFTU were received
as distinguished international guests.
Similar events took place along the entire route to Beijing. Mass organiza-
tions of workers, youth and women greeted the delegation at several stops,
hosting large meals in honor of the delegation. For example, a rally was held
in Harbin, where Lombardo was one of four WFTU executive bureau mem-
bers to address the crowd. In discussing the novelty of addressing a crowd
in the snow, Lombardo reminds us of his international stature:
Before the masses that await our speeches under a copious snow, here in
Harbin, and while I wait my turn to speak, I remember in contrast the
occasions that I’ve had to speak under a torrential rain before crowds
of peasants accustomed to let their clothes dry on their bodies, in the
hot country of Mexico, or under a cold raid in the indigenous villages of
the Andes, and also in an intense and humid heat in the tropic regions
of isthmic America, until I left a puddle of sweat under my feet, or high
Mexico 31
on a table serving as a tribune, on the banks of the Magdalena River in
Colombia, at dusk, having to interrupt my speech every so often to spit
out the mosquitoes that entered my mouth. But I’ve never had to speak
in the snow: doing so I have to use both hands to clear my face and
observe the audience through the cataract of white flakes.8
In Beijing, the WFTU representatives were met by a high-level delegation led

by Liu Shaoqi and were put up in the Six Nations Hotel (formerly the Gran
Hotel des Wagons Lits).9
On November 17, Lombardo had the first of a series of meetings with
representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This first meeting
was apparently on the history of the revolution, which he retells in the trav-
elogue. His next meeting, two days later (November 19) was on China’s
agrarian reform. In his memoir, he emphasizes the land-to-the-tiller policy of
land redistribution (with no mention of this as a basis for future collectiviza-
tion, which, given the experience of the Soviet Union, would have been an
obvious issue to raise), peasant participation in the process, and an end to
oppression by landlords.10
The next day, November 20, Lombardo had his next meeting, which
focused on China’s economy.11 He emphasizes worker participation in
workplace decision-making processes and the importance of state owner-
ship combined with a secondary role for private capital. Lombardo asked
his Chinese interlocutors:
And what about financial policy?—I ask my friends, remembering the

bitter experiences of Mexico’s governments of revolutionary origin, that
with one hand build or try to build and with the other destroy or para-
lyze their own work through lack of an effective credit policy, that could
serve as a basis for economic development.12
Lombardo’s Chinese friends answered:
All financial enterprises—they answer me—will be strictly controlled by

the State. The right of issuing currency belongs to the State. The circu-
lation of foreign currencies inside the country is forbidden. The selling
and buying of foreign stocks, of foreign currencies, of gold and of silver,
will be managed by the State banks. Private financial enterprises that
operate within the Law will be subject to the supervision and guidance
of the State.13
In exchanges such as these, Lombardo uses his questions and his friends’
answers to didactically communicate Chinese policy to his readers as a
development model that is potentially adaptable to Mexican conditions.
On November 21, Li Li-san addressed the conference on the “experi-
ences, lessons and current conditions of the workers movement in China.”14
Lombardo summed up the talk as addressing the question, “How were the
working class and people of China able to defeat the reactionary and brutal
government of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and win
victory in a backward, semifeudal and semicolonial country like China?”15
It is key here that he asks this in these general, universal terms: How does a
backward, semifeudal and semicolonial country defeat imperialism, feudal-
ism and bureaucrat capitalism? What follows concerns not only China, but
also is meant as a lesson for other backward, semifeudal and semicolonial
countries. Li Li-San (and Lombardo in his memoir) emphasize the worker-
peasant alliance and the agrarian revolution; formation of a united front
that could encompass the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie; the
People’s Liberation Army; the Party, guided by Marxism-Leninism, which
enabled it to articulate the appropriate tactics at each phase of the struggle
and overcome rightist and adventurist deviations;16 and the USSR’s exis-
tence as a support base, and its victory in World War II. Lombardo describes
these factors as the Chinese Revolution’s “causas de la victoria.”17
In describing both Mexico and China as semifeudal and semicolonial,
and drawing universal lessons about worker and peasant mobilization under
such conditions on the basis of the Chinese experience, Lombardo seems to
ignore the vast social and cultural differences between Mexico and China.
It is hard to believe that Lombardo, who had a long history as a success-
ful organizer of Mexican workers, particularly as the founder of the CTM,
would be unaware of the vast differences between Mexican and Chinese
workers and peasants, and between the larger societies these workers and
peasants found themselves in. Yet, to be able to seriously advocate taking the
Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexico, Lombardo must have believed
that, despite whatever differences between Mexico and China he was cog-
nizant of (and he was no fool), there are certain universal characteristics of
workers and peasants, and of semifeudal and semicolonial societies, that
prevail across space, time and vast cultural and social differences. These
universal characteristics would then allow for lessons to be drawn from one
context and applied in another, seemingly completely alien context, on the
basis of the commonalities between all peasants or all semifeudal societies
(regardless of time and space).
That night, Mao received and dined with the executive bureau members
of the WFTU. Lombardo sat next to Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife) at dinner.
Lombardo was impressed by Mao:
His face is one of those that powerfully attract even those least inter-
ested in observing men. He has a high and shining forehead, small and
expressive eyes, nose short and straight . . .
If is hard to find a man so great and at the same time so modest, so
sure of the victory of all the peoples of the world over their oppressors
and of the necessity of recognizing that obstacles exist and that it is
necessary to destroy them.18
Mexico 33
When he met Mao, Lombardo explained “the similarity, in origin, between
the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, and I inform him
of the enormous interest with which all the peoples of Latin America fol-
lowed the development of the liberation war of his people.”19 After dinner,
Lombardo reflected on meeting Mao:
Mao Zedong is the leader of the greatest anti-imperialist national revo-

lution in history, the liberator of the Chinese people, which represent
a fourth part of the population of the planet; the creator of new forms
of democracy within the universal struggle that the peoples have today
taken up for their emancipation.
Alongside Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, the other important men
of my time—and I’m thinking of those who have influenced the fate of
the world with their work—occupy a secondary station.20
Lombardo’s comments to Mao merit some consideration. Did Lombardo

really see the Chinese and Mexican revolutions as being similar in their
origin? If his comment to Mao was merely cocktail party conversation, why
did he repeat it in his book, which is nothing if not didactic? While the Chi-
nese and Mexican revolutions both involved the mass mobilization of rural
people, the similarities end there.21 The Chinese Revolution was led by a
Marxist party and created a socialist country. The Mexican revolution was
led by a collection of decidedly nonideological leaders. It seems likely that
the comment was meant to further convince the reader of the relevance of
Chinese experience to the Mexican experience.
On November 27, the WFTU executive bureau members were treated to
a review of a special north China division of the People’s Liberation Army.
The review was an occasion for discussion with military leaders about the
military strategies and tactics developed in the course of the Chinese Revolu-
tion. Lombardo recounts some of these main points in his memoir, stressing
the political role of the army and Mao’s maxim that “the enemy advances,
we retreat.” While Lombardo does not say anything specific about the uni-
versality of these military lessons of the Chinese revolution, the way Lom-
bardo treats Chinese military theoretical formulations as aphorisms rather
than as something particular to China implies that he takes them as lessons
with universal application (despite the fact that Lombardo never made any
serious plans for armed struggle in Mexico). Despite Lombardo’s aversion
to armed revolutionary struggle in Mexico, some of Lombardo’s followers
(such as Arturo Gámiz) did eventually take up arms. It is intriguing to think
that Lomardo’s interest in Chinese approaches to economic development
may have exposed some of his followers to Chinese military doctrine.22
Lombardo’s final meeting with his Chinese hosts was on November 29
and focused on what the Chinese called the New Democratic form of gov-
ernment. A long section of his book deals with how the four classes of the
united front (proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and national
bourgeoisie) participate in government through parties and mass organi-
zations that represent different class forces and sectoral interests. He cites
statements by a variety of representatives of mass organizations representing
noncommunist social strata, such as an industrialist and a religious person,
in support of the idea that noncommunists were able to substantially and
meaningfully participate in governing the People’s Republic of China.23
Lombardo’s memoir was one component of a new, global campaign to
promote the Chinese Revolution as a model for much of the Third World.
In late 1949, the Chinese and Soviet communist parties reached a consensus
on this approach, and it was publicly announced in a speech by Liu Shaoqi
at the WFTU conference in Beijing. Given Lombardo’s status as an execu-
tive bureau member of the WFTU and his political astuteness, it is certain
that he would have been aware of the significance of this new approach. It
is likely, although I have found no direct evidence for it, that this new policy
was explicitly discussed with him by the Soviets and Chinese. Indeed, the
didactic manner in which he reports on his conversations with his “Chinese
friends” about various aspects of the Chinese Revolution seems to confirm
his support for this new agenda.24
Lombardo’s main political concern was to make Mexico economically
independent through deepening the land reform and a program of rapid
industrialization.25 The Soviet Union had provided an initial example for
implementing this vision. Now China, which communists assumed to share
a semicolonial and semifeudal nature with much of the rest of the Asia,
Africa and Latin America, was also implementing this vision. But the Chi-
nese Revolution had been a long, violent war led by visionary Marxist phi-
losopher. When Lombardo decided to promote China as a possible model
for an alternative path to modernization in Mexico, he was importing an
ideological package that contained volatile elements.
TWO SPIN-OFFS FROM LOMBARDISMO: ARTURO GÁMIZ’S

GRUPO POPULAR GUERRILLERO AND ESTHER CHAPA’S
SOCIEDAD MEXICANA DE AMISTAD CON CHINA POPULAR
In the early 1960s, two spin-offs from Lombardismo emerged in the context
of domestic and international polarization among communists set off by de-
Stalinization in the Soviet Union and the 1958 strike movement of teachers
and railway workers in Mexico. These spin-offs echoed Lombardo’s earlier
promotion of the Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexico. The first was
Esther Chapa’s Mexico-China Friendship Society (Sociedad Mexicana de
Amistad con China Popular), which dedicated itself to promoting the Chi-
nese Revolution as a model for Mexico. Unlike Lombardo, Chapa’s Society
focused on the relevance of the Chinese model of a protracted people’s war
as a revolutionary model for Mexico and emphasized the study of Mao
Zedong Thought rather than the relevance of particular development poli-
Mexico 35
cies. The second spin-off was the People’s Guerrilla Group (Grupo Popular
Guerrillero), which was led by Arturo Gámiz and other former PP(S) cadres
who left the PP(S)-led General Union of Mexican Workers and Peasants
(Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de México [UGOCM]) to launch
guerrilla warfare in Chihuahua. Whether or not the two groups had any
contact, together they represented the emergence of an ideological undercur-
rent in Lombardismo that saw armed struggle as an immediately possible
and desirable path for creating a socialist state in Mexico.
These currents in support of armed struggle emerged from Lombardismo
as a result of dynamics set in motion by global and Mexican events that
polarized the communist political terrain and clearly exposed the contradic-
tion within Lombardismo of supporting revolution abroad while promoting
compromise with the PRI at home. The conflict between the Soviet Union
and China, which began in 1956 and culminated in open polemics in 1963,
was a major international factor. The polemics highlighted different Marxist
positions, including the contradictions inherent in the PP(S)’s understanding
of China’s relevance to Mexico. Domestically, in 1958 there was a strike
movement in Mexico among teachers and railway workers. This struggle
marked a high point for communist mass influence in Mexico, despite the
fact that the formal leaders of the Communist Party and the People’s Party
were wary of the rank-and-file leadership of the strikes. Yet when the strike
movement was brutally crushed in 1959, Lombardo denounced the strike
leaders and the Communist Party showed itself incapable of responding to
the crisis situation. The weakness of the Communist Party and Lombardo’s
betrayal of the railway workers in the face of repression, combined with
the example of the triumphant Cuban Revolution and Chinese polemics in
favor of armed struggle, led some communist militants to try to find a way
to begin armed struggle in Mexico.26 It was in the context of these events
that Esther Chapa and Arturo Gámiz made their breaks with the reformism
of Lombardismo.
The Mexico-China Friendship Society

In 1957, Luís Torres Ordóñez, an economist at the National Indigenist Insti-
tute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista) and a member of Lombardo’s People’s
Party, formed the Mexico-China Friendship Society (Sociedad Mexicana de
Amistad con China Popular [SMACP]). The society distributed literature
from China and organized trips to China for artists, scientists, politicians and
representatives of the labor movement (notable travelers included muralist
David Alfaro Siqueiros and former president Lázaro Cárdenas27). The China
travelers would meet their professional counterparts in China and tour the
country, and then report on what they saw at meetings organized on their
return to Mexico. The society was also a center for Mexican sinophilia.
Thus, a meeting on Chinese art or science would mix admiration for Chi-
nese art and culture in general with particular admiration for socialist art
or science and the alleged ability of socialist society to make new and rapid
breakthroughs on these fronts (with the clear implication that, were Mexico
to become socialist, or at least adopt more socialistic policies, similar break-
throughs could be made in Mexico). The society both sought to propagate
the accomplishments of socialist China as well as to win over public opinion
for Mexico to switch diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China to
the People’s Republic of China.28 Because of its focus on propaganda work
and its ties to the Chinese government and ruling party, the society was the
main conduit for Chinese propaganda entering Mexico.29
Doctor Esther Chapa was the first female professor of microbiology at
the National Autonomous University’s (UNAM) medical school, a commu-
nist and an early feminist.30 In the 1930s, she fought for women’s right to
vote as a founding member and leader of the United Front for Women’s
Rights (Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer).31 As a communist women’s
rights activist, she emphasized women’s equality with men and their capacity
as revolutionaries in opposition to other activists who emphasized women’s
nurturing and maternal nature. In her 1936 pamphlet, El derecho de voto
para la mujer (Voting Rights for Women), Chapa emphasized women’s par-
ticipation in workplaces and universities; in the struggles against war, impe-
rialism and fascism; and in the revolutionary movement more generally.
Chapa stated,
She is in offices and schools, continues at home and takes to the street
for demonstrations, organizes meetings, acts in revolutions and, finally,
favors the sanctioning of leftist governments to support the proletar-
ian class that has the mission of destroying the capitalist regime under
which we live. And this modern woman is denied the vote under the
pretext that she is incapable of exercising it!32
In World War II, she participated in the Federal District’s civil defense com-
mittee as a women’s representative. She served as director of the National
School for Teaching Medicine (Escuela Nacional de Medicina Escolar) and
the National Nursing School (Escuela Nacional de Enfermería). She gave
medical care at a women’s prison and was involved in efforts to reform
women prisoners. Before her involvement in the SMACP, Chapa had a history
of leadership in international solidarity efforts. In 1939, President Cárdenas
named her director of a committee to aid Spanish children victimized by the
Spanish Civil War,33 and she was active in solidarity activities with the Soviet
Union sponsored by both the Mexican Communist Party and Lombardo’s
People’s Party. Until her break with Lombardismo in the early 1960s, her
politics were similar to those of Lombardo and the Mexican Communist
Party. She had participated in efforts to reform Mexican society and extend
solidarity to the socialist world, while also trying to work with the PRM and
PRI governments, including participating in official state activities such as
the civil defense committee and the prison administration.34
Mexico 37
The Declaration of Principles and Statutes of the SMACP enumerated
its goals: creating cultural and fraternal ties between the Mexican and Chi-
nese peoples; popularizing knowledge about China and its new era; devel-
oping interchanges; and working for the inclusion of the People’s Republic
of China in the United Nations.35 In the early 1960s, a major political dis-
pute arose about what the main task of the association should be. Should
it continue to mainly do propaganda work promoting China’s economic
and cultural advances? Or, should it mainly try to spread the revolutionary
lessons about China’s liberation through people’s war and concentrate on
doing propaganda work about the relevance of Maoism to making revolu-
tion in Mexico?
This conflict resulted in those who advocated a people’s war approach,
led by UNAM professor Esther Chapa, being expelled in 1963 and forming
their own Mexico-China Friendship Society.36 Both of these groups oper-
ated out of modest headquarters where they sold books, held meetings and
showed films produced in China. They concentrated on propaganda activi-
ties, distributing Pekín Informa (Peking Review), China Reconstruye (China
Reconstructs), books by China’s Foreign Languages Press and other litera-
ture emanating from the People’s Republic. They also organized regular vis-
its to China. The original group, still led by Luis Torres, concentrated on
sending notable political figures, artists and professionals to visit China. The
Chapa group organized delegations of workers and revolutionaries.37 Dur-
ing the spring and summer of 1966, Chapa organized a delegation of “18
workers who will take a one-year course on Marxism-Leninism” and made
arrangements for sending pamphlets and other literature back to Mexico
from China.38 Police records indicate that Chapa’s SMACP had about 150
members in 1966.39
In addition to bringing propaganda back to Mexico from China, Chapa
may have received some funds for her political work and for use by other
Maoists as well. Agents of the Political and Social Investigations (IPS) police
service suspected that Chapa was receiving funds from China. In speculating
about the source of an unusually large quantity of money that the Spartacist
Communist League (Liga Comunista Espartaco) had acquired, an IPS agent
speculated, “It is possibly Esther Chapa, Chairwoman of the Mexico-China
Friendship Society who is giving them money, as it is known that her trips
to China are for the purpose of bringing back funds for agitational work.”40
The differences between the two Mexico-China Friendship Societies
are clear in the police surveillance reports. The reports describe Chapa as
organizing “frequent visits to People’s China with numerous worker delega-
tions” and as having links to some of the small, pro-Stalin and pro-China
groups that were formed in the wake of de-Stalinization and the Sino-Soviet
split.41 They describe her as being in favor of the “struggle line” and apply-
ing the Chinese experience to Mexican workers’ struggles.42 The differences
between the two societies are illustrated by the dueling events they some-
times held on the same night. For example, on July 8, 1966, Chapa gave
a talk attended by about seventy people on the “State and Organization
of People’s China” at the National School for Political and Social Sciences
(Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales), where she talked about
her own visits to China. That same night, Torres’s society held an event
attended by about fifty people, where they showed a film on Chinese paint-
ing and landscapes.43 Later in the month, on July 22, Torres’s society held
a talk on printing, engraving and marble sculpture in China attended by
about forty people. That same night, Chapa gave a talk on women in China
at UNAM’s school of economics that was attended by about three hundred
people. She emphasized the role of women guerrillas in China’s communist
struggle and showed a film from China.44
As can be seen from the IPS police reports, Chapa’s events were usually
larger than Torres’s, sometimes by a large margin. It seems reasonable to
expect that youthful militants swelling the ranks of Mexican radicalism in
the 1960s would be more attracted to a presentation on women guerrillas
than a presentation on marble sculpture. To the extent that the Torres group
remained faithful to the vision of Lombardo Toledano, who discerned an
“anti-national provocation”45 within the 1968 student movement, it prob-
ably was less attractive to New Left youth and students than Chapa’s group.
Chapa’s presence on the UNAM campus might also have added to the pres-
tige, and accessibility, of her events.
In 1966, Chapa’s SMACP made a particular effort to commemorate the
anniversary of the October 1, 1949, founding of the People’s Republic of
China. The association marked the event with a September 30 movie show-
ing and talk by Chapa, followed up by a series of smaller, invitation-only
discussion sessions on October 1. The discussion sessions were each led by
experienced members of the SMACP. This effort illustrates how Chapa’s
SMACP saw the role of revolutionary propaganda in the formation of Mao-
ist organization in Mexico. First, Chapa showed a movie and gave a talk to
a large audience. Then, the next day, the SMACP gathered together smaller
groups to talk privately and in more depth about the content and meaning
of the previous day’s event. This was one method for Chapa to ideologically
train new Maoist cadre.46
In March 1967, Chapa returned from China with the impression that
she had been made China’s only official representative in Mexico and with
a small amount of economic aid in hand for forming a pro-Chinese com-
munist party. Subsequently, she held meetings with Spartacist Communist
League leaders with this proposition in mind. However, no unified Maoist
party materialized out of these efforts. It is impossible to know exactly
what she was told in China. Given China’s foreign policy shift toward
(and even greater domestic rhetorical emphasis on) favoring the develop-
ment of liberation struggles in other countries during the early years of
the Cultural Revolution, it seems quite plausible that someone in China
who met with Chapa gave her a strong endorsement vis-à-vis the politics
of Torres’s SMACP. Certainly, Chapa’s emphasis on revolutionary struggle
Mexico 39
over economic development echoed the ideological battles being fought
within the Chinese Communist Party and best matched China’s official line
at the time. However, given the chaos in China’s government in 1967 and
the fact that Torres’s society kept functioning as it always had, it does not
seem that whatever Chapa was told was very meaningful in the long run.
China did not break off relations with Torres’s society, and there is no
further evidence that China considered Chapa its sole representative in
Mexico. Perhaps Chapa was a victim of a combination of the revolution-
ary enthusiasm and breakdown in government functioning of the Cultural
Revolution. Or perhaps the responsible Chinese party members quickly
rethought their decision and decided it would be too awkward to inform
Chapa of their error. In any case, Chapa seems to have placed much more
importance on her (short-lived) position as China’s official representative
within Mexico’s revolutionary movement than China did.47
Travel to China and talks given by those returning from these trips, along
with the organized distribution of Chinese propaganda by the friendship
societies and other pro-China political groups, were key ways in which
Maoist politics were spread to Mexico. The IPS police archives show inten-
sive propaganda efforts by Maoist forces during this period, with political
activists showing up individually or in groups as large as twenty at universi-
ties and elsewhere with bookstands featuring the works of Lenin and Mao
and other literature from China.48 Such propaganda activities were common
but risky, since although this sort of propaganda was legal, these efforts
sometimes ended in police attacks on the political activists.49
The People’s Guerrilla Group

Arturo Gámiz had been a member of Lombardo’s PP(S) and had played a
leading role in a series of land invasions conducted by the PP(S)-led UGOCM
(General Union of Mexican Workers and Peasants) in Chihuahua and north-
ern Durango during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1964, Gámiz and
others left the PPS in order to begin armed struggle, culminating in the
September 23, 1965, assault on the Madera Barracks.50 The most in-depth
ideological statements made by the movement led by Gámiz appeared as a
series of five resolutions (printed in pamphlet form) adopted by a “Moun-
tain Meeting” (Encuentro de la Sierra) held in February 1965 to unify his
movement around a political platform in Torreón de Cañas, Municipio de
Las Nieves, Durango.
These resolutions display influences from a number of sources, most
prominently the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. They also show a signifi-
cant Chinese influence.51 As a member of the PP(S), Gámiz and his leader-
ship cohort were exposed to Chinese communist ideas (including Lombardo’s
memoir discussed above), and they assimilated some of these ideas into their
own program for revolution in Mexico. Indeed, China is indicated as a refer-
ence point at the beginning of the third resolution: “Compared with China
and other European nations the history of our Fatherland is very short.”
In the fifth resolution, the polemics against the “peaceful road,” while not
unique to the Chinese position, echo the Chinese polemics against the Soviet
Union of the same period. The third resolution states,
It’s common to speak of progress and stability in the abstract but we

revolutionaries shouldn’t go around in the clouds with abstractions,
we should give things their real meaning. There are two social classes,
never, at any moment should a revolutionary let himself forget this, the
exploited and the exploiting.
This position, along with the summation of Mexican history since the Mexi-
can Revolution as a “half century of bourgeois dictatorship,” represented
a sharp break with the Lombardista and Communist Party orthodoxy that
saw the economic development of Mexico under the PRM and PRI as hav-
ing a significant revolutionary nationalist aspect to it.52 In particular, the
emphasis on “development for whom” echoes Maoist economic thinking in
China’s polemics with the Soviet Union.
Mao’s maxim that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is
echoed in Gámiz’s statement that “rights and freedom reside in the gun.”53
Also telling, Mao’s concept of the mass line is reflected in the following
statement by Gámiz: “The obligation of revolutionaries is to synthesize and
rationalize the experience the masses gain in their struggles and integrate
it with the universal revolutionary movement.”54 While Gámiz was not an
archetypical Maoist, an examination of his ideological statements shows the
influence of the Chinese Revolution. After having been exposed to Maoist
ideas as a PP(S) cadre, Gámiz took up some Maoist ideas and wielded them
in explaining his reasons for taking up arms after leaving the PPS.
Chapa and Gámiz: From Lombardo’s Popular Front

to Mao and Che’s Armed Struggle
Esther Chapa’s Mexico-China Friendship Society continued its propaganda
work throughout the 1960s, and its work was carried on by her sister Vir-
ginia after Esther’s death in 1970.55 It remained the main conduit for Chi-
nese propaganda and as such was a key link in the ideological training of
Mexico’s Maoists. Arturo Gámiz’s People’s Guerrilla Group was smashed
soon after its ill-conceived assault on the Ciudad Madera barracks in Chi-
huahua, with some survivors joining another guerrilla group, the Party of
the Poor. These two groups came out of Lombardismo but broke with it
because of their militant stances, which involved taking up the politics of
Maoism to a greater or lesser extent. They were part of a larger turn toward
armed struggle and confrontational mass politics that occurred in the 1960s.
What happened that made advocates of armed struggle like Chapa and
Gámiz leave Lombardista political organizations (the original SMACP and
Mexico 41
the UGOCM,56 respectively) in the early 1960s? Before the ruptures of the
late 1950s and early 1960s, most Mexican communists perceived no conflict
between the idea of eventually waging an armed struggle to overthrow the
Mexican state and a long-term policy of supporting the left-wing of the PRI.
Major communist parties around the world had integrated broad popular
front politics with armed struggle during the 1930s and 1940s.57 Lombar-
do’s discussion of the Chinese Revolution as a model for Mexican revo-
lutionaries did not ignore the Chinese experience of armed struggle, even
though that was not what he chose to emphasize. When Esther Chapa wrote
in 1936 that the modern woman “acts in revolutions and, finally, favors the
sanctioning of leftist governments to support the proletarian class that has
the mission of destroying the capitalist regime under which we live,” she
put mass uprisings side-by-side with supporting the left of the ruling party.
Yet after the Sino-Soviet split with its polemics over Khrushchev’s policy of
peaceful coexistence, the failures of Mexico’s communist leaders in 1958,
the successful examples of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the decisive
defeat of the French in Vietnam in 1954, a shift occurred. What had previ-
ously not been a contradiction within the thinking of Lombardismo became
a contradiction. Those who were won over to the new armed struggle line,
or who had inclined in that direction all along, had to separate from their
old organizations and begin creating focos or people’s armies, depending
on their particular orientation. So Arturo Gámiz gathered his forces and
assaulted the Madera Barracks, while Esther Chapa founded a propaganda
society dedicated to winning over other Mexicans to follow the model of
the Chinese Revolution.
THE GUERRILLA EFFORTS OF FLORENCIO MEDRANO
Florencio Medrano’s efforts at forming a base area for a Maoist people’s war
in Mexico from 1973 to 1978 represent a particularly noteworthy attempt
to make a Maoist revolution in Mexico. While Maoist ideas had a broad and
diverse influence from the 1960s on, Medrano was a special case. A central
tenet of Maoism is the idea that a protracted people’s war is necessary to
make revolution, that “political power flows from the barrel of a gun.” Of
all the political forces that took a large part of their inspiration and ideologi-
cal orientation from the experience of the Chinese Revolution, Medrano and
his guerrillas were the only ones to make sustained efforts at creating base
areas for a protracted people’s war according to the Maoist model. In addi-
tion, Medrano considered Maoism an all-encompassing world outlook and,
in that regard, was more Maoist than many other communist and guerrilla
groups that were heavily influenced by Mao, but felt that Maoism was only
applicable to particular spheres of politics and warfare. If there was ever a
movement that might have become a Mexican Shining Path, it was Medrano
and his followers.
Florencio Medrano Mederos was born into a poor campesino family.
Before becoming a Maoist, he had been an activist in the Communist Party,
in Danzós Palomino’s Independent Peasant Union (Central Campesina Inde-
pendiente) and in Génaro Vásquez’s Guerrero Civic Association (Asociación
Cívica Guerrerense). In May 1966, he served a month in prison for a land
invasion he led in his home town of Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico. Between
1964 and 1966, Medrano was in dialogue with Javier Fuentes, leader of the
Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (Partido Revolucionario del Proletari-
ado [PRP]), about joining the PRP. Upon return from a trip to China, Fuen-
tes encouraged Medrano to join another delegation Fuentes was organizing
to China. In the summer of 1969, Medrano went to China for six months
(from July 9 to December 31) as part of a delegation of at least seven mem-
bers of the PRP.58
During his time in China, Medrano received what Elena Poniatowska
calls a “leadership course.”59 The Special Prosecutor for Political and
Social Movements of the Past (Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales
y Políticos del Pasado)60 claims Medrano attended an international cadre
school. Ramón Pérez also claims that Medrano received military and ideo-
logical training in China.61 None of the sources get into the specifics of the
content of the military and political training. Medrano got to see quite a
bit of the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Yan’an and the
Jinggang mountains. He spent time on a collective farm and learned about
Chinese rice cultivation techniques. Medrano and his companions attended
a banquet held by Zhou Enlai for foreign delegations and Medrano shook
Zhou’s hand.62
On his return to Mexico, Medrano unsuccessfully disputed the leadership
of the PRP with Fuentes. Medrano felt that since the majority of the PRP’s
membership was campesino, then it should be led by a campesino like him-
self. This argument reflected Medrano’s anti-intellectualism, which had been
stoked by anti-intellectual currents in China during the Cultural Revolution
and was heightened by the poor performance of the PRP intellectuals who
Medrano tried to train in guerrilla warfare techniques in the mountains of
Morelos. The PRP decided it would launch a protracted people’s war in
Yucatán and proposed to send Medrano there to lead it. Medrano argued
against such a move, claiming he was only valuable in Guerrero and More-
los, where he had a mass base of support, and that in any case, “They’re
not even Mexicans over there.” This odd proposal by Fuentes and the PRP
leadership seems to reflect a desire to recreate the Chinese experience by set-
ting up a guerrilla front in a remote location where the state would have less
ability to field its repressive apparatus. Although threatened with expulsion,
Medrano prevailed and the PRP abandoned the idea of sending him to find
followers and start a guerrilla war in Yucatán.63
Before these conflicts between Medrano and other leaders of the PRP
could lead to division, a PRP bomb maker in Mexico City accidentally blew
himself up, setting off a police roundup of PRP cadre and leading to the
Mexico 43
arrest of Fuentes. This left Medrano as the main leader of the PRP outside
of jail. Medrano took control of what was left of the organization and set up
a mass front called the National Worker-Peasant-Student Association (Aso-
ciación Nacional Obrera Campesina Estudiantil [ANOCE]).64 At the core
of ANOCE was a “struggle committee” comprised of thirty experienced
Maoists, including some activists who knew some Chinese. The first major
effort ANOCE undertook was the occupation of vacant land (intended for
luxury recreational development) on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, creating a
squatter community that they called Colonia Rubén Jaramillo.65
In the early 1970s, there were many squatters’ movements across Mex-
ico. Poor peasants were flooding into Mexican cities due to the crisis of
campesino agriculture. The lack of available housing in the cities forced
many new arrivals to join in forming new settlements on the outskirts of
the cities.66 But Medrano’s March 31, 1973, land take over in Cuernavaca
was fundamentally different from other squatter struggles going on at the
same time, mainly because it was launched and led with the express purpose
of creating a base area for a Maoist protracted people’s war. In contrast to
other squatter settlements in other parts of Mexico, the way in which the
Colonia Rubén Jaramillo was run reflected important themes of the Cultural
Revolution that Medrano absorbed while in China.
On March 25, 1973, an assembly of poor Cuernavacans held by ANOCE
had set seven o’clock on the following Saturday, March 31, for the land take
over. By nine on the 31st, only a few families had shown up, and Medrano
got on his motorcycle to round up the stragglers. He rode around the poor
parts of Cuernavaca, exhorting his followers to follow through on their
commitment to the land seizure. By dawn on Sunday, more and more fami-
lies were arriving, and Medrano awarded four hundred square meters to
each of the first thirty families, on the condition that they build their new
homes and begin living on their plot within seventy-two hours. After three
days, three hundred families had arrived and the settlement was continu-
ing to grow. In order to accommodate the stream of newcomers, Medrano
called an assembly of the squatters to reduce plot sizes. By appealing to the
need for proletarian solidarity, Medrano overcame initial resistance from
the first wave of settlers, and the assembly decided to reduce all plots to two
hundred square meters. Eventually, fifteen hundred plots were distributed
and after a few months the population reached ten thousand.67
In order to build up the settlement’s infrastructure, Medrano made collec-
tive labor mandatory. According to Elena Poniatowska’s account, “Almost
everyone was enthusiastic to participate in the communal tasks. Installing
drainage pipes, raising the church, fencing in the cemetery, the sports field
and the children’s playground were everyone’s work.” When asked what
materials a bridge would be built with, Medrano answered, “With the met-
tle we carry inside,” echoing Chinese propaganda about massive develop-
ment projects built with little more than the will of the workers themselves.
Indeed, as Medrano put it, “I want to make the Jaramillo settlement the first
people’s commune of the Mexican Republic.” Medrano organized Red Sun-
days, when idealistic youths who came from Cuernavaca and Mexico City
joined in on the collective labor, echoing the movement of educated youth to
do peasant labor in the Chinese countryside. The hospital was named after
Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who died serving in the Chinese com-
munist Eighth Route Army and who was the subject of one of Mao’s four
“always read” essays. Echoing the Cultural Revolution’s education reforms,
the schools built in the settlement emphasized the need for education to be
connected with productive labor.68
Student participation in the Red Sundays generated some unforeseen
political complications. Many of the students were flirting with a variety
of leftist ideologies. Their presence expanded the range of political ideas in
contention within the settlement (some students were partisans of the PCM,
while others belonged to other militant Marxist organizations, such as the
Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party). Some ANOCE cadres complained
that the students didn’t do their work well and that they wanted to talk
about Marxism and other revolutionary ideas more than they wanted to
work. Some cadres also felt that bringing in crowds of newcomers allowed
cover for police spies to enter the Colonia. However, Medrano felt that by
facilitating political ferment within the settlement and developing its ties to
outside political forces, he was creating a broader support base for initiating
armed struggle.69
As the settlement grew, the lesser political commitment of many late-
comers caused problems for Medrano’s political project. Some settlers
came with the idea of trying to sell or rent their plots, having already done
the same in other squatter communities. Police were also able to enter dis-
guised as squatters. One even got elected as a block representative to the
Colonia’s assembly. After a couple months, Medrano began focusing more
and more on political and military preparations for armed struggle and
paid less attention to keeping the community politicized and mobilized.
Sometimes these preparations required him to leave Rubén Jaramillo for
days at a time. As a result, problems such as inadequate trash removal
accumulated, and enthusiasm for collective labor and political struggle
diminished. Criminals began to use the Colonia as a base of operations,
since the police couldn’t enter. As Medrano’s preparations for armed strug-
gle advanced, he and his guerrillas began carrying arms openly, scaring
many community members.70
By the end of 1973, the dangerous experiment of an armed, self-governing
area on the outskirts of a major city was too much for the Mexican govern-
ment to take, and the army invaded the settlement (it did not leave until
1980). Medrano and the core of his armed force escaped and made their way
to the countryside around Tuxtepec, where Medrano had organized some
supporters. For five years, until his death in combat, Medrano and his forces
tried to adapt Mao’s military and political teachings to Mexican conditions
and form a base area in a border region between the states of Oaxaca and
Mexico 45
Veracruz. In 1920s China, border regions between states had been lawless
areas, and Mao Zedong took advantage of that weakness to create rela-
tively stable base areas along the Hunan-Jiangxi and Jiangxi-Fujian borders.
While Medrano was able to use the terrain and popular support to evade
the police, he was never able to create a base of operations that the police or
army could not penetrate.
Medrano formed mass organizations among timber workers and peasants
in the Tuxtepec region and used his armed forces in support of the demands
of these organizations. Medrano criticized Mexico’s Guevarist guerrillas for
being disconnected from the people:
Our movement is also the result of a series of experiences like those of

the compañeros Génaro Vasquez, Lucio Cabañas, and Arturo Gámiz,
who offered their lives for the sake of the people. These compañeros
deserve our respect because they died for their ideals. But they also made
mistakes, and we have to learn from their mistakes. These compañeros
believed that a small unit of guerrillas, Che Guevara style, would be
able to carry off a revolution in Mexico. That’s not the way, because
the guerrillas can’t be disconnected from the people. A revolution has
to be made by the people—that is, directed by its best children. That’s
why our idea is to tie ourselves to the people, so that we can teach them
the ideal of struggle. They have to know their rights and know how to
defend them against oppressors and exploiters and their servants.71
Because of this, Medrano expressed his need to be close to the communities

he was trying to organize, even though this put his life in danger.72 However,
despite his attempt to combine involvement in popular struggles with armed
struggle, he was unable to form any sort of relatively stable base area, and
his party (now renamed the United Proletarian Party of America [Partido
Proletario Unido de América, PPUA]) was never able to pass over from
being a roving guerrilla band to being a force more deeply rooted among the
people of the Tuxtepec region.
Medrano’s somewhat mechanical fidelity to Mao is the hallmark of his
movement. According to Ramón Pérez, a young militant in the PPUA from
Oaxaca, Medrano always had Mao’s works at hand and encouraged his mili-
tants in their study as well.73 Drawing on the strong anti-intellectual strain in
the Cultural Revolution and the tendency to see Mao’s writings as applicable
to any problems that could possibly arise, he constantly studied Mao’s works
but neglected the sort of broader study that would be necessary to truly com-
prehend the nature of Mexican society in the 1970s. When he felt threatened
by intellectuals, Medrano would respond by invoking the purges of intellec-
tuals in China in order to quash opposition.74 He saw the bold action of the
workers and peasants on the basis of Mao’s theories as all that was necessary
in order to make revolution, that somehow, by “daring to struggle” he would
not only “dare to win,” but also would inevitably win. Medrano was guided
by his faith in the power of Maoism as an ideology and in the capacity of the
people to struggle when led by a Maoist political line.
CONCLUSION
Travel to China was a central feature in the domestication of Maoism in

Mexico. It was in China, during the WFTU conference, that Lombardo
was briefed on the early Soviet and Chinese policy of promoting the Chi-
nese Revolution as a model for other underdeveloped countries. And his
travel memoir communicates what were intended as universal lessons of
the Chinese experience for a Mexican audience. The Mexico-China Friend-
ship Societies (SMACP) created regular channels of communication for both
literature and people to flow between China and Mexico. Reports of trips
to China and the universal, revolutionary lessons learned there were central
features of the propaganda work of both the SMACPs. Florencio Medrano
became a Maoist on his trip to China, where he absorbed political lessons
that guided his actions from his return in 1970 to his death in 1978. His
closest collaborators also had made the trip to China.
The connection to China created through the SMACPs and by other
China travelers formed the basis for the creation of a counter-narrative
to both dominant Mexican and (after 1956) Soviet narratives about the
Chinese Revolution. Relying on the authority of their own experiences and
utilizing the Chinese propaganda that flowed through pro-Chinese politi-
cal networks, travelers to China painted a positive picture of the Chinese
Revolution, both as an event in its own right and as a source of lessons to
be applied in Mexico. As the crafters of the pro-China counter-narrative,
China travelers played a disproportionate role in the creation of new Maoist
political efforts.
The authority that Chapa and Medrano derived from their travel to
China played a major role in their ability to craft a credible Maoist coun-
ter-narrative and lead others in developing Maoist politics. In both Ponia-
towska’s interviews with residents of Colonia Rubén Jaramillo and Pérez’s
memoir of being a PPUA activist, Medrano is shown to have derived sub-
stantial authority and leadership credibility from his travels. For Chapa,
China travel was a central element in her activities. Much of the SMACP’s
propaganda work involved testimonials by Chapa and others as to what
they had seen in China, and one of their main activities was to organize oth-
ers to travel to China and “see the future for themselves.”
In drawing lessons from the Chinese Revolution, Mexican Maoists’ think-
ing reflected a belief in “revolutionary asynchronicity.” That is, they thought
that they would almost literally reproduce aspects of the Chinese revolution-
ary experience. In his portrayal of the Chinese Revolution as a model for
Mexicans, Lombardo elides the vast differences between Mexico and China.
He perceived the Chinese Revolution as offering a model for all “semi-feudal,
Mexico 47
semi-colonial” countries. Medrano sought to reproduce many aspects of the
Chinese experience. In the Colonia Rubén Jaramillo, students from the cit-
ies came to engage in collective labor with the resident squatters, like youth
in China who had been “sent down” to the countryside. In addition, such
collective labor was perceived and described in terms taken directly from
Cultural Revolution China. The schools in the Colonia were structured, like
Chinese schools, around the practical needs of the poor, and combined labor
with instruction. After losing the Colonia to the Mexican army, Medrano
then retreated to a border region, where he attempted to reproduce Mao’s
experience in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area of the Jinggangshan.
The Mexican case displays not only a broad dissemination of Maoism,
but also its defeat and co-optation. Medrano never succeeded in building a
large and successful party or guerrilla army. Constantly on the run follow-
ing the breakup of Colonia Rubén Jaramillo, he was limited to small-scale
engagements in support of mass organizing in a small area of the country.
Other Maoists helped found squatter settlements and get the residents legal
title, electricity and water service, and then found that their mass base no
longer had much interest in revolution. Confronted with this situation, lead-
ers and their mass bases by the 1990s were backing the PRD, PT, or even
the Salinas presidency. While some of them still used Maoist language, they
had been co-opted. While Maoism in Mexico in the early 1960s represented
a way of breaking with the previous history of communists helping to build
the PRI’s “great arch,” by the 1980s most Maoists had either been crushed
or swung back into the limits imposed by the state.
While many activists (such as Arturo Gámiz) adopted elements of Mao-
ism, I have focused in this chapter on Chapa and Medrano as archetypical
Maoists. Chapa and Medrano were key figures in the promotion and praxis
of Maoism in Mexico. The political trends that they led did not just take
elements of Maoism that they found useful; they treated Maoism as an all-
encompassing world outlook. In this sense, they bear a strong resemblance
to Latin America’s most successful and well-known Maoist organization,
Peru’s Shining Path. The question of why Chapa, Medrano and their compa-
triots’ efforts never became what Sendero was in Peru can only be answered
speculatively, but it is mainly due to structural differences between Mexico
and Peru. There are some intriguing parallels. The leading role of Chapa
echoes the leading roles played both by women and university professors in
Sendero. Chapa’s SMACP, Medrano’s PRP/ANOCE/PPUA and Sendero all
emerged through a process of splintering within the communist movement
set in motion by the Sino-Soviet split. Medrano’s insistence on the sufficiency
of Mao’s work for understanding the universe brings to mind the philosophy
and social science courses taught by Abimael Guzmán and Antonio Díaz
Martínez at the UNSCH in Ayacucho, which used Quotations from Chair-
man Mao as their sole textbook. And travel to China played a key role in the
formation of archetypical Maoist organizations in both Mexico and Peru.
3 Forging the Fourth Sword of
Marxism
The Chinese Revolution and Peru’s
Shining Path
You see?—continued Mao—that’s how to start a people’s war; it’s not

hard. Do you want to make war? It’s a question of making up your
mind.
—Mao speaking to two members
of the Peruvian Communist Party, December 19631
Peru is the only Latin American country where a Maoist party led an
insurrectionary movement on a scale that created a major and protracted
national crisis. This movement, led by the Partido Comunista del Perú (Sen-
dero Luminoso), better known as the Shining Path, was the most significant
instance of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America.2 This
Maoist party was founded in the Peruvian highland city of Ayacucho and
initially found its strongest support at Ayacucho’s Universidad Nacional de
San Cristóbal de Huamanga, where its leader, Abimael Guzmán, taught phi-
losophy.3 The war launched by the Shining Path in 1980 affected the lives
of all Peruvians during its most intense years, approximately from 1985 to
1992, and at least 69,000 people died during the war.4
The war drew on and was fueled by poverty and social alienation which
have deep historical roots in Peru. In particular, the war was an expres-
sion of the long-standing divergence between Lima and Peru’s vast Andean
hinterlands. While the Shining Path spread to most of the country by the
late 1980s, it began in the 1970s as a largely localized phenomenon in the
highland Ayacucho region. The Shining Path was particularly successful at
connecting its Maoist ideology to the discontentment of Ayacucho’s stu-
dents and intellectuals. This cohort of provincial intellectuals and students
subsequently drew on the acute poverty and underdevelopment of the Aya-
cucho countryside to mobilize the initial social base for the war which would
define Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Both because of the scale of the war unleashed by the Shining Path and its
importance for recent Peruvian history, the Shining Path is a crucial object
of investigation for any study of the influence of the Chinese Revolution in
Latin America. While the Shining Path was conditioned by Peru’s particular
history and social conditions, the leaders of the Shining Path were armed
Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism 49
with an ideology that they forged by interpreting the lessons of the Chinese
Revolution. As demonstrated by the quotation that began this chapter, the
Communist Party of China gave aid and encouragement to Peruvian Mao-
ists in their preparations to make revolution in Peru. As part of preparing
for revolution, many Senderistas spent time in China, and their experience
of the Cultural Revolution was directly related to their theory and practice
of people’s war.
As the only self-proclaimed Maoist people’s war to occur in the west-
ern hemisphere, the Shining Path phenomenon at first seemed out of place,
and, coming as it did in 1980 with the return to democracy in Peru and the
decisive move toward market socialism in China, out of time as well. Steve
Stern has described the Shining Path as an organization that emerged both
within and against history.5 This phrase seems apt for encapsulating the
enigmatic nature of the Shining Path. One of the early actions that Send-
ero carried out in 1980 involved hanging dead dogs from lamp posts, first
in Lima, then in Ayacucho, denouncing Deng Xiaoping and upholding the
Gang of Four, who had been overthrown in 1976 by Deng’s supporters in
the Chinese Communist Party. These sorts of actions seemed strange to most
Peruvians, yet they demonstrated fundamental points of reference in the
mental universe that the Shining Path inhabited. The Shining Path is only
really comprehensible in light of the influence that the Chinese Revolution
exercised on Peru during the 1960s and 1970s.
Many historians who have touched on aspects of recent Peruvian history
involving the Shining Path have combined an awareness of the importance
of ideology to the movement’s leaders with astonishment at the actions the
organization took precisely because of its world outlook, such as the hang-
ing of dogs referred to above. In order to properly understand the Shining
Path’s motivations and actions, one has to understand the doctrinal disputes
within Chinese communism in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The Shining
Path’s interpretations of these debates led directly to many concrete policy
formulations on its part. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say
that Mao’s criticisms of Peng Dehuai in the wake of the Great Leap Forward
had a more direct bearing on the nature of Shining Path peasant organizing
in Ayacucho than did the writings of Peruvian communist founding father
José Carlos Mariátegui. But those Chinese debates lie far outside the realm
of expertise of most historians of Peru.
The influence of Chinese revolutionary politics in Peru did not come
about spontaneously or somehow by chance. The top leadership of the Shin-
ing Path, and many other pro-Chinese communists from competing organi-
zations, traveled to China and studied Maoism there. Not unlike Catholic
priests taking special classes in Rome, in China they honed their ideology
and developed a more consolidated, and more sophisticated, understanding
of their mission. And they returned imbued with the authority of having
studied in Beijing. Travel to China bestowed both knowledge and social
capital. On their return to Peru, they energetically championed their beliefs.
And as rival Maoist organizations emerged in the 1960s, they fought polem-
ical battles with the ferocious zeal of rival inquisitors. What the Maoists
forged in Peru, culminating in the Shining Path’s insurrection of the 1980s
and 1990s, was the product of strenuous effort. To the extent that this was
accomplished seemingly “against history,” it is a testament to the large scale
and conscious effort involved.
In this chapter, I chart the history of this Chinese influence in Peru. I
begin with the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on the Peruvian Communist
Party and then examine the way in which rival Maoist groups laid claim
to their authority as bearers of the “correct political line.” After looking at
the broader Chinese influence brought about in Peruvian society through
the strength of the fractious but numerous Maoist forces in the 1960s and
1970s, I move on to a more particular consideration of the Shining Path,
undoubtedly the most important example of the influence of the Chinese
Revolution in Latin America. I hope that this chapter will make clear that
while China certainly aided Peruvian Maoists, agency always lay with Peru-
vian actors.
PERU’S REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION:

THE SOIL WHERE CHINESE IDEAS TOOK ROOT
The Peruvians Maoists were part of a Peruvian radical tradition that had its
first flowering in the wake of World War I. At the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, Peruvian industries such as sugar, cotton, oil, textiles and mining had
created a proletariat that continued to grow with the expansion and greater
incorporation of Peruvian industry into global circuits of capitalist produc-
tion and circulation. Between 1880 and 1920, the growth of commerce
caused the population of Lima, the economic as well as the political center of
the country, to grow from 104,000 to 224,000.6 Most of the migrants who
swelled Lima’s population came from Peru’s heavily indigenous countryside.
The growth of a proletariat and sizeable lower middle class in Lima had
serious political repercussions. The framework of the Peruvian state was
totally inadequate to the task of incorporating, co-opting or placating rest-
less urban masses (it is not for nothing that the 1895–1919 period of Peru-
vian history is referred to as the “Aristocratic Republic”). In 1918–1919, a
working-class movement for an eight-hour workday and the response to the
deterioration of living conditions in the face of the inflation that followed
World War I both brought down the Aristocratic Republic (inadvertently
giving rise to Augusto Leguía’s 1919–1930 dictatorship) and gave birth to the
modern Peruvian radical tradition. As two successive general strikes shook
Lima, a student movement emerged to support the workers and push for uni-
versity reform. The unrest caused by the students and workers was brought
to an end by a coup led by Augusto Leguía. These movements brought Víctor
Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui to prominence.
In the following years, these two men matured into the principal leaders
of the Peruvian left. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, future founder of the
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) was a student leader in
this 1918–1919 movement. José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Partido
Socialista del Perú (which would later be renamed the Partido Comunista
del Perú [PCP]), played an important role as a journalist and critic during
1918–1919. In 1919, Leguía sent Mariátegui into exile in Europe, where he
became a Marxist and founded the first Peruvian communist cell with three
other Peruvians in Genoa in 1922.7 After his 1923 return to Perú, Mariáte-
gui’s home became the center of leftist debate and activity. Amauta, a politi-
cal and cultural journal edited by Mariátegui, achieved continental fame.
A central concern of Mariátegui’s was the place of indigenous people in
Peruvian society. Peru had (and has) long been characterized by the divi-
sion between the cosmopolitan city of Lima and the vast provinces in the
mountains largely populated by indigenous people. Peru’s 1940 census
showed an Indian majority of over 75 percent in Peru’s poorest departments,
while nationally indigenous people were about 40 percent of the popula-
tion.8 Mariátegui posited that indigenous identity was a central aspect of
Peruvian identity, in opposition to the dominant notion that Peru’s large
Indian population was culturally and socially distinct from Peruvian society
and represented a problem of integration (or, for the less enlightened, just a
problem).9 Mariátegui also defined the Indian problem as a socioeconomic
question, which could be resolved by overthrowing feudal social relations in
the Peruvian countryside.10 As Mariátegui summed up his position, his “new
approach locates the problem of the Indian in the land tenure system.”11
Mariátegui died in 1930, only two years after founding the Socialist
Party. As both a Marxist thinker whose originality and creativity achieved
international recognition and as the founder of the communist movement
in Peru, the legacy of Mariátegui has been both extremely important to
and heavily contested by later generations of Peruvian communists. As we
will see below, a Maoist reading of Mariátegui played an important role
in how the Shining Path defined itself politically. Since he died at such a
young age (he was only thirty-five), and so soon after founding the party,
many Peruvian communists felt he died with much work left undone. In con-
ducting interviews or having discussions with Peruvian leftists in the course
of my research, it was not uncommon to hear speculation about whether
things might have turned out better for their movement had “José Carlos”
lived longer. Mariátegui’s status as a mythical founding father of Peruvian
communism has meant that his ideas have often been subject to interpreta-
tion and dispute based on the rival claims of activists who feel that, were
Mariátegui alive today, he would certainly be a Maoist (or a Trotskyite, or
a social-democrat, and so on).
Peru began to recover from the Great Depression already in 1933, earlier
than most other Latin American countries. The recovery reached full swing
during World War II, but then the economy encountered difficulties in the
postwar period. The PCP remained a secondary political force, conducting
much of its political work through the labor union it led, the Confeder-
ación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP). In 1948, pro-APRA naval
officers launched a failed insurrection in Callao, which led to a powerful
conservative reaction in the form of a military government headed by Gen-
eral Manuel Odría. Inspired by Perón, Odría enacted populist measures like
increasing public works spending, but he also issued a decree suspending
habeas corpus and attempted to crush political dissent. While APRA was
Odría’s main target, other opposition forces, including the PCP, were also
caught up in Odría’s repressive net.
The repressive policies of Odría’s 1948–1956 dictatorship (including cen-
sorship and arbitrary detentions) and unwillingness to hold elections galva-
nized a growing popular movement against him in the early 1950s, eventually
forcing General Odría to call elections and leave power in 1956. The most
powerful expressions of popular opposition to the Odría government were a
series of uprisings and strikes in Arequipa, a traditional bastion of opposition
to the central government in Lima, where the PCP played an important role
in organizing student and worker participation. Despite a temporary surge
in membership and its important role in the opposition movement, the PCP
was unable to assimilate many of its new recruits into party life and failed in
its ambition to become a more significant national political actor. As Odría
left power in 1956, the Sino-Soviet split began to take shape, soon resulting
in the formation of a pro-China faction in the PCP.
1956–1964: CHINA’S ROLE IN THE BIRTH OF PERUVIAN MAOISM
On November 14, 1963, two leaders of the pro-China faction of the PCP,
José Sotomayor and Manuel Soria, left Peru for China to consult with the
Chinese leadership on whether or not they should form a separate, pro-
Chinese party.12 For several years, factions allied to the Chinese and Soviet
positions had coexisted within the PCP. Their coexistence had been difficult
and acrimonious. The internal party dispute became public when pro-Soviet
members of the PCP unsuccessfully attempted to stop the 1961 publication
of Carlos De la Riva’s pro-China Donde nace la aurora, which consequently
appeared with the following dedication: “To those who made my trip to the
People’s Republic of China possible. To those—‘revolutionaries’ or not—,
who try to make my life impossible for having taken that trip.”13 In the
early 1960s, the pro-Chinese faction began focusing its efforts on organiz-
ing peasants. In July 1962, communist lawyer Saturnino Paredes took an
important step in this direction when he presided over the second national
congress of the Peasant Federation of Peru (Confederación Campesina del
Perú), but diverting resources to work in the countryside was opposed by
the pro-Soviet faction.14 Unsuccessful policies exacerbated the differences.
The PCP’s 1962 presidential candidate, General César Pando, received only
1 percent of the popular vote, and many party leaders were arrested after a
military coup annulled the elections in order to prevent APRA from coming
to power.15 Now that the Soviet Union and China had publicly parted ways,
Sotomayor and Soria wanted to consult with the Chinese Communist Party
about whether they should form a new, Maoist party.
The pro-Chinese faction of the PCP first emerged in the wake of a five-
month seminar that China hosted for Latin American communists in 1959.
The official reason for the seminar was to teach the lessons of the Chinese
Revolution, but it was also intended to win over adherents in the dispute
between China and the Soviet Union. It is unclear how many Peruvian com-
munists attended, although at least three major leaders went: Sotomayor, De
la Riva and (later leader of the pro-Soviet faction) Jorge del Prado. It is also
unclear which countries were represented, although Sotomayor does make
reference to a request by the Peruvians and Ecuadorians that the seminar
cover the issue of minority nationalities in China.16
Sotomayor describes the program of study in the following words:
The courses covered questions dealt with at length in the works of Mao
Zedong and the works of the Chinese leaders: the united front, the peas-
ant question, the mass line, the armed struggle in the Chinese Revolu-
tion, the Chinese party in conditions of clandestinity and while legalized,
the struggles inside the party, Mao Zedong’s philosophical thought. The
speakers made a detailed exposition of each of these topics, in two or
more sessions, and finally gave an account of books and pamphlets which
should be consulted. All, absolutely all, were works by Mao Zedong.17
In addition to the study courses, seminar participants visited major cities,

factories, peoples’ communes, cultural institutions and schools in order to
get a more lively notion of Chinese socialism. While the Chinese instructors
repeatedly said that the Chinese Revolution could not be mechanically cop-
ied in other countries and that the courses were for the purpose of extract-
ing general lessons, Sotomayor writes, “However, the truth is that after five
months of study in Peking, they all returned certain that, on a fundamental
level, the road traveled by the Chinese Revolution would have to be repeated
in the countries of Latin America.”18
On November 17, 1963, Sotomayor and Soria visited the Chinese embassy
in Bern, where they spoke with the Chinese ambassador via a translator they
had met in China in 1959.19 The Chinese embassy took a week preparing
the papers for the rest of the Peruvians’ trip, after which they continued on
to China via Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Burma. This was to be the new route
from Peru to China, now that travel via the Soviet Union was not an option.
By the end of November, Sotomayor and Soria arrived in Beijing, where they
were greeted by two Chinese cadres and a translator. One of the cadres had
been the professor on the topic of the united front from the 1959 seminar,
and they were taken to stay at the same house they had stayed at in 1959.20
In the second week of November, the Peruvians met with eight mem-
bers of the standing committee of the politburo of the Chinese party. Deng
Xiaoping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China and future
top leader of China after Mao’s death, was the main speaker on behalf of
the Chinese side. Deng said that the Chinese party had been impressed by a
speech that Sotomayor gave at the 1960 Moscow conference of communist
parties and agreed with the Peruvians on the need for the PCP’s pro-China
faction to form its own party. Next, Sotomayor and Soria met with Mao
Zedong, who emphasized the importance of people’s war as the strategy
communists should adopt for seizing state power. The quote at the begin-
ning of this chapter is from Sotomayor’s account of the audience with Mao.
A meeting with Mao represented a special honor. By having the Peruvian
delegates meet with Mao, however briefly, the Chinese gave extra empha-
sis to the message that they felt the Peruvians were taking an important
action and that the Chinese party supported them. After receiving the Chi-
nese imprimatur to create a new party, Sotomayor and Soria returned to
Peru, arriving at the beginning of January 1964. Already on January 18,
the Peruvian Maoists convened the Fourth National Conference of the PCP,
where they expelled the leaders of the pro-Soviet faction and elected their
new national leadership.21
The Content and Character of Peruvian

Maoism at the Time of the Split
Before moving on chronologically, let us examine what Peruvian Maoists
understood the lessons of the Chinese Revolution to be in the early 1960s
when they launched their new party. In the early 1960s, Abimael Guzmán
was only a secondary (although ascendant) figure in the PCP, and the Chi-
nese Cultural Revolution had not happened yet (it began in 1966). Thus, by
looking at the state of Peruvian Maoism in the early 1960s, we can better
understand the particular ways in which Guzmán and other Shining Path
leaders further elaborated and changed Peruvian Maoism after having expe-
rienced and interpreted the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Carlos de la Riva’s Donde nace la aurora is based on his own travels in
China in 1959 as part of the Peruvian delegation to the seminar for Latin
American communists held by the Chinese party and gives us a sense of
what lessons Peruvian Maoists were drawing from Chinese experience in
the early 1960s. De la Riva was a leading communist organizer, pamphle-
teer and painter in Arequipa, where he played an active role in founding the
Federación Departamental de Trabajadores de Arequipa (FDTA) in 1951, as
part of the early 1950s upheaval in Arequipa against the Odría dictatorship.
Nicknamed “Carlos de la rabia” for his quick temper, he could be a diffi-
cult cadre for the party to manage. It is indicative of his independent spirit
that Donde nace la aurora was published in defiance of party prohibitions
against discussing internal divisions outside party ranks. De la Riva was an
immediate opponent of Soviet de-Stalinization and Khrushchev’s proposed
peaceful road to socialism and played a major role in organizing the pro-
Chinese faction of the PCP.22
De la Riva hoped that his book would “serve the revolutionaries of our
Peru” and, referencing the book’s title as a metaphor for the struggle for
socialism, that “soon the dawn will break.”23 Much of De la Riva’s account
of his time in China is purely descriptive. He discusses the places and things
that he saw and the accounts of the transformation of both the economy
and people that he heard. There are several instances, however, where his
account as an observer of China becomes much more didactic, and he seems
to be distilling universal principles for communist actors. For example, in
discussing the recruitment of workers by the Chinese Communist Party, he
notes that the party recruited only “the best in terms of their personal con-
duct, their prestige, and their technical level.”24 This was a timely issue for
De la Riva because the PCP was having difficulty in absorbing new recruits
from the movement to overthrow Odría.25
Two other particularly didactic sections of Donde nace la aurora are De
la Riva’s treatment of the topics of guerrilla warfare and the united front
during his recounting of the history of the Chinese Revolution. De la Riva
is careful to spell out some of Mao’s axioms of guerrilla warfare, such as
“when the enemy advances, we retreat.” Further elaborating on Mao’s mili-
tary genius, De la Riva also details how a premature change in strategy
from mobile warfare to positional warfare, which Mao had opposed, cost
the Chinese communists dearly.26 Likewise, De la Riva’s historical account
of the united front strategy that the Chinese communists deployed in fight-
ing against the Japanese occupation is highly didactic, detailing not only the
broad outlines of the policy but also particular problems of application such
as the issue of maintaining the party’s “autonomy within the united front.”
These discussions of particular issues involved in carrying out policy seem
directed toward readers grappling with the problem of putting the ideas
De la Riva discusses into practice.27 De la Riva ends by drawing an explicit
parallel between China’s recent history and a possible future for Peru, citing
Marx’s statement, “You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil
wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but
also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political
power.” This is precisely what had happened in China, De la Riva argued,
and what he hoped would happen in Peru.28
PERUVIAN MAOIST FACTIONALISM AND LEADERSHIP

AUTHORITY DERIVED FROM CHINA, 1964–1970
After forming the pro-Chinese Communist Party, the Maoists began suf-
fering divisions of their own.29 The main trunk of the new party, the PCP-
Bandera Roja, splintered numerous times between 1964 and 1970. Expelled
factions sometimes constituted new parties that also claimed the name of
Communist Party, but became better known by the descriptive suffix (such
as Shining Path or Red Fatherland) they chose to set them apart from the
other Communist Parties. From the perspective of an investigation of Chi-
nese influence in Peru, what is most interesting about these divisions in the
Peruvian Maoist movement is the way in which rival Maoist leaders invoked
the authority they had gained from studying in China and cited Chinese
texts, particularly Mao’s works, to support their respective positions. Com-
peting leaders invoked authority derived from having studied in China and
demonstrated their mastery of Chinese texts to back their claims to have
the best or most true interpretation of how to apply Maoist principles to
Peruvian realities.
Attendance at a cadre training course in China in 1965 was an important
event for Abimael Guzmán and gave him more prestige and authority, which
helped to catapult him to party leadership, despite his youth (he had been
born at the end of 1934).30 Guzmán had been seen as a promising future
leader since joining the party in 1958.31 As a rising star in a leadership field
that had been narrowed by the Sino-Soviet split, study in China was the
crowning event that gave Guzmán entrance to the top level of party leader-
ship. His trip to China was probably arranged through the Lima offices of
China’s Xinhua news agency, the only permanent official presence of the
People’s Republic of China in Peru until diplomatic recognition came in
1971. China almost certainly paid for the trip, since it paid for almost all
visits by communists from the developing world for cadre training courses.
Guzmán has described his 1965 trip in the following words:
I went to a cadre school, a school that had two parts, the first was politi-
cal, it started with the study of the international situation and ended
with Marxist philosophy, there were various courses and a second part
which was military, held at a military school in Nanjing, where I studied
theory and practice in a deeper way.32
In an earlier interview with El Diario, Guzmán related an episode from his

1965 training that particularly struck him, and that is illustrative of the way
in which he saw military and political matters as being interrelated:
When we were finishing the course on explosives, they told us that any-
thing can explode. So, at the end of the course, we picked up a pen and
it blew up, and when we took a seat it blew up, too. It was a kind of
general fireworks display. These were perfectly calculated examples to
show us that anything could be blown up if you figured out how to do
it. We constantly asked, “How do you do this? How do you do that?”
They would tell us, don’t worry, don’t worry, you’ve already learned
enough. Remember what the masses can do, they have inexhaustible
ingenuity, what we’ve taught you the masses will do and will teach you
all over again. That is what they told us. That school contributed greatly
to my development and helped me begin to gain an appreciation for
Chairman Mao Tsetung.33
On his return to Peru, Guzmán took a leave of absence from his post as a
philosophy professor in Ayacucho and worked at the center of the Commu-
nist Party organization in Lima until he visited China again in 1967. After
leading a party delegation to an international conference in Albania in April
1967, Guzmán made his second trip to China in August and September.34
This trip to China had a profound impact on him. The trip was occasioned
by China’s decision to cut off funds to the PCP, which Guzmán went to China
to inquire about.35 Despite the decision to stop providing a direct subsidy
to the PCP-BR, the Chinese Communists continued to foot the bill for this
and future trips to China by Peruvian Maoists. This trip allowed Guzmán
to witness the Cultural Revolution firsthand, which greatly impressed him.
He noted that much had changed since 1965. Where China had formerly
been quiet and orderly, there were now massive marches, a resurgent cult of
personality around Mao Zedong, and the destruction of literature opposed
to Mao’s line.
The Cultural Revolution was at that moment, (. . .) things that impressed

me, deep changes, from the manner in which we foreigners were received
before and during the Cultural Revolution. For example, (. . .) we had
an occasion to go to a cleansing (depuración) of books, I remember a
famous writer, Mao Tun, (. . .)
The marches were different, very deep changes, in all fields. Of
course, political changes much greater. When I was in that place, I was
in the same center, with military protection. When I was there in ’65 it
was like a convent, silent; in ’67 . . .
’67 was deafening, at certain hours of the day, marches, (. . .). Well,
another thing that caught my attention, when I was informed that the
Communist Party had been dissolved, only the Central Committee was
left, as a singular organism. All the militants had to return to prove if
they had sufficient credit to be communists. (. . .) And that’s how, infor-
mation is another cultural action, we consist of that which has been
(. . .) an exposition on Mao Zedong thought, for the first time I saw
information of that type.36
As Guzmán describes above, he was a witness to the Cultural Revolution in

full swing. It should not then be surprising that the factional struggles that
broke out among Peruvian Maoists resembled the rhetorical battles between
Red Guard factions in China, with each side hurling quotations from Mao
Zedong at each other and claiming to be the true bearers of Mao’s line.
One of the main points of contention that developed within the Maoist
camp concerned the proper way of building up forces for guerrilla warfare.
As a basic point of orientation, the PCP-BR had decided that “our funda-
mental tasks and our principal forces should be thrown into the country-
side”37 with an eye to following the Chinese revolutionary model of waging
a peasant-based war to surround the cities from the countryside. But despite
the prior organizing experience of general secretary Saturnino Paredes and
some other Bandera Roja activists, the party had no clear ideas about how
to go about doing this, apart from expanding the organization of the com-
munist controlled Confederación Campesina del Perú. However, the link
between the work of expanding peasant syndicalism and making the leap to
revolutionary armed struggle was not particularly clear. Given that the end
of all this activity was supposed to be armed struggle and revolution, the
stakes of the ensuing debates were particularly high. In this context of try-
ing to figure out how to organize peasants not only to join a peasant union
but also to wage a revolutionary war, the Peruvian Maoists looked more
and more to the Chinese model for the answers that stymied them. Between
1964 and 1970, the Peruvian Maoists as a whole undertook two main tasks:
their efforts to organize in the countryside and their efforts to learn from
the Chinese Revolution in order to answer the difficult questions raised by
their efforts to organize in the countryside. Over the course of the second
half of the 1960s, just as China was emphasizing the correct understanding
of ideology for making revolution during the Cultural Revolution, Peruvian
Maoists were more and more assiduously studying and trying to learn from
the Chinese example and emphasizing the importance of correctly under-
standing the Chinese model in order to make their own revolution.
Following his return from China, Guzmán went back to Ayacucho
instead of Lima. He was infused with a new faith and passion. Those who
knew him at the time still remark on how he came back from the second
trip to China as an even more driven and convinced activist. Guzmán began
to speak publicly on political and philosophical issues on a regular basis,
establishing a public visibility and influence that complimented his leading
organizational position within the PCP-BR. He quickly established himself
as the hegemonic force on the left in Ayacucho, despite having been absent
for most of the time between his 1965 and 1967 China trips.38 Guzmán built
up an independent organizational base of support in Ayacucho in support of
an approach to waging peasant-based guerrilla warfare sharply opposed to
Saturnino Paredes’s gradualist approach.
Paredes’s gradualism centered on the slow building up of peasant unions
in the hope that the reformist struggles of the peasantry would someday
grow so great that the nature of their struggle would undergo a qualitative
transformation and become an openly revolutionary struggle. Guzmán, on
the other hand, advocated immediately putting the party apparatus on a
war footing. According to Guzmán’s plan, the PCP would have to conduct
just enough work among the peasantry that it could establish a strong base
of support, and then it should launch armed struggle. In the course of the
struggle, the PCP would gain more support and, having gained support on
the basis of already being engaged in armed struggle, would do away with
the knotty problem of transforming peasant unionism into people’s war-
fare. Paredes and Guzmán dueled with each other using quotes from Mao
Zedong. Paredes cited Mao’s statement that “revolutionary war is a war
of the masses, and can only be waged by mobilizing and relying on the
masses.” Guzmán responded with Mao’s injunction to “learn warfare by
waging war.”39 While Guzmán and Paredes’s debate probably suffered in
terms of clarity because of this approach, their rhetorical strategy of wield-
ing Mao’s quotations as a sacred text and using those quotations against
each other served to highlight each antagonist’s claim be the true bearer of
Chinese revolutionary politics.
THE BROAD INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY

THOUGHT IN PERU IN THE 1970S
While the Maoist parties were the most concentrated expression of China’s
influence in Peruvian society, China also had a more diffuse influence on
Peru in the 1970s. This influence was greatest among university students, in
the social sciences and in the union movement. The activities of Peru’s Mao-
ist parties contributed to this broad influence. Maoist teachers used works
published by China’s Foreign Languages Press to influence students, profes-
sionals from various fields were invited to visit China as part of the solidar-
ity activities undertaken by the Maoist parties, and the organizing efforts of
the Maoist parties extended their influence into the union movement. As a
result, Maoism became an increasingly legitimate political option for many
Peruvians. This was particularly true not only for intellectuals, but also for
workers and peasants in areas with concentrations of Maoist organizers.
This increased legitimacy, in turn, benefitted the Maoist parties and helped
to keep the largest ones afloat, despite their tendency toward fratricidal
disputes over differences in interpreting doctrine.
The Chinese influence in the universities was part of a general radical-
ization of Peru’s universities in the late 1960s and 1970s. Young radical
professors commonly used Soviet texts from the 1930s and 1940s (edited
and reissued in later decades) that were designed for systematically teaching
Marxism. These Soviet texts were commonly used in Peruvian social sci-
ence courses and achieved a wide distribution after the Velasco government
normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1969.40 The common use of
these Soviet manuals in Peru followed their earlier introduction in Cuba
in the early 1960s, and it may well be that the attraction of these texts for
radical Peruvian professors depended in large part on the widespread use of
these manuals in Cuba.41 Professors sympathetic to China not only made
use of these Soviet manuals, but also introduced Chinese texts. At the Uni-
versidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH) in Ayacucho,
Abimael Guzmán and the Shining Path ideologue and agronomist Antonio
Díaz Martínez taught classes where the only assigned textbook was Quota-
tions from Chairman Mao Tsetung.42
Numerous professors and intellectuals who did not join Maoist parties
were influenced by China. Iván Hinojosa has noted that Maoism contributed
to shaping the “intellectual agenda of the period” and that “the universities
were inundated with monographs and, to a lesser extent, undergraduate the-
ses, dedicated to peasant studies, agrarian economy, social movements, social
classes, and so forth.”43 For example, while only a small number of profes-
sors actually belonged to the Shining Path at the UNSCH, a larger number
were sympathetic to socialist China. This is reflected in the large proportion
of professors from the UNSCH who traveled to China. An anthropologist in
Ayacucho who was a student activist at the UNSCH in the 1970s estimates
that out of approximately 120 professors at the UNSCH at that time about
a quarter of them had traveled to China at some point. While most of the
UNSCH professors who traveled to China were not organized supporters of
Sendero, their travel to China helped to create an atmosphere on campus
where Chinese ideas received legitimacy and a sympathetic hearing. Even well-
respected liberals at the university, such as rector Efraín Morote Best (who
hired Guzmán and whose imprisoned son, Osmán, became a prominent Shin-
ing Path leader), went to China on a cultural delegation in the late 1960s.44
A noteworthy example of the Chinese influence on Peruvian social scien-
tists was professor of education Carlos Castillo Rios. An author of multiple
books on the theme of poverty and education in Peru, he also wrote a book
on the Chinese education system based on a sixty-day visit to China. Also
noteworthy are the two well-known Peruvian authors, Oswaldo Reynoso
and Miguel Gutiérrez, who left Peru to work as polishers for China’s For-
eign Languages Press during the 1970s and 1980s, and each wrote novels
inspired by their experiences living in China. That intellectuals unaffiliated
with any communist party traveled to, worked in and wrote about their
time in China both demonstrates and contributed to the relatively broad
legitimacy of Chinese-inspired politics in Peru in the 1970s.45
Outside of the academy and intellectual circles, the Chinese influence
was more dispersed and heavily dependent on the activity of the Maoist
parties. By the late 1970s, the Red Fatherland party played a hegemonic
role in the miners’ and teachers’ unions. Mining was the largest income-
generating export sector of Peru’s economy, and “forceful action by the
mineworkers caused enormous losses” in the late 1970s.46 In the northern
department of Cajamarca, Red Fatherland organized peasant self-defense
patrols to stop crime, in effect constituting a parallel self-government out-
side, but not directly opposed to, the Peruvian state.47 In the countryside
of Ayacucho, the Shining Path exercised enormous influence by the late
1970s. Thus, in some parts of Ayacucho and Cajamarca and in some parts
of the workforce, such as among miners, Chinese ideas were quite influ-
ential, or at least Peruvian political parties basing themselves on Maoist
doctrine were influential.
THE SHINING PATH AT THE UNIVERSIDAD
NACIONAL DE SAN CRISTÓBAL DE HUAMANGA
In 1970, Abimael Guzmán and his followers were expelled from the PCP-
Red Flag when Guzmán lost his factional struggle with party head Saturnino
Paredes. The new PCP-Shining Path faced a dire organizational situation.
As Guzmán put it, “We separated in February ’70, in ’71 we had a II Ple-
nary Session of the Central Committee in Ayacucho, there were twelve of
us, twelve people, no more! And in Peru just fifty something.”48 And so, in
1970, the Shining Path was born, with only handfuls of supporters spread
around the country (in all departments except Madre de Dios) and a solid
core in Ayacucho based at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de
Huamanga (UNSCH).49 Seemingly, Guzmán was not well-placed to rebuild
the PCP, yet by 1980 Sendero was situated to launch its “people’s war.”
Sendero was able to utilize its strong position at the UNSCH to recover
from the damage caused by the 1970 split with Paredes and the PCP-Red Flag.
Abimael Guzmán was not only a charismatic and energetic leader, but he also
held important administrative positions at the UNSCH which strengthened
his ability to use the university as a recruiting and training ground. In the late
1960s and early 1970s, Guzmán was in charge of the Ciclo Básico, or core
curriculum, and used this position to change introductory social science, biol-
ogy and philosophy courses into courses on historical materialism, the dia-
lectics of nature and dialectical materialism respectively.50 Other Senderista
professors also held important administrative positions that amplified their
ability to influence students and other professors. Antonio Díaz Martínez,
a leading Senderista and an agronomist at the UNSCH, ran a rural social
science and agronomy research institute funded by Switzerland and also con-
trolled student access to housing and university food services.51
Sendero organized its student wing, the Frente Estudiantil Revoluciona-
rio (Revolutionary Student Front) por el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui
(FER-SL), to contest and control student government in the early 1970s.
Sendero’s student supporters participated in this organization, which also
collaborated on work outside the university with Sendero’s generated orga-
nizations such as the Movimiento de Campesinos Pobres (Poor Peasants
Movement) and the Frente de Defensa del Pueblo (People’s Defense Front).52
Students recruited by Sendero sometimes also recruited family members
into the generated organizations. Sendero also formed the Centro de Tra-
bajo Intelectual Mariátegui (CTIM [Mariátegui Intellectual Work Center]),
which drew in some professors for regular discussions of Mariátegui’s works
and issued pamphlets that interpreted Mariátegui in a Maoist light. Some
academics drawn into the work of the CTIM were invited to visit China and
to work on translating Maoist materials there. Antonio Díaz Martínez, for
example, refined the translations for China Reconstruye from 1974–1976.53
Propaganda materials from China played an important role in Sendero’s
proselytizing. Pekín Informa and China Reconstruye were ubiquitous and
Sendero distributed them for free in massive quantities. These magazines,
and other Chinese propaganda materials, arrived from China in Lima via the
Asociación Cultural Peruana China, which served as a clearing house that
made Chinese materials available to all interested newsstands, bookstores
and political parties. Pekín Informa was then shipped via the fourteen-hour
drive to Ayacucho, where it arrived regularly. At the end of the week, the
previous week’s edition of Pekín Informa would arrive in Ayacucho. Sen-
dero also showed Chinese films regularly, featuring model operas from the
Cultural Revolution and Mao greeting red guards in Tiananmen Square.
The well-organized and free distribution of Chinese materials filled an intel-
lectual gap in Ayacucho, where few people had access to a variety of news-
papers and printed materials with articles on world events and philosophy.
The scarcity of other materials and the well-organized distribution of Pekín
Informa amplified the influence of Maoist ideas in Ayacucho.54
A central part of Sendero’s growth in the 1970s was the recruitment of
students training to become teachers. In 1963, Guzmán set up the Escuela
de Aplicación Guamán Poma de Ayala, a training institute for rural teach-
ers, at the UNSCH. This normal school was an important site for Send-
erista recruiting within the UNSCH and was a vehicle whereby Sendero
recruits were placed as teachers in rural communities (on the state payroll).
State attempts to close down the Escuela de Aplicación Guamán Poma de
Ayala met with resistance from Sendero.55 Sendero’s organization of rural
teachers, who in turn recruited their own students, was the key to Sendero’s
growth in rural Ayacucho.
In addition to utilizing Chinese materials, such as films, books and mag-
azines, and arranging for party members and sympathetic intellectuals to
travel to China, the Shining Path directly utilized Chinese ideas in conceiv-
ing and organizing its activities. This is clear from examining some of the
Shining Path’s documents, which make direct use of Mao’s works and other
Chinese sources, in addition to referring to Chinese experiences as examples.
An intellectual history of the Shining Path or of international Maoism would
need to examine the myriad ways in which one could plausibly suggest Chi-
nese influences on Senderista ideas. However, for the purpose of establishing
the Chinese influence on the Shining Path, we will restrict ourselves to citing
several representative examples where Shining Path documents (or docu-
ments written by important figures in the Shining Path) directly cite Chinese
sources or refer to Chinese experiences.
In order to implement their strategy of a peasant-based guerrilla war, the
Maoists in Ayacucho had to get to know the region’s countryside. To help
in that work, in 1968 the party’s Ayacucho Regional Committee (Comité
Regional de Ayacucho del PCP) put together a short handbook titled “Plan
de investigación en el campo.”56 The purpose of the handbook was to spur
investigative work that had been “practically abandoned”57 and that would
lead to “the formation of the armed forces in the countryside.”58 The first
half of this booklet is comprised almost entirely of quotes from Mao Zedong
and includes a full reprint of Mao’s 1930 essay promoting the practice of
on-site investigation, “Oppose Book Worship.”59 The Mao quotes used in
this document highlight the importance of conducting investigations into
social conditions for conducting revolutionary work and touch on some
basic methodological principles. Some quotes touch on epistemology, such
as, “The only way to know a situation is to conduct social investigation.”
Other quotes concern practical details: “An investigation meeting doesn’t
have to be large; three to five, or seven or eight people are enough.”60 The
shorter, second half of the handbook lists seven categories of issues that
Maoist cadres were to pay attention to when conducting rural investiga-
tions, touching on historical, geographical, economic and social, political,
ideological and military aspects of the location under investigation, as well
as “the role of imperialism in the countryside.”61 Almost all of the material
in this handbook dealing with the philosophical basis and methods of social
investigation that the Maoists carried out in Ayacucho’s countryside are
taken directly from Mao, right down to a section with the subhead “Victory
in China’s Revolutionary Struggle Will Depend on the Chinese Comrades’
Understanding of Chinese Conditions.”62
As already mentioned, the Shining Path derived its name from the
phrase “on the shining path of Mariátegui,” which it affixed to some of
its publications. When Guzmán’s faction was expelled from the PCP-Red
Flag, Guzmán led Shining Path cadres in studying the works of José Carlos
Mariátegui as part of the process of cohering the new party. As Guzmán
demonstrated in his 1978 talk “Let’s Take Back Mariátegui and Recon-
stitute His Party,”63 much of this “taking back” of Mariátegui was an act
of interpreting Mariátegui’s works in light of Mao Zedong. In “Let’s Take
Back Mariátegui and Reconstitute His Party,” Guzmán enumerates a num-
ber of fields of political theory and activism where he claims, “Mariátegui
established the general political line of the Peruvian revolution.”64 Guzmán
gives his own synthesis of Mariátegui’s writings and demonstrates how they
correspond to Mao’s ideas.65
For example, after quoting two paragraphs written by Mariátegui for
the original political program of the Socialist Party, Guzmán states, “Here
are condensed in a masterful way the problem of Peru’s revolution and its
two stages: the national democratic, or bourgeois-democratic of a new type
in the language of Mao Zedong, and the proletarian revolution.”66 After
quoting Mariátegui on the nature of communist-led armed forces, Guzmán
states, “Here is the army of a new type that the revolution generates and
which can only arise under the absolute control of the party, as Mao Zedong
teaches.”67 Later, directly addressing the issue of the convergence between
the ideas of Mao and Mariátegui on so many points, Guzmán explains,
“Participating directly in the class struggle of our country, Mariátegui was
able to develop as a Marxist and apply the universal principles in a creative
form, thus the similarity of many of his theses with those of Mao Zedong.”68
While the Shining Path made “taking back” Mariátegui a signature part of
its political project, this “taking back” involved a deliberate rereading, if not
re-working, of Mariátegui in a Maoist light.
Antonio Díaz Martínez’s book China: La revolución agraria also dem-
onstrates Sendero’s direct borrowing from Maoist China. From 1974 to
1976, Díaz worked in China on the Spanish edition of China Reconstructs,
a magazine published in several languages to spread the word of social-
ist China’s accomplishments. He had considerable freedom to travel, and
China: The Agrarian Revolution combines observations and interviews with
his own description of China’s revolutionary history, drawing heavily on
Mao’s Selected Works. Because of the approving way in which China treats
Chinese developments, it can be taken not only as a description of Chinese
society through the eyes of a Peruvian Maoist, but also as a programmatic
statement of the PCP. As Díaz notes in his introduction, the revolutionary
process he describes in China “creatively applies the laws of Marxism to our
conditions (those of a backward country).”69 At least in its broad outlines,
China represents a statement not just about China, but also about what the
PCP intended to do in Peru as well. Thus, the sections dealing with Chinese
communist policy in its rural base areas before 1949 are particularly rel-
evant as statements for evaluating how the PCP intended to create and run
its own base areas.70 Indeed, some of these sections have titles such as “Why
Isn’t the Bourgeoisie Capable of Leading the Democratic Revolution in the
Backward Countries?” and “Why Is the Worker-Peasant Alliance Necessary
in the New Democratic Revolution?” and use Mao’s works as a basis for
universal political lessons, rather than for a discussion of China’s particular
history. Díaz chose this form of exposition deliberately “not just to achieve a
better understanding of social development but also to be more didactic.”71
Díaz’s book also demonstrates Sendero’s affinity for the policies that were
prominent during China’s Cultural Revolution. As discussed in Chapter 1,
the Cultural Revolution was a very contentious period in Chinese politics.
By repeatedly citing Zhang Chunqiao,72 a leading ideologue of the radical
Maoists during the Cultural Revolution and later one of the Gang of Four who
were put on trial after Mao’s death, Díaz signaled which stream of Chinese
revolutionary thought Sendero aligned itself with. This affinity is particu-
larly notable in Díaz’s repeated emphasis on the importance of ideology
and ideological firmness in socialist construction and in human endeavor in
general. For example, in discussing the construction of the Red Flag Canal in
Henan province, Díaz writes, “The work developed amidst a fierce line and
class struggle inside the party: one opposed going forward with construction
by saying that it was too much effort for too little gain, the other proposed
transforming nature based on the collective force of the masses, without
hoping for outside aid and finding their own solutions.”73
Likewise, Díaz’s discussion of the historical application of united front poli-
cies by the Chinese Communist Party echoed the relatively narrow conception
of a united front advanced during the Cultural Revolution. In discussing how
the communists altered their policies during the period of the Anti-Japanese
War in order to be more inclusive, Díaz lists a series of new policies imple-
mented by the communists in areas they controlled that he implies were only
correct because of the circumstances of the Japanese invasion, such as “not
economically eliminating the anti-imperialist middle bourgeoisie, not distrib-
uting the worst lands to the rich peasants” and “not physically eliminating
the landlords, not attacking intellectuals, not liquidating the counterrevolu-
tionaries, not monopolizing the organs of power with communists.”74 Absent
the Japanese invasion, Díaz seems to be saying that these policies of lenience
would have been incorrect, directly foreshadowing Sendero’s own policies in
Peru’s countryside. It is impossible to say whether or not the affinity Díaz
expressed for the politics of the Cultural Revolution came from his being edu-
cated in those politics while in China, or because he already held similar views
and then gravitated to what he already agreed with, or some combination.
Regardless of the cause of his, and Sendero’s, affinity for more draconian poli-
cies, the Chinese Revolution as understood through the lens of the Cultural
Revolution was held up as a model to be implemented in Peru.
Sendero used its preponderant position at the UNSCH, and particularly
the teacher training programs of the UNSCH, as a base for extending its
influence throughout Ayacucho and Apurímac. Over the course of the 1970s,
more and more Senderista teachers were placed in the countryside, and some
of their organizing efforts began to yield substantial rural support for Sendero.
These successes laid the groundwork for Sendero to absorb other revolu-
tionary militants in the Ayacucho/Apurímac countryside, including promi-
nent peasant leaders such as Lino Quintanilla and Julio César Mezzich.75
Sendero was thus in a position to capitalize on gross political mistakes by
the military government between 1978 and 1980 which allowed Sendero to
effectively seize control of a part of the Ayacucho countryside even before
declaring war against the government.
One of the principle political differences between the pro-Soviet and pro-
China wings of the PCP in 1964 was the Maoists’ insistence on armed strug-
gle as the only viable revolutionary path. Yet once Sendero Luminoso had
adequately established its organizational strength in the late 1970s so that
it could begin to seriously contemplate launching guerrilla warfare, a major
struggle broke out in the PCP-SL central committee over whether or not the
conditions were appropriate for launching the people’s war. Guzmán insisted
on moving forward to begin armed struggle, despite the fact that Sendero
was a relatively small party with little mass support outside Ayacucho depart-
ment. Guzmán’s opponents, core leaders of the PCP-SL who had played a
major role in building the organization over the course of the 1970s, argued
that Sendero had to grow larger before it could feasibly launch a people’s war.
Guzmán’s opponents also argued that the impending end of the military dic-
tatorship meant that Sendero would not be able to win mass support, while
Guzmán argued that the end of the military dictatorship revealed the weak-
ness of the state and that Sendero should exploit that weakness. This debate
played out at central committee meetings from 1978 through March 1980
as preparations advanced for launching the people’s war. By April 1980, all
of Guzmán’s opponents had either left the party or criticized themselves for
their “rightist” position of opposing beginning the armed struggle. While
several prominent Senderista leaders left the organization at this time, there
was not a concomitant exodus of lower-level militants.76
This internal struggle, which strengthened the resolve of the remaining Sen-
deristas, took place in the context of a developing favorable political situa-
tion in Cangallo, where Sendero would launch its people’s war in May 1980.
In 1978, Sendero launched a series of violent student strikes in the country-
side of Ayacucho. During these strikes, students assaulted police posts. In
late November 1978, the Ayacucho Civil Guard Command ordered the with-
drawal of all civil guards from four districts in eastern Cangallo in response to
these strikes. Due to the imminent end of military rule, the injuries and deaths
caused by the escalating strikes, and the lack of importance that poor, rural
areas held for the central government, the military decided it would be most
prudent to simply abandon eastern Cangallo. Sendero established its control
by bringing more cadres into the area and forming organizations for mobiliz-
ing and controlling the local people.77 At 2 a.m. on May 17, 1980, five Send-
erista militants, four youths led by a school teacher, began Sendero’s people’s
war by attacking the voter registration office in nearby Chuschi and burning
the ballot boxes that had arrived for the following day’s general election.78
CHINA, SENDERO AND THE PEOPLE’S WAR, 1980–1992
The expectation that Sendero’s Peruvian revolution would follow a similar

path to the Chinese Revolution played a decisive role in Sendero’s strategy.
In the early 1980s, Sendero had some early success in developing its organi-
zation in Lima, including organizing youth to throw Molotov cocktails at a
neighborhood municipal building to mark the beginning of the people’s war
in Lima in June 1980. But, in order to more closely follow the strategy of
surrounding the city from the countryside, Sendero backed off of its initial
successes in organizing support in Lima.79 Sendero’s overall strategy for tak-
ing power in Peru relied on ultimately provoking a U.S. military intervention.
Mao once ironically thanked the Japanese for invading China because that
invasion created the conditions for the growth and triumph of the Commu-
nist Party through the long years of the resistance war against Japan. Send-
ero’s strategy was based on replicating that experience in Peru.
The creation of rural base areas and surrounding the city from the coun-
tryside was the strategy that Sendero decided to pursue. And thus Sende-
ro’s approach to organizing the peasantry was a key issue. Between 1980
and 1983, Sendero expanded its influence rapidly through the Ayacucho
countryside and began to expand more slowly into other parts of the country.
Many peasant communities gave Sendero a relatively warm reception during
this initial period and approved of Sendero’s use of armed force to address
long-standing grievances of the communities. Sendero’s executions of cattle
thieves and abusive local bosses sometimes won it the support of communi-
ties. This was particularly the case in communities that had not benefited
from the 1969 land reform promulgated by the reformist military govern-
ment of General Juan Velasco Alvarado. This included most communities in
the southern highlands of Peru. Also, communities that had historically been
exploited by nearby haciendas (as opposed to communities of free-holding
peasants) were more likely to initially support Sendero.80
In late 1982, the Peruvian government under president Fernando
Belaúnde Terry sent the military to Ayacucho to deal with the escalating
Sendero threat. The Peruvian armed forces swept through the countryside
with indiscriminate violence. Sendero’s inability to protect many of the com-
munities where it had been welcomed by a segment of the population lost
it much of the support it had initially gained. At this juncture, Sendero’s
narrow approach to the united front contributed to a remarkable spiral of
violence in which Sendero had difficulty interpreting flagging peasant sup-
port as anything other than communities going over to the side of its enemy.
As peasant communities began to form self-defense patrols in opposition
to Sendero, first independently and then under state sponsorship, Sendero
began to treat some entire peasant communities as enemies and to wage war
on them.81 This was a remarkable and infamous turn of events for a revolu-
tionary force attempting to base itself mainly on peasant support. Sendero’s
narrow conception of friends and enemies prevented it from dealing flex-
ibly with the very difficult problem of flagging peasant support in the wake
of dirty war. In the context of severe state repression, voices of opposition
to Sendero emerged or gained strength in communities where Sendero had
previously been welcomed. Having cultivated an approach of seeing “con-
tradictions among the people” as “contradictions between the people and
the enemy” (to use Mao’s terminology), Sendero responded to these voices
with violence. Sendero’s violence against peasant critics was perceived as
illegitimate by peasant communities and created a spiraling effect where
Sendero had even less support. Effectively, Sendero’s own policies were key
to it losing the support among the peasantry that its strategy depended on.82
Despite the Shining Path’s ultimate failure in its revolutionary endeavor,
it was a relatively successful example of the domestication of Chinese revo-
lutionary ideas in the Americas. The war that Sendero waged was a massive
phenomenon, and it would be impossible to consider every potential way
in which Chinese politics influenced Sendero, especially as much research
remains to be done into various regional experiences of Sendero and into
the internal life of Sendero itself. Certainly, the overall strategy of surround-
ing the cities from the countryside was a direct and clear borrowing from
China. But there were other ways in which we can clearly show the continu-
ing Chinese influence on the Shining Path after the start of the people’s war.
During the war, the Shining Path’s propaganda continued to make direct
and explicit reference to Mao and the Chinese Revolution. Apart from
adopting the phrase Marxist-Leninist-Maoist to describe itself beginning
in 1982,83 quotations and references to Mao peppered all of the PCP-SL’s
major declarations during the 1980s. For example, in the 1982 document
“Let’s Develop Guerrilla Warfare,” which called on Peruvians to join the
Shining Path’s developing guerrilla struggle, Mao is directly quoted or
referred to five times in twenty-four pages, apart from numerous references
to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.84 In the 1985 document “Don’t’ Vote: Gen-
eralize Guerrilla Warfare to Win Power for the People,” which argued that
Peruvians should boycott the 1985 elections, Mao is directly quoted three
times in twelve pages.85 Following Abimael Guzmán’s capture and advocacy
of a peace accord with the Peruvian government, the Shining Path faction
that opposed a peace accord issued a document in 1995 titled “Overcome
the Bend in the Road, Developing the People’s War.” The main body of this
twelve-page document contains fourteen quotations from Mao and lists nine
works by Mao for further study.86
Even in internal documents used for guiding practical tasks, such as the
conduct of armed struggle, the Shining Path made direct use of Chinese
ideas. One example is a March 1983 Shining Path document that discusses
basic practical issues concerning the armed struggle, such as bomb making
and the formation of small armed squads and the coordination of tasks in
those squads. This document advocates using the tactic of “four groups and
a squad,” whereby an armed squad is divided into four different groups,
each with different responsibilities in carrying off an attack: “shock,” “fire,”
“aid,” and “escape.” The document attributes this method of organizing
armed groups to Lin Piao, a leading figure in Mao’s Eighth Route Army.87
The Shining Path also borrowed other practices from China. In the Lima
shantytown where the PCP-SL tried to establish an urban base area, the Shin-
ing Path copied the Cultural Revolution practice of using wall posters (dazi-
bao in Chinese) as a medium for people to post their thoughts and grievances.
In addition to posters glued to walls, Sendero also set up chalkboards that
could be used in this way.88 The Shining Path also seems to have copied Chi-
nese approaches to rehabilitating antisocial community members in Raucana,
such as wifebeaters and alcoholics. The methods of reform through labor and
ideological training sessions (enforced through coercion when those in need
of reform didn’t voluntarily participate) employed by the Shining Path in
Raucana are highly reminiscent of Chinese methods, although there is no
direct evidence of Sendero copying Chinese practice here.89
THE CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

OF MAOISM BY THE SHINING PATH
While the leaders of the Shining Path drew heavily on Chinese ideas and
expected their Peruvian revolution to reproduce the Chinese experience,
they also adapted their ideas to Peruvian conditions. This process of domes-
tication combined intentional adaptations of Chinese Maoism with adap-
tations imposed by the process of putting ideas into practice in Peruvian
conditions. In a nod to the necessity of domesticating Maoism to Peruvian
conditions, the Shining Path named its ideology Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
“Gonzalo Thought.” Just as “Mao Zedong Thought” was the term the Chi-
nese had used to denote their development of “Marxism with Chinese char-
acteristics,” the addition of “Gonzalo Thought” explicitly recognized that
some particular adaptations and additions had to be made to the universal
ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in order to apply that ideology to
Peruvian realities.
The Shining Path’s most explicit adaptation of Maoism to Peruvian condi-
tions was the attempt to assimilate Mariátegui’s work into a Maoist frame-
work. As I have argued above, this involved reconceptualizing Mariátegui
in light of Mao, not a re-working of Mao in light of Mariátegui. But despite
the fact that the Shining Path’s use of Mariátegui consisted in significant part
in rebranding Maoism for a Peruvian audience, this rebranding of Maoism
also involved an element of domesticating Maoism to Peruvian conditions.
If the Shining Path’s leaders did not see some need to adapt Maoism to
Peruvian conditions, or at least to make their Maoism seem Peruvian, they
would not have seen a need to use Mariátegui as a way of domesticating
their Maoism.
The domestication of Maoism to Peruvian conditions took place on mul-
tiple levels and on a daily basis. Because of Sendero’s use of Mao’s works as
a guide for action, cadre at all levels of the party studied Mao and tried to
guide their own revolutionary practice based on their understanding of the
lessons learned from reading Mao. Whenever any Shining Path cadre made
a decision about how to act in any given situation and mentally drew on
Mao’s writings in order to decide on a correct way to deal with that situa-
tion, some level of creative adaptation and domestication took place. But
while this type of domestication of Maoism took place literally hundreds,
if not thousands, of times a day in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s, the
sources for what those cadre did and said are at this time very scarce, and
the Chinese influence is more diffuse than what I have used in this chapter.
For example, when a mid-level Shining Path cadre in Puno or Ayacucho
read Mao’s “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” as many
cadres did, and then articulated policies that would be carried out in her
area of responsibility based on her understanding of what she had read, she
was participating a process whereby Maoism was Peruvianized. Inevitably,
Shining Path cadre understood Mao’s works with minds shaped by grow-
ing up and being socialized in Peruvian conditions. It seems inevitable that
this Peruvian social conditioning gave rise to interpretations of Mao and
Chinese revolutionary practice that would have seemed quite alien in China
itself. Unfortunately, this type of daily adaptation of Maoism is diffuse
and hard to pin down in a documentary record. Ultimately, however, this
everyday domestication of Maoism probably shaped the form (or forms)
that Peruvian Maoism took as much as the formally articulated ideology of
“Gonzalo Thought” did.
CONCLUSION
While the Shining Path was defeated and the war that it waged was a great
tragedy for Peru as a nation, it was also the most successful transfer of Mao-
ist ideas to Latin America. It was a success because of a large and concerted
effort by the Chinese Communist Party and especially by Peruvian revolu-
tionary intellectuals who treated Mao’s works as a sacred text and built an
organization based on their understanding of that sacred text. Because of the
horrors of the civil war, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the Shining Path
based itself on a set of ideas that were intended to guide Peru to a liberated
future in which the sierra would no longer be dominated by the coast, Peru
no longer dominated by foreign powers, and women no longer dominated
by men. However dogmatic and mechanical the Shining Path tended to be
in its interpretation of Maoism, its success in grafting Maoism onto Peru’s
political culture is evident in the way that some Peruvians continue to turn to
Maoism as an answer to the perennial problems of imperialism, patriarchy
and internal colonialism. While the Maoist trend in Peru is subterranean,
it isn’t far beneath the surface. The activities of Maoist students are read-
ily apparent on the campuses of San Marcos in Lima and the UNSCH in
Ayacucho to this day. During multiple research trips to Peru, I have never
had any difficulty in quickly finding pro-Sendero literature sold “under the
counter” at various literature kiosks in Lima. Some even openly display
posters of Abimael Guzmán. Armed factions of the Shining Path continue to
operate in the old civil war hot spots of the Central Sierra and the Huallaga
Valley. The story of Maoism in Peru is clearly not over yet.
4 Bolivia
Nationalists and Maoists Diverge
They came back from Moscow and they told us we had to change
the name of our cell. And we asked for an explanation. We said, ‘You
guys, who go to Moscow every weekend, explain to us why we have
to change our name?’ They said he [Stalin] killed people. Of course he
killed people! It’s a revolution!1
—Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007.
Echazú, a former member of the pro-China “Stalin Cell” of
the Communist Party of Bolivia, is explaining how he found
out about de-Stalinization when party leaders returned to
Bolivia from the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party in 1956.
Bolivian interest in China was heavily influenced by the events set in motion
by Bolivia’s 1952 revolution, in which miners and peasants joined with the
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucio-
nario [MNR]) to overthrow the old regime in a brief insurrection. Despite
these revolutionary circumstances, which might seem to indicate that Bolivia
would be fertile ground for Maoism, our Bolivian case study is something
of a counterpoint to Peru. While there were substantial numbers of Boliv-
ians interested in China, including some who interpreted their experiences
as visitors to China as political lessons for Bolivia, no significant Maoist
insurgency ever emerged. Interest in China surged after the 1952 revolu-
tion led by the MNR and included a broad political spectrum, including the
left-wing of the MNR, the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) and a social
democratic party, the Party of the Revolutionary Left (PIR). As in Peru, a
Maoist party was formed in the 1960s which cultivated close ties with the
Chinese Communist Party, with leaders frequently traveling to China for
training and consultation. Yet ultimately, there was no transference of Mao-
ist ideology on a scale similar to that in Peru.
Given Bolivia’s revolutionary tradition and the early interest of some
MNR leftists in the Chinese Revolution, it might seem that Bolivia would
be a more likely site for Maoist revolution than Peru. However, repressive
military dictatorships continually dispersed Bolivia’s left during the 1960s
and 1970s, and the early pro-Chinese sympathizers of the MNR never made
common cause with the Bolivian Maoist party. Chinese ideas remained rela-
tively confined to a persecuted minority. In contrast, Peru’s reformist mili-
tary government of 1968–1980 tolerated the broad circulation of Maoist
propaganda and widespread use of communist political materials as peda-
gogical tools, lending legitimacy to those ideas. Despite the relatively small
size of the Peruvian Shining Path in 1980, it took advantage of a less repres-
sive political context to deploy ideas that had been widely propagated and
legitimized during the 1970s. The Bolivian Maoists lacked those advantages
and were unable to detonate the explosive force of Bolivia’s vast socioeco-
nomic disparities.
The attempts by part of the left-wing of the MNR to draw lessons from
China’s industrialization and agrarian reform shed new light on the political
currents that were contending in the MNR’s ruling coalition between 1952
and 1964. After the radical phase of the Bolivian Revolution ended around
1955, and the United States came to exercise greater and greater economic
and political influence in Bolivia, left-wing forces in the MNR’s ruling coali-
tion looked to the policies pursued by China as an alternative to deepening
economic dependency. These leftist MNRistas were deeply troubled by the
failure of the Bolivian Revolution to achieve economic independence for
Bolivia and hoped that China offered a nationalist development path suited
to Third World countries. While these pro-China forces were thwarted,
first by other political currents within the MNR and then by the end of
the MNR’s government in 1964, they formed a significant segment of the
MNR’s coalition and had to be addressed by leaders such as president Víctor
Paz Estenssoro.
Not long after the fall of the MNR, a Maoist party was formed in Bolivia
by communists with no links to the earlier pro-Chinese politicians in the
MNR. The Bolivian Maoist party, known as the Communist Party of Bolivia
(Marxist-Leninist), cultivated close ties with China and sent numerous party
members to China for training and to work on Maoist propaganda projects
in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. The Bolivian Maoists had a mass base of
support among miners in the Andean highlands but attempted to launch a
“people’s war” in the sparsely populated area of northern Santa Cruz depart-
ment to the east. The armed uprising was quickly crushed, and the Bolivian
Maoist project faded. Despite some striking similarities to the Shining Path,
the Bolivian Maoists had not met with the success of their Peruvian comrades.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: FROM THE CHACO

WAR TO THE 1952 REVOLUTION
The origins of both the MNR and the Communist Party date to the aftermath
of the Chaco War. In the early 1930s, the government of president Daniel
Salamanca (1931–1934) launched a military campaign of exploration and
Bolivia 73
occupation of the underpopulated region of the Bolivian Chaco, partially
to divert attention from the ills caused by the Great Depression. Bolivia’s
population at the time was overwhelmingly concentrated in the country’s
western highlands, with much of the eastern, lowland part of the country
sparsely inhabited.2 In June 1932, this military expedition occupied an aban-
doned Paraguayan fort inside the borders of Paraguay, sparking a three-year
war that ravaged the populations of both countries. By the time peace was
secured in 1935, Bolivia had lost over 65,000 troops and most of the Chaco
Boreal (about twenty thousand square miles). As Bolivia had a population of
only two million at the time, the loss of 65,000 troops (due more to hunger,
dehydration and disease than to actual fighting) was proportionate to the
losses European countries had suffered during World War I. Overwhelm-
ingly, the troops at the front were indigenous Bolivians who were coerced
into fighting. The social impact of the war was tremendous. Many highland
Indian villages were left devoid of men, and haciendas took advantage of
the situation by stealing the lands of Indian communities. With such heavy
dislocations in the Bolivian countryside as a result of the war, many veter-
ans resettled in the cities after the war, with Bolivian cities such as La Paz
and Cochabamba experiencing at least 30 percent population growth in the
wake of the war.3
The massive and seemingly senseless loss of territory and human life during
the Chaco War called into question the nature of Bolivian society for many
Bolivians. Two major parties calling for a radical reorganization of Bolivian
society formed in the aftermath of the war: the MNR and the PIR.4 While the
PIR became a social-democratic party after the Communist Party of Bolivia
(PCB) was founded in 1950 (with many activists leaving the PIR for the new
PCB), at its founding it functioned as a pro-Soviet communist party. As with
the APRA and PCP in 1930s Peru, the MNR opposed the Bolivian oligarchy
from a nationalist viewpoint while the PIR deployed a class-based ideology.
The MNR and the PIR would join together in attacking the rosca (as the tin
oligarchy was known) and imperialism, but diverged sharply on other issues.
The MNR was particularly influenced by European fascism and called for
“a Bolivia governed by Bolivians” while denouncing the “imperialist Jews
of Wall Street.”5 Initially, the MNR found its social base mainly among the
urban middle classes, which supported its calls for economic independence
from the foreign countries that Bolivia depended on as a market for its tin.
The PIR described Bolivia’s predicament in Marxist language, emphasizing
the division of Bolivia into antagonistic classes and the semicolonial nature
of the Bolivian economy.6 The PIR attempted to base itself on the working
class, and it gained support among miners, particularly in the southern high-
land mining centers of Oruro, Potosí and Catavi/Siglo XX. The PIR was also
relatively strong in Cochabamba, the home of its two main leaders.
The decimation of indigenous men in the Chaco War was a sudden and cat-
astrophic event that highlighted the tremendous ethnic polarization of Bolivia.
At the time of the Chaco War, Bolivia was over 60 percent indigenous. Rural
indigenous communities were divided between free villages and communities
of colonos, laborers who resided on haciendas. Colonos were bought and sold
as part of the property they resided on and were customarily expected to per-
form labor for free, including domestic chores. Free villages were constantly
under pressure from surrounding haciendas, which grew at the expense of
village land. The nineteenth century had seen a great diminishing of village
lands, and the absence of so many village men in the Chaco War provided a
renewed opportunity for massive land grabs.7
Many indigenous miners came from the ranks of the newly landless.
While mining had been central to the Bolivian economy for centuries, in the
1940s and 1950s Bolivia was dependent on tin exports as its only secure
tax base and source of foreign exchange. The importance of tin for Bolivia’s
economy created structural conditions for narrow oligarchic rule, since only
three families controlled 80 percent of the tin industry.8 The extreme nar-
rowness of this oligarchy excluded the vast majority of Bolivians from any
meaningful participation in the country’s political life. This was an impor-
tant factor in bringing the urban middle classes, miners and indigenous peas-
ants together in the coalition led by the MNR which carried out the 1952
revolution.
Bolivia’s tin miners organized into an industry-wide union only in the
1940s. In 1942, a strike at Catavi was crushed when the government mas-
sacred thirty-five miners. The PIR was the party most closely associated
with the striking miners, and many of its leaders were jailed as part of the
repressive wave unleashed by the government. But it was the MNR that suc-
cessfully seized on the massacre to attack the government from its position
in congress. The MNR’s stance helped it to win the support of the newly
formed tin workers’ union, the Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mine
Workers (FSTMB). The miners’ union would play a key role in helping the
MNR come to power in 1952.9
Despite the impetus that the decimation of indigenous Bolivians in the
Chaco War gave to the formation of the MNR, and the fact that the miners
supported by the MNR were largely indigenous, the MNR itself was mainly
composed of mestizo and white Bolivians, especially in its leading ranks. In
1943, the MNR allied with a coup led by the populist colonel Gualberto
Villarroel. The Villarroel government deployed a form of nationalist popu-
lism not unlike that of Perón in Argentina. The Villarroel regime recognized
workers’ rights and facilitated the formation and expansion of the FSTMB
and the cross-industry Bolivian Workers’ Union (Central Obrera Boliviana,
COB), in which the FSTMB played the dominant role. It also sponsored a
congress on indigenous rights.
At the same time, the government engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, and
its international sympathies lay with the European Axis powers. Villarroel’s
policies were highly polarizing, and in 1946 a popular uprising by a multi-
class mob, which united residents of La Paz who had been alienated by his
policies (including workers and market women as well as the upper classes)
Bolivia 75
with the political parties opposed to the president, lynched him and over-
threw the government. Although Villarroel was polarizing and semi-fascist,
many workers saw him as a champion of their class. PIR militants took an
active part in the lynching of Villarroel, and this action discredited the party,
ultimately leading to the exodus of many members in 1950 to found the
Bolivian Communist Party (PCB). The new party with a new name, absent
the most prominent old leaders of the PIR, was free of the taint of the 1946
lynching. In contrast, the MNR’s association with the Villarroel government
set the stage for its comeback with the 1952 revolution.
The MNR won Bolivia’s elections in 1951, but when these elections were
annulled by the military, the MNR began to prepare an insurrection. The
1952 revolution lasted only three days. On April 8, MNR party members,
worker supporters and a two thousand–strong contingent of the national
police took over La Paz. The military counterattacked, and it briefly looked
like the MNR would suffer defeat as it had in a previous insurrectionary
attempt in 1949. However, armed miners came to the aid of the revolution,
joining with the MNR’s forces to defeat the army in La Paz, Oruro and
Cochabamba. The clashes left about six hundred dead in La Paz, where the
fighting was fiercest. On April 11, the army formally surrendered.
By 1952, the MNR had shed some of its more fascist elements and resem-
bled a left party. When MNR leader Víctor Paz Estenssoro returned to La Paz
from exile on April 15 and some of his supporters shouted “down with the
Jews,” he responded, “There are no racial distinctions in this revolution.”10
Within eighteen months of coming to power, the MNR had nationalized
the mines, carried out agrarian reform and instituted universal suffrage. But
while the MNR had transformed itself into a broad party with a significant
left-wing, there were substantial obstacles to carrying the reforms further.
On the one hand, the leadership of the MNR had not committed itself to the
deep structural transformations of Bolivian society that many miners and
left-wing MNRistas desired. But even if they had wanted to deepen their
revolution, there were massive economic impediments. In the mid-1950s,
Bolivia entered a major economic crisis. Food prices skyrocketed, and the
government was forced to implement rationing of basic goods. The MNR
government turned to the United States and the IMF for aid. Under for-
eign pressure, the MNR set up a Stabilization Commission in 1956 which
put a U.S. citizen in charge of the Bolivian economy and left him solely
accountable to the United States. The Bolivian economic crisis had reached
such a depth that in 1957 the United States directly provided 32 percent
of the Bolivian government’s revenue.11 Within only a few years of com-
ing to power, economic circumstances had led a “revolutionary national-
ist” party to deliver the Bolivian economy into a protectorship under the
United States. Whether or not the leaders of the MNR intended to carry out
further reforms, and there is no evidence that they did, no reforms would
now be possible without losing the foreign support that kept the economy
afloat during the crisis. The left, consisting of trade unionists, communists,
Trotskyites and the left-wing section of the MNR, wanted the government to
pursue further reforms and take Bolivia down the path of socialist develop-
ment. Thus, the leftists moved from working with and supporting the MNR
to a stance of opposition.
LOOKING TO CHINA AFTER 1952
In his book on the thirty years of Bolivian history following the 1952 revo-
lution, Rebellion in the Veins, the historian James Dunkerley makes the
observation that an interesting feature of the MNR left was its “orienta-
tion towards the Chinese example of national liberation.”12 After citing an
instance in which president Víctor Paz Estenssoro legitimized the MNR’s
policy of not nationalizing the entire economy and its efforts to seek foreign
investment by invoking Mao Zedong’s support for some private enterprise
in China in the early 1950s, Dunkerley moves on to other matters. Paz
was a founder of the anticommunist MNR, yet the influence of the Chinese
Revolution on the left-wing of the party forced him to deal with Mao’s
ideas and even to use them to bolster himself against criticisms from his
left. His citation of Mao Zedong, and the general “orientation towards the
Chinese example” of the MNR’s left-wing more generally, is revealing in
that it shows how the Chinese Revolution had become part of the MNR’s
frame of reference. The MNR-sponsored Central Obrera Boliviana’s 1954
program and statutes directly refer to the “great resonance” of Mao’s vic-
tory and the importance of the Chinese experience of “agrarian reform, the
nationalization of the main sources of production and the development and
diversification of the economy.”13
Two leading members of the MNR’s left traveled to China in 1959 and
1960 and wrote accounts of their travels that implicitly criticized the MNR’s
failure to achieve economic independence and the stagnation of its mod-
ernizing efforts, and held up the Chinese process of industrialization and
land reform as a model for getting the Bolivian revolutionary process back
on track. The two MNR members were Mario Torres Calleja, the general
secretary of the FSTMB for many years, and Germán Quiroga Galdo, a
diplomat and president of the Bolivian congress’s Chamber of Deputies in
the late 1950s. Their accounts of going to China demonstrate the ways in
which Bolivians oriented “towards the Chinese example of national libera-
tion” thought about the meaning of the Chinese revolution for Bolivia. Like
Mexico’s Vicente Lombardo Toledano,14 Quiroga and Torres were mainly
interested in China’s example as a Third World country that seemed to be
having great success in industrializing and improving the welfare of the
population by increasing life expectancy and promoting education. They
thought that certain structural similarities between Bolivia and China, such
as being countries with large rural populations, made China’s moderniza-
tion efforts particularly relevant for Bolivia.
Bolivia 77
Mario Torres Calleja visited China for a month in July and August of
1960. He was invited to visit by Chinese unions in his capacity as the general
secretary of the FSTMB, Bolivia’s largest and most powerful union. While
in China, Torres visited China’s major cities and toured a wide variety of
industrial and agricultural establishments, where he met with union leaders,
industrial managers and administrators. Toward the end of his visit, he also
had a private audience with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Although only
in China for a month, he saw many different parts of the country, and he
remarked that “the skill that the Chinese have achieved in organizing time is
incredible. The visitors that travel to this new world of energy have the days
of their stay planned down to the second.”15
In contrast to Torres, Germán Quiroga Galdo came from Bolivia’s small
elite class. He lived for years in Europe and the United States, and his trav-
elogue often compares China to the many other places this cosmopolitan
Bolivian had visited. Quiroga served as Bolivia’s ambassador to the United
Nations for four years at the beginning of the MNR’s rule, under the Paz
Estenssoro presidency. As an experienced diplomat with revolutionary
nationalist sentiments who had attended the 1955 Bandung conference of
Asian and African states at Sukarno’s invitation, it is not surprising that
the Chinese sought Quiroga out and invited him to visit China. In 1959,
he accepted the invitation and toured the country, visiting the major cit-
ies and also some rural people’s communes. Quiroga shared with Torres a
sense that Chinese economic development could serve as a lesson for Bolivia
because the Chinese socialist experiment was “carried out in a semi-feudal
and semi-colonial country, characteristics that precisely distinguish the Latin
American peoples.”16
Torres’s main observations and concerns during his China trip revolved
around China’s economic progress, which astounded him. At certain parts
of his book, he lists page after page of figures that demonstrate the growth of
Chinese production of a range of products, including steel, iron, coal, elec-
tricity, paper, sugar, cotton and much more. Torres commented that China’s
statistics aren’t frozen numbers: they have an incredible mobility and

the data changes from day to day. Everything is perpetually developing
and growing. The new relations are produced, engendered by the lib-
eration of the productive forces and the creation of new instruments of
labor, which are determining factors for raising the indices of extractive
and industrial production to fantastic proportions.17
Torres’s visit in 1960 came at the tail end of the Great Leap Forward, so
many of the production statistics he saw probably were in fact too fantastic
to be real. But he was struck by the incredible productive power of the newly
formed people’s communes that he visited. He noted that “in the course of
the trip I could observe the impressive movement of great concentrations
of peasants devoted to feverish labor: the ‘People’s Communes.’ This was
my first vision of that human ocean that, swollen with the uncontainable
forces of labor, daily conquers the great power of transforming the world
and life.” In particular, Torres admired the “order, discipline and work” of
the communes.18
Quiroga was similarly impressed by Chinese economic advances since the
1949 revolution, although he situated the developments more explicitly in
terms of China’s breaking out of economic dependence by recounting the
subordination of China to imperialism following the Opium Wars in the
nineteenth century. Although Quiroga declared himself an anticommunist,
he went on to write that he would have to be blind not to see the magnitude
of China’s accomplishments.19 He described China as a great anthill, where
everyone was organized for “quantity, speed and economy.”20 Quiroga then
situated the Chinese agrarian reform as the central factor in the transforma-
tion of semifeudal and semicolonial countries.21 While Quiroga discussed the
Chinese economy and agrarian reform specifically, his generalizations about
semifeudal and semicolonial countries clearly drew the reader’s attention to
the relevance of the Chinese experience to Bolivia and invited comparisons to
the Bolivian land reform process initiated by the MNR government. At one
point, Quiroga openly criticized the incumbent Hernán Siles (1956–1960)
presidency for backing off the revolutionary commitments of the Paz govern-
ment, thus using the Chinese experience as a demonstration of the direction
that he thought Bolivian economic and social policy should have been going
in. Indeed, while often avoiding a direct discussion of how Chinese policies
might be transplanted to Bolivia, he made a striking statement about their
universality when he stated, “It is in China, much more than in the Soviet
Union, where the battle is being waged that will resolve the controversy over
the socioeconomic forms that will prevail in the future” and “the conclusions
that China comes to will merit the adherence of the majority of the human
race.”22 Quiroga further highlighted the relevance of Chinese policies for
Bolivia by remarking on the similarities of both countries as countries with
large minority nationality populations and remarked on the similarities he
perceived between China’s minority nationalities and Andean Quechua and
Aymara speakers.23
Quiroga made passing mention of the large number of Latin Americans
he saw in Beijing. He remarked particularly on the many Peruvians, Colom-
bians and Uruguayans he saw and described most of them as parliamentar-
ians.24 His discussion of Chinese interest in Latin America was brief and
mainly centered on the Chinese desire for Latin American support in its
efforts to replace Taiwan in the United Nations. He met with Zhu De, a top
Chinese leader, twice and discussed Bolivia and China’s status at the United
Nations with him.25 Quiroga felt that the Chinese communists overesti-
mated the anticolonial sentiments of Latin American leaders and that China
would not encounter the sort of Third World solidarity that it hoped for in
its efforts to join the United Nations. Quiroga also noted the popularity of
Fidel Castro in China during his visit and the attention that the Chinese were
Bolivia 79
paying the social movement in Panama to gain sovereignty over the Panama
Canal Zone.26
Toward the end of his visit, Torres attended a reception held by Mao,
Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi for various delegations from Latin America,
Africa and Asia. A delegation of Bolivian congressmen that came sepa-
rately from Torres was also present. Because of his status as a leader of the
Bolivian workers’ movement and as a high-ranking MNR official, Torres
was granted a private reception by Mao and Zhou. At this audience, Tor-
res discussed the Bolivian revolution with his Chinese interlocutors, and
Mao and Zhou expressed a desire for diplomatic and commercial relations
with Bolivia.27 The presence of both Torres and a Bolivian congressional
delegation in China in 1960 are remarkable given that Bolivia had no
formal diplomatic relationship with China. The left-wing of the MNR
undoubtedly would have preferred to recognize the People’s Republic of
China diplomatically at this time. But diplomatic recognition did not come
until 1985 because of opposition first by the United States and later by the
Bolivian military, which held power for much of the time between 1964
and 1985.
The lesson that China’s development path offered a model, or at least
a point of reference, for revolutionary Bolivia is implicit throughout both
books and is made more than implicit on a few occasions. At one point,
Torres referred to the genetic and psychological similarities of Bolivians and
Chinese people, deriving from the ancient Asian migrations that populated
the Americas.28 The author of the preface to Torres’s book made the point
that Torres “takes something that serves his people, his class, his struggle”
from his trip to China.29 And Torres made clear that, while China’s experi-
ence cannot be copied in Bolivia, its experience should serve as a point of
reference for the “most advanced sector of the MNR.”30
The example of China as a critical counterpoint to the course of the Boliv-
ian revolution becomes clear in light of an elucidation of the same points by
Ricardo Anaya, a leftist member of the opposition. Anaya visited China in
1959 in his capacity as a leading member of the PIR and as an economics
professor at Cochabamba’s Universidad Mayor de San Simón. Although
in the 1940s the PIR had functioned as Bolivia’s communist party, the for-
mation of the PCB in 1950 left the PIR with reduced numbers. The PIR
remained influential among intellectuals, however, because of the promi-
nence of Anaya and other intellectuals still aligned with the party. In 1961,
Anaya delivered a talk at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón on China’s
agrarian reform and the people’s communes that he had witnessed during
his trip to China. The talk was then published in the university’s Revista de
la facultad de ciencias económicas.31 The text of his talk is preceded by an
article by Charles Bettelheim, a French professor of economics and promi-
nent international organizer of Chinese solidarity activities.
Despite Anaya’s position as an opposition figure, his observations on the
Chinese agrarian reform were remarkably similar to those of Torres and
Quiroga. Anaya highlighted the different stages of the Chinese land reform
over the decade between the revolution’s triumph in 1949 and the unfold-
ing of the Great Leap Forward during his 1959 visit. Anaya represented
this decade of agrarian reform as step-by-step advance, apparently unaware
of the great economic dislocations and famine wrought by the Great Leap
Forward. Anaya went on at some length about the financing and organiza-
tion of the people’s communes and concluded by summing up what he saw
as the defining characteristics of the communes and China’s agrarian reform
in general.
The only significant difference between Anaya’s treatment of the Chinese
agrarian reforms and the accounts of Torres and Quiroga is that Anaya
explicitly used the Chinese successes to criticize the Bolivian government. It
is worth quoting Anaya:
It is obvious to say that this study of China’s agrarian reform has been
made by a Bolivian in order to extract lessons for the agrarian reform
process in our own country. Its polemical tone has as an object to high-
light the contrasts between a reform, like the Chinese, which marches
forward, and a reform that goes backward, like the Bolivian. The con-
clusions of this study have the objective of proposing directions for
reorienting Bolivia’s agrarian reform, which at the present moment has
lost the notion of its objectives and methods.32
Jesús Lara: An Instance of Communist Orientalism

Jesús Lara, a prominent poet who often wrote in Quechua and also a cen-
tral committee member of the Communist Party, visited China at more or
less the same time as Quiroga, Torres and Anaya, but he wrote a markedly
different account of his trip. He visited China in 1959 and traveled around
China with delegations from various Latin American countries. Although
he didn’t specify the nature of his visit, it seems likely that his trip coincided
with the 1959 cadre training school that China held for Latin American
communists (discussed in Chapter 1). It may well be that he explored China
with the Peruvian communist painter Carlos de la Riva. Jesús Lara’s trip
to China inspired a book of poetry that differed in content as well as form
from the previous three works we have examined. While Torres, Quiroga
and Anaya were all principally concerned with China as an exemplary anti-
imperialist development model for Bolivia, Lara reminds us of that China
was an exotic place even for many progressive Bolivians.
In contrast to the travel narratives that Lara wrote about his trips to Hun-
gary and the Soviet Union, he chose to write about China in the form of a
book titled Lotus Flower: Message of Love to the Chinese Woman.33 In this
book, Lara mixed homage to the heroism of the Chinese Revolution with
frank appreciation for Chinese women, who held an exotic fascination for
Bolivia 81
him. Lotus Flower consisted of a series of romantic poems addressed to an
anonymous Chinese woman. There are verses such as the following:
Perhaps you came to me in that

Woman of the People’s Commune
Who in the warm sound of her kettledrum
Overwhelmed my heart
With her emotional welcome
And sang her present well-being
And her solid faith in her future
And proclaimed that the droughts
And the floods
Were bad memories of the past.34
And additionally:
Happy little worker

Owner of her machine and more owner
Of her future and her life
Has her heart in that, the People’s Republic,35
In the above, the anonymous Chinese woman that Lara addressed the poems
to seems to embody the accomplishments and promise of the Chinese revo-
lution. In other passages, Lara expressed an attraction to Chinese women
less inflected with revolutionary enthusiasm:
Perhaps I found you in that girl

On that enjoyable night in Wuhan
Who danced so much with me
And sliding between my arms
Was like a handful of lilies.36
Lara’s book of poetry serves as a reminder of the cultural distance between

China and Bolivia and the ways in which even Bolivians who admired the
Chinese revolution may have found it hard to conceptualize China as any-
thing but an exotic or romantic other. Lara’s frank orientalism raises the issue
of orientalism in the writings of the other Bolivian travelers to China at this
time. While Torres, Quiroga and Anaya all focused on issues of economic
modernization, Lara’s book reminds us that in invoking their own authority
as travelers to China and witnesses to Chinese economic progress, Torres,
Quiroga and Anaya were writing about a society that was very “other” to
Bolivians in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thus the meaning to be derived
from Chinese economic development by Bolivian travelers during this period
may have been particularly malleable to the political ends that Bolivian trav-
elers wanted to drive home with the use of their newly acquired authority.
The Bolivian Use of the Chinese Revolution
in the 1950s and Early 1960s
Regardless of whether their travel narratives accurately depicted the reality
of Chinese society and economics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the
positions taken by Torres, Quiroga and Anaya, examined above show how
some Bolivians made use of the Chinese Revolution to criticize Bolivia’s
continuing economic dependence and the limited nature of the MNR’s land
reform. Members of the MNR left-wing made these criticisms implicitly, and
the PIR, explicitly. But for both the PIR and the MNR left-wing, the Chi-
nese Revolution represented the promise that a more thorough land reform
might serve as the basis for industrialization and modernization free from
the restraints placed on Bolivia by dependence on U.S. loans and markets.
To return to Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s reference to Chinese policy discussed
earlier, we can see that when Paz Estenssoro made uncharacteristic refer-
ences to Mao and the Chinese development model, he was addressing critics
within the MNR and outside his party who upheld the Chinese Revolution
as an alternative economic model for Bolivia. Both the early references to
China in the 1954 COB program and statutes and the fact that Paz felt the
need to directly invoke China against his critics suggest that the positions
taken by Torres, Quiroga and Anaya were not political outliers but rather
significant representations (by important politicians) of a line of thinking
that saw the Chinese development model as a potential alternative to what
they saw as the shortcomings of the MNR’s reforms.
In retrospect, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Bolivian Revolution
of 1952 seem worlds apart. While both revolutions ushered in significant
social reforms, the Chinese Revolution began a process of socialist construc-
tion that involved a much broader array of changes, on a much larger scale
(by virtue of China’s size), and that included periods of tumultuous utopian
upheaval and mass mobilization nothing like what occurred in Bolivia. How-
ever, the interest that Bolivian sinophiles showed in China in the 1950s and
early 1960s, and the relevance that they thought the Chinese model held for
Bolivia, show that at the time a significant set of Bolivian intellectuals and
politicians saw more in common than different between China and Bolivia.
In particular, they hoped the Bolivian revolutionary process could be diverted
onto a course similar to that followed by the Chinese Revolution.
A TRANSITION IN THE CHINESE REVOLUTION’S

INFLUENCE IN BOLIVIA
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, economic crisis and U.S. protector-
ship of the Bolivian economy forced the MNR government to take austerity
measures that alienated the party leadership from key sectors of the MNR’s
social base, such as miners and part of the urban middle class, that had
Bolivia 83
brought the party to power and given the regime legitimacy. The state-run
mining corporation, Comibol, was reorganized so as to explicitly sacrifice
the welfare of the workers to the “development of the National Revolu-
tion.” But despite the MNR leadership’s argument that “with the National
Revolution the traditional worker-employer relation disappeared,” the
miners were unwilling to quietly accept the imposition of prerevolutionary
working conditions.37 The miners called a series of strikes, and by 1964 the
MNR had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of much of its former social base
and seemed to have lost its ability to keep order. The military had never
been enthusiastic about the MNR, and in November 1964 General René
Barrientos overthrew the government.
In the new context of military dictatorship, the argument that Bolivia
could peacefully break out of its dependence on U.S. economic support by
deepening its agrarian reform and setting out on a path of industrializa-
tion according to the Chinese model became untenable. Not only had the
MNR attacked the social base of its left-wing, but also a military regime that
would repress socialists and left-wing nationalists came to power. The idea
of changing government policy peacefully to a socialist model thus became
moot. However, as in Peru and Mexico, there were some communists who
continued to view China as a model for carrying out an armed revolution in
a Third World country. We now turn to those communists.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BOLIVIA (MARXIST-LENINIST)
During the period between the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union in 1956 and the open rupture between the Chinese and
Soviet parties in 1963, a faction formed within the Communist Party of
Bolivia (PCB) that aligned itself with China’s criticisms of the Soviet Union.
This faction formed the Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist)
[PCB(ML)] in April 1965 at a congress held in Catavi/Siglo XX, a min-
ing area with a reputation for militancy. Opposition to the policies of the
PCB’s leading triumvirate of Mario Monje, Jorge Kolle Cueto and Simón
Reyes had been brewing for some time. The PCB(ML) brought together
party activists who criticized the PCB about a variety of issues. Federico
Escóbar Zapata, a communist leader of the miners’ union at Siglo XX, was
the PCB(ML)’s first general secretary. Escóbar had held the post of control
obrero, elected worker representative to management of the state-run Comi-
bol mining company, at the Siglo XX mine. In this position, Escóbar was
able to influence the hiring of miners, favoring members of the communist
party. The leaders of the PCB had used the strength of the party’s influ-
ence among miners to negotiate behind closed doors with the MNR govern-
ment, in the process compromising the demands of the PCB’s base. Escóbar
saw these negotiations, conducted without consulting with the miners, as a
betrayal of the miners’ struggle.38
Although Escóbar had spent about a month in China and had visited
Cuba around 1960,39 his main concerns revolved around the struggles of
Bolivia’s miners.40 However, an influential set of the PCB(ML)’s cadre were
activists who were very concerned with international communist politics
and ideology. These activists came from several backgrounds. Presumably,
most were young urban intellectuals, such as the party’s Stalin Cell from La
Paz.41 Others had experience, considerable experience in some cases, in the
world of international communist politics. Diva Arratia, a red diaper baby
whose father had been a congressional deputy for the PIR, led Bolivia’s
delegation to the 1953 World Youth Festival in Bucharest when she was
twenty-one.42 As the leader of Bolivia’s delegation, she was invited to visit
China, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. She attended a world
peace conference and met Pablo Neruda and Cuban communist poet Nico-
lás Guillén. After spending most of 1953 and much of 1954 in the social-
ist bloc, she returned to Bolivia and gave a speaking tour about life in the
socialist countries. A highlight of the tour involved being denounced by a
priest in Potosí during a radio broadcast of the Holy Week mass.43
Bolivian students who were studying in Havana and Moscow and who
had been in contact with Chinese party members also decided to side with
the Chinese. Víctor Reinaga, a founding politburo member of the PCB(ML),
estimates that about a dozen Bolivian students in Havana and more in Mos-
cow sided with the PCB(ML). The students in Havana were initially detained
and then deported to Bolivia via France, since Bolivia had broken off rela-
tions with Cuba.44 One student leader, Oscar Zamora Medinacelli, was
named second secretary of the PCB(ML) at the founding congress. Zamora
had extensive experience with the international relations of the communist
parties. Zamora initially rose to prominence as a communist student leader
in Tarija in the 1950s. In 1960, Zamora took up a position on the secretariat
of the International Union of Students (UIS) in Prague. The secretariat con-
sisted of about thirty members, including representatives from each of the
socialist countries and from a smattering of nonsocialist countries. The UIS
was the main vehicle through which the socialist bloc coordinated its inter-
national policies directed at students (something like a student version of the
better known World Federation of Trade Unions).45 As the Sino-Soviet split
erupted, Zamora attended a student conference in Albania that was set up
in opposition to the UIS and then traveled to China where he met with Mao
Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Before returning to Bolivia, Zamora went to Cuba,
where he secured financial support from Che Guevara for the founding con-
ference of the PCB(ML).46 Although Zamora had been absent from Bolivia
for four years, he parlayed his international connections and his access to
funds into a position as second in command of the new party.
At the founding of the PCB(ML), members such as Oscar Zamora, Diva
Arratia and the roughly two dozen students who had left Havana and Mos-
cow represented an important bloc of party cadre who had firsthand experi-
ence of the international politics of the communist movement. Despite the
Bolivia 85
fact that the majority of the members and support base of the PCB(ML)
were made up of miners whose concerns were much more prosaic,47 there
was a substantial bloc of cadre within the PCB(ML) who were concerned
that the party not only support the political positions of the Chinese com-
munists but also that the PCB(ML) develop close relations with the Chinese
Communist Party.
The former party leaders I interviewed painted a picture of a remark-
able amount of interaction between the Chinese and Bolivian parties. Oscar
Zamora, who took over as general secretary when Federico Escóbar died in
1966, traveled to China immediately upon assuming the office to consult
with the Chinese party. Jorge Echazú, a former member of the La Paz Stalin
Cell, became the Bolivian correspondent for China’s Xinhua news agency.
Echazú, who was also a politburo member, estimates that at least two hun-
dred Bolivians went to China for multi-month cadre training courses where
they received political and military training between 1966 and 1970. The
PCB(ML) sent a handful of people to China to teach Quechua. Another
handful of PCB(ML) members worked on Spanish-language propaganda
activities in Beijing, including Hugo Zavala, a law professor from Oruro who
lived in China from 1972 to 1983 and did Spanish, Quechua and Aymara
shortwave radio broadcasts called “Pekín Informa para Latinoamérica” on
Radio Pekín. Diva Arratia also went there for eye surgery in 1965 after
being injured in a car accident. Pekín Informa and other Spanish-language
Chinese literature were distributed by the PCB(ML) for free to miners at the
Siglo XX mine.48
Although the PCB(ML) is interesting from the perspective of its extensive
ties to China, it did not accomplish much of significance during the 1960s
and 1970s. Despite its mass base among miners, the PCB(ML) is best-known
for its short-lived attempt at armed insurrection in the northern country-
side of the department of Santa Cruz.49 For this effort, the PCB(ML) had
created an organization called the Unión de Campesinos Pobres (Union of
Poor Peasants [UCAPO]). The UCAPO was mainly composed of migrants
from the highlands who had heeded government calls to colonize Bolivia’s
sparsely populated jungle regions. Successive Bolivian governments have
been eager to establish a larger population in some of the sparsely inhab-
ited eastern regions, both as a spur to development and to solidify Bolivia’s
claim to the region.50 After uprooting themselves and homesteading under
difficult conditions, these colonists found themselves totally abandoned
by the government, which had promised to aid their colonization efforts.
The PCB(ML), experienced at mobilizing rural highlanders in the mining
regions, found a social base in these colonists.
The UCAPO “people’s war” began as a series of land takeovers in late
1970, including a large hacienda owned by a powerful local landlord. Oscar
Zamora had renamed himself “Comandante Rolando” to head up this
armed force. However, he was quickly caught by the armed forces. He had
considerable amounts of Maoist literature on hand but only two revolvers.
Zamora was summarily sent into exile. Although he quickly returned to
Bolivia clandestinely, Zamora was unable to reinvigorate the UCAPO after
his demoralizing capture. The reformist government of General Juan José
Torres (October 1970 to August 1971) negotiated an end to the conflict with
the militarily defeated squatters, granting them some of the land they had
occupied. And thus the “people’s war” sputtered out. The decision to launch
this armed struggle in the jungle seems strange. The region was remote from
the highland population centers and the mining regions where the PCB(ML)
might have counted on considerable support and, at the very least, would
have had a large population to work with. Certainly, one might think that
Che Guevara’s disastrous experience would have served as a warning against
guerrilla warfare in the sparsely populated areas of Bolivia’s east. In a strik-
ing example of dogmatism, the Maoist doctrine of surrounding the cities
with peasant armies from the countryside led the PCB(ML)’s leadership to
decide to launch a “people’s war” in the jungle rather than in its traditional
areas of support.
While the majority of the PCB(ML)’s mass base both among miners and
settlers in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands were indigenous Bolivians, the party’s
efforts at mobilizing this mass base centered on demands corresponding
to miner and settler identities. The PCB(ML) did not attempt to mobilize
its supporters on the basis of demands for indigenous rights or indigenous
national liberation. As is common in Bolivian politics, white and mestizo
Bolivians made up a disproportionate number of the PCB(ML)’s leader-
ship. One indigenous former cadre I interviewed, who now supports Evo
Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government, ascribed the
PCB(ML)’s attempts to mechanically reproduce China’s experience to a fail-
ure to investigate the “ideologies of the masses native to Bolivia” deeply. He
clearly felt this inadequate investigation was at least partly due to the ethnic
composition of the PCB(ML)’s leadership.51
It is hard not to wonder whether, under slightly different circumstances, the
experience of Bolivia’s PCB(ML) might not have come to resemble Peru’s Shin-
ing Path. In both cases, there was considerable travel to China and great efforts
were made to master the doctrine of Maoism with a view to making revolu-
tion in the Andes. Each party was led by what I have described in the chapter
on Peru as true-believing “Maoist inquisitors.” And each party commanded a
small but not insignificant localized mass base at the time it tried to launch its
armed struggle. Yet, in Peru the Shining Path grew and grew after launching
its war while the Bolivian party was quickly routed. Had the Peruvian armed
forces been more energetic in 1980, would we only remember the Shining
Path as a second-tier political party that soon faded into obscurity, similar
to today’s PCB(ML)? Or had chance been more favorable to Oscar Zamora,
might he have become Bolivia’s Abimael Guzmán? Of course there were dif-
ferent social and political conditions in the two countries, and between Aya-
cucho and Siglo XX. But from the perspective of organized connections with
the People’s Republic of China and attempting to put Maoism into practice in
Bolivia 87
the Andean highlands, the histories of both parties run remarkably parallel up
until the point when each launched armed struggle.
CONCLUSION
If our Peruvian case demonstrates a relatively successful transfer of Mao-

ist ideas to Latin America, the Bolivian case must ultimately be considered
a comparative failure. There were promising sparks, but the ideas did not
catch fire. At the time of the 1952 revolution, leftists within the MNR’s gov-
erning coalition drew parallels between Bolivia’s and China’s revolutionary
processes, and as the MNR’s agrarian reforms petered out and the United
States remained a dominant force in Bolivia’s economy, some prominent
MNRistas advocated taking a path to modernization and economic inde-
pendence based on the Chinese model. After the fall of the MNR govern-
ment in 1964, the Bolivian Maoist party, the PCB(ML), cultivated close links
with the People’s Republic of China. But despite the close contacts between
the PCB(ML) and China, the Bolivian Maoists were unable to become a
major force in Bolivian politics, and their efforts to start a “people’s war”
quickly fizzled.
Despite the failure of the transmission of Maoist politics to Bolivia, vari-
ous political actors who were inspired by the Chinese Revolution remain
influential, if not prominent, in Bolivia today. When Bolivia gave diplomatic
recognition to China in 1985, old left-wing MNRistas such as former minis-
ter of peasant affairs Ñuflo Chávez and Alfredo Franco joined together with
former PIRistas such as Oscar Vega, a disciple of Ricardo Anaya, to found
the Asociación Boliviana de la Amistad con China (Bolivia-China Friendship
Association [ABACH]), which promotes Chinese economic and cultural ties
with Bolivia.52 Oscar Zamora’s politics have changed with China’s, and
the former advocate of people’s war became an ardent supporter of Deng
Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s. Zamora served as Bolivia’s ambassador to
China in 2000, and he estimates that he traveled to China between twenty-
five and thirty times between 1963 and 2004.53
Jorge Echazú, the former member of the Stalin cell and a Xinhua cor-
respondent and politburo member of the PCB(ML), split off from Zamora’s
main branch of the PCB(ML) in 1970. His splinter group, now renamed the
Communist Party of Bolivia [Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM)], is small, but
individual party members participate in the government of Evo Morales,
despite Echazú’s claim that his party aided the Shining Path logistically dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s. Before being ousted in a shake-up, Alberto Echazú,
a politburo member of the PCB(MLM) and brother of Jorge, was vice min-
ister of mining, and Guillermo Dalence, also a PCB(MLM) member, served
as minister of mines. The role of the PCB(MLM) in Morales’s ministry of
mines was a legacy of the Bolivian Maoists’ influence and support in Bolivia’s
mining communities.
5 Conclusions
China is writing today one of the most brilliant pages of world history,
with the transformation that it is accomplishing among its people.1
—Lázaro Cárdenas, 1959
The concrete dynamics of the transfer of Maoist ideas to Latin America,

when considered at all, have been assumed to have taken place more-or-less
as Richard Wolin recently described in the case of French Maoism:
Fascinated and impassioned by political events that were transpir-

ing nearly half a world away, they began to identify profoundly with
Mao’s China, which they came to perceive as a panacea for metropolitan
France’s own multifarious political ills. None spoke Chinese, and reliable
information about contemporary China was nearly impossible to come
by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders. Little mat-
ter. The less these normaliens [students at the École normale supérieure]
knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes.2
As we have seen, China had hardly forbidden access to outsiders. At least

in the Latin American case, the spread of Maoism depended on a highly
organized set of relationships between Chinese and Latin American revolu-
tionaries. While China was distant, it was also accessible. The Chinese made
efforts to share their experience and ideology with interested foreigners.
Latin Americans went to China to see firsthand the Chinese socialist experi-
ment and, based on that experience, determine what lessons the Chinese
example had for Latin America. The quality of the knowledge gained in
these exchanges is certainly open to question, and many Latin American
travelers definitely projected their own particular dreams of liberation onto
the Chinese experience. But, the creation of Latin American Maoism was the
product of transnational networks grounded in particular historical rela-
tionships, not the fevered imaginings of students in total isolation from lived
Chinese experience.3
The People’s Republic of China’s initial interactions with Latin Ameri-
cans took place within the context of international structures already built
Conclusions 89
up around the international communist movement. Vicente Lombardo
went to China in 1949 as part of the leadership of the World Federation
of Trade Unions, and Oscar Zamora became acquainted with the Chi-
nese in Prague while serving on the secretariat of the International Union
of Students. However, as the Sino-Soviet split deepened in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, China developed its own forums for promoting its brand
of Marxism. As examples in the preceding chapters have shown, half-year
political and military classes were an important element of Chinese efforts
to refine the ideology of communists already inclined to favor Chinese posi-
tions. China funded travel by Latin Americans to China and committed
resources to training Latin Americans. It also committed time and resources
to producing propaganda in an array of languages, even broadcasting on
shortwave radio to the Andes in Quechua and Aymara. Given the num-
ber of visitors to China who met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, some sig-
nificant portion of the time of the two most powerful men in China during
the 1949–1976 period was spent meeting with foreigners. These meetings
demonstrated China’s commitment to building goodwill toward China and
the political capital of sympathetic foreigners. But despite the considerable
resources that China committed to aiding Latin American communist par-
ties and promoting Maoism internationally, the movement of Chinese ideas
to Latin America ultimately rested in the hands of Latin Americans who
wanted to apply Chinese ideas in their home countries.
The particular forms that Latin American agency took in domesticating
Chinese ideas ranged from the mundane tasks of distributing literature
and disseminating propaganda in other forms to the creative leaps of try-
ing to find specific national forms for Chinese concepts. A Mexican infor-
mant of mine, Simitrio Tzompazquelitl, recalled getting beat up by the
police as a youth when he went to Mexico City to get Chinese literature
to distribute in his home town of Puebla.4 His experience is representative
of both the manifold mundane tasks (traveling from a smaller city to a
larger one to get propaganda produced in China to distribute) undertaken
by numerous anonymous Latin American Chinese sympathizers and the
risks involved even in carrying out these small tasks. China was willing
to provide materials, but it was the numerous Latin Americans who not
only did the grunt work of getting those materials distributed, but also
ran the risks involved.
Apart from the daily grind of agitation and propaganda work, Latin
American agency also took more creative forms. Florencio Medrano’s effort
to create a Chinese-style base area in a squatter settlement on the outskirts
of Cuernavaca was one such attempt. The dueling events held by the rival
Mexico-China Friendship Societies represented differing creative attempts
to fashion a vision of how China was relevant to Mexico. Oscar Zamora’s
effort to launch a people’s war in Bolivia’s jungle and the Shining Path’s more
successful war effort were forms of Latin American creative domestication of
Chinese ideas. In all of these efforts, Latin American agency was principal.
The Chinese supplied the propaganda materials and some training, but Latin
Americans were on their own to decide how to use that material and training.
To the extent that Latin Americans were able to disseminate and domes-
ticate Chinese ideas, they relied on formal contacts with the People’s
Republic of China and organized networks and party structures in their
home countries. Latin American and Chinese agency took place within the
context of relatively cohesive structures which usually tried to use orga-
nizational discipline and divisions of labor in order to effectively utilize
cadres’ time and efforts to maximize the reach and impact of propaganda
efforts. The Shining Path, well-known for its strict organizational disci-
pline, is the most successful example of this form of organization, but most
of the other pro-Chinese groups we have considered aspired to similar
levels of structural sophistication and discipline. The organized nature of
Latin American agency highlights the fact that the influence of Chinese
ideas in Latin America was overwhelmingly due to the efforts made by
groups of people trying to propagate those ideas. The influence of Chinese
ideas was not mainly due to the fact that such ideas were floating in the
air as part of the plethora of radical new ideas that were influential during
the 1960s.
REVOLUTIONARY ASYNCHRONICITY
While Latin Americans, not the Chinese, interpreted how Maoist ideas
applied to Latin American conditions, their interpretations were often not
particularly creative. The concept of “revolutionary asynchronous develop-
ment” put forward by John Lewis Gaddis is useful in understanding the
mechanical and dogmatic way in which Latin American Maoists often inter-
preted the lessons of the Chinese Revolution for their own countries.5 In the
process of summing up many of the discoveries of the new Cold War litera-
ture, Gaddis notes the “surprisingly literal” way in which Mao understood
the experience of the Soviet Union as that of an elder brother from whom
the younger brother must learn. As Gaddis sums up:
We have seen how [Mao] expected an American invasion of China in

1949 because the United States and its allies had sent troops to Siberia
and North Russia in 1918: the Korean and Indochinese conflicts, as
he perceived it, were the functional equivalent of such foreign inter-
vention. He had allowed a brief period of experimentation with state-
sponsored capitalism, analogous to Lenin’s New Economic Policy. He
had then collectivized agriculture and launched a Five-Year Plan for
rapid industrialization, both based carefully on the Soviet model. He
was even willing to wait “eighteen or even more years” for diplomatic
recognition from the United States, because it had taken seventeen to
recognize the Soviet Union.6
Conclusions 91
Gaddis shows that from 1949 to 1957, Mao and the Chinese Communist
Party as a whole attempted to mechanically reproduce the Soviet experience
of economic development and modernization.
Most trends of Marxist thought posit that societies go through stages
of development that have universal characteristics, regardless of when or
where that stage of development takes place. Just as the Chinese perceived
Soviet development policies from the 1920s as suitable to beginning socialist
construction in 1950s China, Latin American and Chinese Maoists posited
that until 1949 China had been characterized by semifeudal/semicolonial
conditions, and thus the strategy and tactics that the Chinese Communists
devised to suit those conditions held universal lessons for other semifeudal/
semicolonial countries. On one level, then, revolutionary asynchronicity can
be seen as implicit in Marxist universalism.
But perhaps there are reasons in addition to Marxist ideas of stages of
development, and thus of forms of revolutionary action that are supposed
to scientifically correspond to different levels of development, that account
for the mechanical “revolutionary asynchronicity” that was so common
among Latin American Maoists. Over two hundred years ago, while dis-
cussing the rise of Islam, Edward Gibbon noted that “in all religions, the
life of the founder supplies the silence of his written revelation: the sayings
of Mahomet were so many lessons of truth; his actions so many examples
of virtue; and the public and private memorials were preserved by his wives
and companions.”7 If the actions of a moral founding figure, Muhammad
or Mao Zedong, represent “so many examples of virtue,” then why would
followers of those figures not try to replicate them? Perhaps the efforts of
Latin American Maoists to replicate the actions of Mao and the Chinese
revolutionaries he led, regardless of place and time, were sometimes a form
of religious reenactment of virtuous or moral action as much as they were a
reasoned application of Marxist principles to appropriate historical condi-
tions. Certainly, that religious element to reenacting the Chinese revolution
in Latin America would be consistent with the ways in which Mao’s works
were treated as a sacred text by leaders such as Abimael Guzmán, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 3. Florencio Medrano’s decision to try to start a Maoist
people’s war in the border region between Oaxaca and Veracruz, mimicking
Mao’s actions in the Jiangxi-Fujian border region, seems to have been based
more on a leap of faith than on a rational assessment of objective conditions.
It seems reasonable to assert that while a particular notion of historical
materialism that universalized the forms of subjective activity that corre-
spond to particular sets of objective conditions (in this case semifeudalism/
semicolonialism) played a major role in how Chinese ideas were understood
as relevant to Latin America, an unstated form of religious adherence to
and understanding of Maoist ideas was also present. This religious element
in the transfer of Chinese ideas to Latin America contributed to revolution-
ary asynchronicity as Latin American Maoists tried to reenact the virtuous
actions of the founder of their “religion.”
THE COLD WAR, COMPETING VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION
AND CHINA’S APPEAL FOR LATIN AMERICAN NATIONALISTS
In a recent article, Prasenjit Duara discusses how the Cold War in the devel-
oping world was marked by “the imposition through clientilistic, and fre-
quently unpopular, ruling structures in developing nations of designs for
enlightenment by an enormously superior military power.”8 The elites of
the Soviet Union and the United States put forward their contending visions
of modernization, one socialist (or allegedly socialist) and the other capital-
ist. The socialist vision of modernization had considerable appeal for Latin
American nationalists, as it emphasized state ownership of major indus-
try and greater economic equality. Additionally, the socialist vision had the
advantage of defying the United States, a considerable psychological payoff
for nationalists who saw the United States as the main neocolonial power
in Latin America.
Yet China had a particular appeal for some Latin American nationalists
with socialist inclinations, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fol-
lowing his January 1959 trip to China, former Mexican president Lázaro
Cárdenas articulated part of the appeal of the People’s Republic of China to
Latin American nationalists well when he wrote:
The Chinese, after bloody struggles with their traditional enemies,

lashed by endemic diseases, the floods of their great rivers, which left
numerous victims, the blights that frequently decimated their crops and
left them in stifling poverty, understood that only united, in a common
effort, could they resolve their deep problems, and that was how they
began the great work that they are today carrying out.
China is writing today one of the most brilliant pages of world his-
tory, with the transformation that it is accomplishing among its people,
which makes it worthy of admiration and esteem.
The Chinese people have extraordinarily sensitivity and tact. They
work intensely day and night in order to better themselves, to make
their country great; they understand how to behave in order to succeed.9
Cárdenas echoes the Bolivian Nationalists from Chapter 4 in his paean to

the Chinese people’s ability to overcome underdevelopment, natural disas-
ters and the ravages of decades of warfare through collective efforts at mod-
ernization.
Apart from the appeal of the heroic, collective efforts of the Chinese peo-
ple that drew Cárdenas’s attention, China had two advantages as a model
for socialist modernization over the Soviet model, which dominated on a
global level (and which was ultimately imposed on Cuba). First, China was
recognizable as independent of the USSR, especially after 1958, in ways the
other Soviet bloc countries were not. Maoist modernization can be seen as
a way of articulating the aspirations for socialist modernization offered by
Conclusions 93
the Soviet model, while eschewing the undesirable possible consequence of
being dominated by the Soviets similar to Eastern Europe, North Korea or
Mongolia. Second, China offered a model of development and moderniza-
tion that was working (or perceived to be working) in a Third World coun-
try. The discourses of both the capitalist and socialist modernizers lumped
large parts of the world together as Third World, underdeveloped, develop-
ing, neocolonial or semicolonial. According to these ways of understanding
the problem of modernization, it was natural for China to be seen as sharing
major structural characteristics with Latin America, despite the vast differ-
ences between these regions. Thus, China was a more natural model for
Latin American modernization than the Soviet Union.
The window of China’s appeal as a potential model for modernization to
Latin American nationalists was relatively brief. The emergence of China as
recognizably independent from the Soviet Union coincided with major propa-
ganda efforts that trumpeted the major economic triumphs of the Great Leap
Forward at the end of the 1950s. As we have seen in the narratives of the
Bolivians in Chapter 4 and Cárdenas above, these events caught the attention
of noncommunist nationalists and elicited their warm approval. Yet, as the
Sino-Soviet split created tensions between China and Cuba, and the Cultural
Revolution created a situation of perceived chaos in China in the mid-1960s,
China lost its appeal for many Latin American nationalists.
WHY HAVE THE MAOISTS BEEN LARGELY

IGNORED UNTIL NOW?
A central thesis of this book is that Maoists and others who were influenced
by the Chinese Revolution played an important, yet often unacknowledged,
role in Latin America’s New Left. This begs the question, why exactly have
the Maoists been ignored? I have a multipart answer to this question, which
I think sheds light on how disciplinary norms have led to an important blind
spot in our understanding of recent Latin American history. The first factor
is a common tendency among historians to mainly look to Europe and the
United States for connections with Latin America in the Cold War period. In
histories of the colonial period, when slaves were being brought across the
Atlantic in their millions from Africa and a regular trans-Pacific trade was
carried on between the Spanish colony in the Philippines and Latin America,
connections with Asia and Africa are widely acknowledged and studied.
However, in modern Latin American history, and in particular Latin Amer-
ica during the Cold War, the search for connections between Latin America
and Asia have apparently been counterintuitive for most historians. This is,
I think, a hangover from the traditional, and now largely dethroned, way of
looking at the Cold War as mainly a competition between the United States
and Soviet-led blocs, centered in North America and Europe, rather than as
a global phenomenon with multiple important centers of power and agency
that encompassed revolutionary movements and efforts at decolonization
in the Third World. The traditional school of Cold War historiography saw
agency as mainly located in the power centers of Moscow and Washing-
ton and largely ignored the agency of Latin Americans and other Third
World actors. Historians of Latin America have long contested that denial of
Latin American agency. However, it is only recently that historians of Latin
America have begun to examine how Latin America fits into a global Cold
War that is more broadly conceived than the traditional, U.S.- and Soviet-
centered model. This has contributed to the blind spot in regard to China’s
influence in Latin America.10
The second factor is a lack of knowledge of Chinese history among most
Latin Americanists. Secondary fields of expertise are often not vigorously
pursued because of our discipline’s emphasis on specialization. However,
this emphasis on regional (and, indeed, subregional and sub-subregional)
specialization can lead us to miss connections that would otherwise be clear.
For example, it is clear to any historian of modern China that when Flor-
encio Medrano tried to create a Maoist base area in the Veracruz-Oaxaca
border region, he was trying to copy Mao’s efforts of the late 1920s. Yet how
many historians of Latin American social movements and guerrilla groups
would catch that? Or, take the case of Peru. As discussed in Chapter 3, there
is a voluminous and growing literature on the Shining Path that situates
the Shining Path within the context of Peruvian society and culture. That
is very important. Yet the importance of Chinese history and politics to the
Shining Path’s development and the unfolding of its plans means that some
knowledge of Chinese history and politics is essential to gain entrée into the
“closed communication system” used by Sendero in its internal (and even in
many public) documents.11
The third factor is the generalized revulsion at the most visible repre-
sentatives of Maoism in Latin America, the Shining Path. Many, although
certainly not all, studies of guerrilla groups and social movements in post-
1960 Latin America have been motivated by some degree of sympathy for
the movements being studied. The Shining Path never elicited much solidar-
ity or support in the academies of Europe and North America, and its aca-
demic supporters in Latin America have been focused on movement tasks
rather than on historical writing. Despite the skepticism that some histori-
ans, including myself, have about the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation
Commission’s claim that Sendero killed more civilians than the Peruvian
government killed, the fact that such a claim can even plausibly be put for-
ward speaks to a level of brutality that, when combined with the political
and military defeat of the movement, makes it singularly unattractive even
for most of the academics who have gone tailing after other Latin American
guerrilla groups.
The fourth and final factor why the Maoists have been mostly missed in
the historiography of Latin America’s long 1960s and Cold War is probably
due to their weakness in Latin America today. Because of the weakness of
Conclusions 95
the Maoists today, it is easy to assume that they were never important to
begin with, or at least not as important as the clear forerunners of the main
political trends in contemporary Latin America. After China went capitalist
in the years after Mao’s death in 1976, the Maoists became a weak political
trend even in most of the countries where they had been influential. In light
of their current weakness, it can be easy to miss the window of time when
they were an important political trend in Latin America. Yet, if we forget
about the Maoists, we miss a key element of Latin American history.
Notes
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
1. Quoted from Roberto Márquez and David Arthur McMurray, eds. and
trans., Man-Making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén, 2nd ed.
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 39. The original Span-
ish version can be found in Nicolás Guillén, Obra poética 1958–1972, Tomo
II (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1974), 31. Guillén, a prominent
figure in the négritude movement, wrote this poem after his 1958 visit to
China.
2. Interview with Víctor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007.
3. See, for examples of articles, Daniel Tretiak, “China and Latin America:
An Ebbing Tide in Transpacific Maoism,” Current Scene: Developments in
Mainland China 4, no. 5 (March 1, 1966): 1–12 or Ernst Halperin, “Peking
and the Latin American Communists,” China Quarterly 29 (January–March,
1967): 111–154. The book is Cecil Johnson, Communist China and Latin
America, 1959–1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
4. Johnson, Communist China, 12.
5. Piero Gleijeses’s study of Cuba’s Africa policy, Conflicting Missions: Havana,
Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2002), is probably the best-known and most outstanding example
of this trend.
6. An exemplary work in this vein is Michael Szonyi’s Cold War Island: Que-
moy on the Front Line (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which
details how the Cold War reshaped society on Quemoy. The connection
between these two trends in recent scholarship is well-illustrated by Gilbert
Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New
Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
7. Rod Aya, “Theories of Revolution Reconsidered: Contrasting Methods of
Collective Violence,” Theory and Society 8, no. 1 (July 1979): 40–45, quoted
in Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14.
8. Eric, Zolov, “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to
a New Left in Latin America” A Contracorriente 5, no. 2 (2008): 48–49.
9. Jeffrey Gould, “Solidarity under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968,”
American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 374.
10. Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American
Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke
University, 1986). See also David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian
Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina
98 Notes
Press, 2001) and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall
of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),
157–174.
11. Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travail 10
(Autumn 1982): 119, cited in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13.
12. See, for example, the methodological discussion of Chinese village studies
in the 1970s based solely on interviewing refugees from a mainland village
who had fled to Hong Kong, in Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan
Unger, Chen Village: Under Mao and Deng, expanded and updated edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2–9.
13. For Vesey’s personal history and deep interest in the Haitian Revolution as
a revolutionary model, see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise
and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006), 170–171 and Scott, “The Common Wind,” 307–308.
14. Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin
America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in Joseph and Spenser,
In From the Cold, 4.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Important Talks with Guests from Asia, Africa
and Latin America (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), 3.
2. Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” in Selected Works
of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 4 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 413.
3. The “returned Bolshevik” Bo Gu was formally “the person with overall
responsibility in the Party Center,” but as Braun played the guiding role for
the “returned Bolsheviks” as the Comintern representative, sat on the Polit-
buro and was in charge of military decision making, it does not seem an
exaggeration to describe Braun as the party leader.
4. Mao’s concluding speech at the CCP’s Seventh Congress, May 31, 1945.
Cited in Yang Kuisong, “Changes in Mao Zedong’s Attitude Toward the
Indochina War, 1949–1973,” Cold War International History Project Work-
ing Paper 34 (February 2002): 2. Yang relied on editions of Mao’s works that
are not available in English.
5. “Mighty Advance of the National Liberation Movement in the Colonial
and Dependent Countries,” For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy,
January 27, 1950. This was the newspaper of the Cominform (Communist
Information Bureau). The text of Liu’s speech was also transmitted to North
America independently in English Morse code on November 23, 1949; see
Robert C. North, “The Chinese Revolution and Asia,” International Journal
6, no. 1 (Winter 1950/1951): 20.
6. See discussion and citations in Chapter 2, as well as Yang Kuisong, “Changes
in Mao Zedong’s Attitude Toward the Indochina War, 1949–1973,” 3.
7. The full treaty is reproduced in Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and
Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993), 260–261.
8. Yang Kuisong, “Changes in Mao Zedong’s Attitude Toward the Indochina
War, 1949–1973,” 9–11.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. Ibid., 12–14.
11. The five principles are listed in Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold
War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 36.
Notes 99
12. Perhaps secret should be put in scare quotes, since the New York Times ran
a full translation of the speech on June 5, 1956.
13. Although the doctrine of a peaceful transition to socialism had not been
advocated by the Moscow-based leadership of the international communist
movement previously, many communist parties had adopted tactics that pre-
figured Khrushchev’s new line.
14. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 39.
15. See Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, comp. Central Committee of
the Communist Party of China (1955; repr., Honolulu: University of the
Pacific Press, 2002). On the “revolutionary and heroic” legacy of Soviet
collectivization, see Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers
in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987).
16. Published in People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), April 5, 1956.
17. The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Peking: For-
eign Languages Press, 1959), 18.
18. Mao Zedong, “On the Ten Major Relationships,” in Selected Works of Mao
Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 5:304.
19. Both articles, originally dated April 5 and December 29, 1956, have been
published together as The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959).
20. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 71.
21. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 99–104; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold
War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 187–190.
22. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 35–37.
23. The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Peking: For-
eign Languages Press, 1959), 24.
24. Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Lan-
guages Press, 1966). The original Chinese edition was first published in 1964.
25. See the chapter on Peru for an archetypical case.
26. Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War (Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1968), 108.
27. To get the Latin American side of the story, one must visit multiple archives
at multiple sites in multiple countries and track down an array of colorful
figures and sort fact from fiction in the stories that they tell. To do that,
one has to speak Spanish. It probably will not surprise the reader that few
specialists in Chinese foreign affairs speak Spanish. (Additionally, there is the
difficulty of finding funding for travel to several Latin American countries,
as opposed to making one convenient trip to Beijing.) And so we have this
lamentable situation wherein enlightening books are published on Chinese
foreign policy, the Sino-Soviet split and China in the Cold War, but despite the
clear importance of liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America
to the Chinese Communist Party (at least according to Chinese rhetoric),
we have relatively little information about how the Chinese party and state
interacted with those liberation movements.
28. Interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006.
29. Leonardo Ruilova, China popular en América Latina (Quito: Ediciones Inter-
nacionales, 1978), 99–100; R. Evan Ellis, China in Latin America: The Whats
and Wherefores (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 35.
30. Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in
the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 90; Dan-
iel Tretiak, “China and Latin America: An Ebbing Tide in Transpacific Mao-
ism,” Current Scene: Developments in Mainland China 4, no. 5 (March 1,
100 Notes
1966): 2; Jiang Shixue, “On the Development of Sino-Latin American Rela-
tions,” China International Studies no. 9 (Winter 2007): 76–102. The statis-
tics are from Jiang, who takes them from Chinese customs statistics (zhonguo
haiguan tongji).
31. Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (New York: Penguin, 1974), 224; Ruilova, China
popular, 103–104; Daniel Tretiak, “The Chinese in Latin America,” China
Quarterly no. 7 (July–Sept. 1961): 151.
32. William E. Ratliff, “Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin
America, 1949–1960,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 1 (Feb.
1969): 57–58. Those wanting to pursue the issue of Chinese cultural diplo-
macy beyond my brief discussion here should consult this article.
33. Tad Szulc, The Winds of Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1963), 187.
34. Longer lists can be found in Ruilova, China popular, 99–102 and Ratliff, “Chi-
nese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949–1960,”
61–63. See also William E. Ratliff, “Communist China and Latin America,
1949–1972,” Asian Survey 12, no. 10 (Oct. 1972): 846–863. On Lázaro
Cárdenas’s January 1959 trip to China, see Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: I-Apuntes,
1957–1966 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1973), 3:83–84, 88–91, 101–103.
35. W.A.C. Adie, “China, Russia, and the Third World,” China Quarterly 11
(July–Sept. 1962): 207.
36. Interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007
(Echazú was a former Xinhua correspondent for Bolivia).
37. Interview with Andrea Gómez in Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006.
38. Jiang Shixue, “On the Development of Sino-Latin American Relations.”
39. Ernst Halperin, “Peking and the Latin American Communists,” China Quar-
terly 29 (January–March 1967): 118–119; Osvaldo Peralva, O Retrato (Rio
de Janeiro: Editora Globo, 1962), 24–25.
40. Ratliff, “Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America,
1949–1960,” 64; Peralva, O Retrato, 120. Peralva mentions Brazilian par-
ticipation in the training course but does not name the other participating
Latin American communist parties.
41. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 104. The training facility remains
off-limits to nonmilitary personnel.
42. José Sotomayor Pérez, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo? (Lima: Editorial Universo,
1979), 47–48; José Sotomayor Pérez, Revolución cultural proletaria (Lima:
Ediciones Nueva Democracia, 1967), 71.
43. The term revisionist in Marxist parlance serves to label, and usually to con-
demn, those who have “revised” the revolutionary heart out of Marxism and
dates from the time of Lenin’s polemics against the evolutionary socialism of
Eduard Bernstein. Those who find the naming practices of Latin American
Maoist groups hard to follow should just be happy that we are not discuss-
ing Turkey, where Maoist splinter parties distinguished themselves from each
other by using different symbols in their acronyms [for example: TKP (ML)
and TKP/ML were the acronyms for two different groups using the name
Turkish Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)].
44. “Introducing Peking Review,” Peking Review 1, no. 1 (March 4, 1958): 3.
45. Halperin, “Peking and the Latin American Communists,” 146.
46. For example, CVR interview with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre
in Callao on May 28, 2002, 26; interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on
March 20, 2007; interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on Febru-
ary 23, 2007. See also IPS Caja 492, exp. 1, #394 (dated May 24, 1966),
discussed in Chapter 2.
47. José María Sisón, with Ninotchka Rosca, José María Sisón: At Home in the
World (Greensboro: Open Hand, 2004), 46.
Notes 101
48. There may also be lingering concerns about the legality of having received
those funds, even though the act occurred decades ago.
49. Interview with Diva Arratia del Río in La Paz on March 1, 2007; interview
with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006.
50. Jorge Palacios, Chile: An Attempt at “Historic Compromise.” The Real Story
of the Allende Years (Chicago: Banner Press, 1979), 5; Partido Comunista
Revolucionario de Chile, El Pueblo: 50 números de “El Pueblo” en la clan-
destinidad (Toronto: Ediciones Marxista-Leninistas, 1978).
51. See Chapter 3 for more information on Peru. The Peruvians weren’t the only
ones to target Deng Xiaoping. When Deng visited Washington, D.C., in Janu-
ary 1979, Maoists based in the United States who were demonstrating against
Deng got into a big fight with the police. See “5 Men Arrested After Attack
on China Chancery,” Washington Post, January 25, 1979; “Violence Flares
Briefly in Day of Varied Protests” and “Two Maoists Disrupt Teng Ceremo-
nies,” Washington Post, January 30, 1979.
52. Interview with Martín Rodríguez and Víctor Reyes on February 20, 2006, in
Mexico City.
53. Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in
the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) deals with
this Chinese apparatus for managing foreigners extensively. However, because
the book is focused on the Chinese management of foreigners from the devel-
oped world, Making the Foreign Serve China does not capture important ele-
ments of the experience of foreigners from the Third World in China.
54. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 87; Oswaldo Reynoso, Los eunucos
inmortales, 3rd. ed. (Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 2005), 17–22.
55. Interview with Eduardo Ayllón on July 15, 2010, in La Paz.
56. For example, none of the four major books on Latin America during the
Cold War published in the last few years include any discussion of Maoism
as a continental ideological force, apart from a chapter on the Shining Path
as a phenomenon local to Peru in one volume. See Greg Grandin, The Last
Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004); Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold; Hal Brands,
Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010);
Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insur-
gent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Diario de un viaje a la China nueva (Mexico

City: Ediciones Futuro, 1950), 108–109. Translation always mine unless oth-
erwise mentioned.
2. The countries sending union delegations were Burma, Sri Lanka, China,
North Korea, South Korea, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia,
Thailand, Mongolia, Pakistan, the USSR and Vietnam; ibid., 106.
3. As discussed in Chapter 1. Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue
Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1993), 105. This point is discussed in a more global
context in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 159.
4. The idea of a global, long 1960s (roughly 1955–1973) has been put forward in
Karen Dubinsky, et al., eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of
Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009), among other places.
102 Notes
5. When referring to the both the Partido Popular and the Partido Popular
Socialista, I use the acronym PP(S). The name change occurred in 1960.
6. Lombardo, Diario de un viaje, 66–67.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. Ibid., 88–89.
9. Ibid., 81–84, 88, 90–92, 97–99.
10. Ibid., 109–118, 126–134.
11. Ibid., 136–141.
12. Ibid., 140.
13. Ibid., 141.
14. Ibid., 144; translation mine.
15. Ibid., 145.
16. A rightist deviation might typically involve compromising in a way that would
negate the goals of the revolution, while an adventurist deviation would
involve continuing armed struggle under conditions where mass support did
not exist, or where negotiation was called for.
17. Ibid., 144–156.
18. Ibid., 157–158.
19. Ibid., 159–160.
20. Ibid., 162–163.
21. A serious comparison between the Chinese and Mexican revolutions has
been made in Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York:
Harper & Row, 1969). John Mason Hart compares the Mexican Revolution
with the Chinese Revolution of 1911 in Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming
and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987).
22. Lombardo, Diario de un viaje, 187–189.
23. Ibid., 192–204.
24. The manner in which Lombardo reports on the various aspects of the Chinese
Revolution echoes the way in which official Chinese publications discussed
these issues. It is unclear, though, if this is because Lombardo drew on official
Chinese publications in drafting his travelogue, or if it is due to the fact that his
Chinese interlocutors did not themselves stray far from official formulations.
25. A scholar of Lombardismo, Barry Carr, succinctly characterizes Lombardo’s
politics this way in “The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State:
Marxism’s Contribution to the Construction of the Great Arch,” in Gilbert
M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation:
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1994), 332.
26. On the radicalizing effect of the railway workers’ and teachers’ strikes on the
communist movement in Mexico, see my interview with Camilo in Mexico
City on February 16, 2006. He claimed that the 1958 teachers and railway
workers movements contributed to the impulse within the PCM, and in the
movement generally, to look for other ways of doing things than the way the
PCM did things. On the events of 1958–1959 in Mexico, see Antonio Alonso,
El movimiento ferrocarrilero en México, 1958–1959 (Mexico City: Edicio-
nes Era, 1972); Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century
Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 203–219.
27. Victor Alba, “The Chinese in Latin America,” The China Quarterly 5 (Janu-
ary–March 1961): 54.
28. Diplomatic recognition occurred in 1972.
29. Leonardo Ruilova, China Popular en América Latina (Quito: Ediciones
Internacionales, 1978), 136. Interview with Adolfo Mexiac in Cuernavaca
on March 11, 2006.
Notes 103
30. Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan. El Frente Unico Pro
Derechos de la Mujer, 1934–1938 (Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Miguel
Angel Porrúa, 1992), 95.
31. Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2005), 111.
32. Quoted in ibid., 164. The translation is presumably Olcott’s.
33. Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan, 142.
34. Interview with Andrea Gómez in Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006. Erika
Cervantes, “Esther Chapa fue promotora incansable del voto femenino,”
Comunicación e Información de la Mujer, http://www.cimacnoticias.com/
noticias/03abr/s03040106.html (accessed July 7, 2007). On the contributions
of Mexican Marxists to ruling party hegemony in Mexico, see Carr, “The
Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State.”
35. “Declaración de Principios y Estatutos de la Sociedad Mexicana de Amistad
con China Popular” in IPS Caja 492, exp. 2, #81.
36. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #475 (dated May 31, 1966).
37. Interviews with Adolfo Mexiac in Cuernavaca on March 11, 2006; Andrea
Gómez in Cuernavaca on March 12, 2006; and Simitrio Tzompazquelitl in
Mexico City on March 21, 2006.
38. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #552 (dated June 4, 1966).
39. IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #199 (dated July 23, 1966). This is the only numerical
estimate I have found for membership in either SMACP at any time.
43. IPS Caja 492, exp. 3, #369 (dated July 8, 1966); IPS Caja 492, exp. 3, #371
(dated July 8, 1966).
44. IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #161 (dated July 22, 1966); IPS Caja 493, exp. 1, #167
(dated July 22, 1966).
45. Roger Bartra, El reto de la izquierda: Polémica del México actual (Mexico
City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1982), 185.
46. IPS Caja 495, exp. 2, #273 (dated September 12, 1966).
47. IPS Caja 515, exp. 3, #122 (dated March 9, 1967).
48. IPS Caja 495, exp. 1, #616 (dated June 10, 1966); IPS Caja 493, exp. 3, #204
(dated August 26, 1966).
49. Interview with Simitrio Tzompazquelitl in Mexico City on March 21, 2006.
50. Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico Under Siege: Popular Resistance to
Presidential Despotism (New York: Zed Books, 2002), 88–89. Modeled on
Fidel Castro’s 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks (also unsuccessful from
a military standpoint), Gámiz’s assault on the Madera Barracks in Chihua-
hua was a disastrous undertaking. Seventeen guerrillas attacked 120 soldiers.
Eight guerrillas died during the battle, and most survivors, including Gámiz,
were soon tracked down and killed.
51. Baloy Mayo has also noted the Maoist influence on the Grupo Popular Guer-
rillero; see Baloy Mayo, La guerrilla de Génaro y Lucio: Análisis y resultados
(Mexico City: Editorial Diógenes, 1980), 49.
52. Although, as indicated above in our quotation from Lombardo’s memoir
regarding economic development in China and Mexico, Lombardo and also
the PCM saw the revolutionary nationalist aspect of Mexico’s modernization
as being secondary to the continued subordination of Mexico to the United
States and other imperialist powers.
53. Arturo Gámiz García, Segundo Encuentro de la Sierra “Heraclio Bernal”.
Resolución 3. Breve Resumen Histórico (Ediciones Línea Revolucionaria,
1965), 1.
104 Notes
54. Arturo Gámiz García, Segundo Encuentro de la Sierra “Heraclio Bernal”.
Resolución 4. Medio Siglo de Dictadura Burguesa. La Burguesía ha Fra-
casado. Es Incapaz de Resolver los Problemas Nacionales (Ediciones Línea
Revolucionaria, 1965), 5–6.
55. In the 1980s, when the Chinese government asked Virginia Chapa to destroy
or return most of her materials from the Maoist era, Virginia passed her large
stock of Maoist propaganda along to Mexicans working in solidarity with
Peru’s Sendero Luminoso. Interview with Martín Rodríguez and Víctor Reyes
on February 20, 2006, in Mexico City.
56. Both of which were PPS-led mass organizations—that is, organizations that
generally followed the political guidance of the PPS but that had a broader
membership than the party itself.
57. The major examples being in China, Vietnam, France, Italy, Spain and Greece.
58. For background information on Medrano and the details of his trip to
China, see Elena Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio (Mexico City: Ediciones
Era, 1980), 244–245, 251; Ramón Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla (Houston:
Arte Público Press, 1999), 107–108; Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos
Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, “La guerrilla se extiende por todo el país,”
National Security Archive at George Washington University, http://www.
gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB180/070-Grupos%20armados.pdf
(accessed July 7, 2006), 9. There are some discrepancies in the sources regard-
ing the details of Medrano’s trip to China, and the Fiscalía Especial document
claims Medrano traveled to China in 1970, not 1969. Because of the discrep-
ancies in the sources, the dates given in this paragraph should be taken as
approximations. Also, while the Fiscalía Especial document places Medrano’s
hometown in Tlatlaya, Estado de México, Poniatowska gives his birthplace
as Guerrero; see Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 251.
59. Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 244.
60. This was the name of the government body named during the Fox adminis-
tration (2000–2006) to investigate human rights violations by the Mexican
army and police against social and political movements which emerged dur-
ing the 1960s and 1970s. It was inspired by truth commission efforts in other
countries. At the last minute, the Fox administration suppressed the report
of the special prosecutor, which was subsequently posted on the National
Security Archive’s Web site.
61. Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla, 108. Pérez also claims that Medrano was in
China for three years, contradicting Poniatowska and the government, each
of which claim he was in China for six months (despite offering different
years for his trip).
62. Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 244–245.
63. Ibid., 245, 250–254.
64. Ibid., 252.
65. Ibid., 197, 259.
66. See, for example, Juan Manuel Ramírez Sáiz, El movimiento urbano popular
en México (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1986).
67. Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 181–183, 185, 191–192, 197–198. At the
same time as Poniatowska gives the number of squatters as ten thousand, she
claims there were five thousand families.
68. Ibid., 190–195, 197–200, 262–263.
69. Ibid., 200–202.
70. Ibid., 256–258, 264–265.
71. Pérez, Diary of a Guerrilla, 49. This quote almost certainly relies on Pérez’s
memory of what Medrano said.
72. Ibid., 67.
Notes 105
73. Ibid., 65, 106.
74. Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio, 253–254.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. José Sotomayor Pérez, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo? (Lima: Editorial Universo,

1979), 24; “¿Ya ven?—prosiguió Mao—así se puede comenzar una guerra pop-
ular; no es difícil. ¿Quieren ustedes hacer la guerra? Es cuestión de decidirse.”
2. The PCP-SL still exists, and, in early 2012, two factions of it are still waging
armed struggle in Peru. Thus, end dates for the insurrection are somewhat
arbitrary. Most major military operations were over by 1995.
3. Guzmán became best know under his nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo
(the title “Chairman” [Presidente in Spanish] comes from the post he held
as chairman of the standing committee of the political bureau of the central
committee of the PCP–Sendero Luminoso).
4. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima: Defensoría
del Pueblo, 2003), 13.
5. Steve Stern, “Introduction to Part One,” in Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and
Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 13.
6. Peter Flindell Klarén, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 219.
7. Cells are generally the most basic organizational unit of a communist party.
8. Thomas M. Davies Jr., Indian Integration in Peru: A Half Century of Expe-
rience, 1900–1948 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 3. These
are only rough estimates. Many thousands of indigenous Peruvians were not
counted by the census, and it is not clear exactly how Indians and mestizos
were distinguished by the census takers.
9. For various legislative efforts at dealing with Peru’s Indians, see Davies,
Indian Integration in Peru.
10. See José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
(1928; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). See especially the essays
“The Problem of the Indian” and “The Problem of Land.”
11. Mariátegui, “The Problem of the Indian,” 28.
12. Sotomayor, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo?, 14. Soria was best known by his alias,
“Cantuarias.”
13. Carlos De la Riva, Donde nace la aurora (Arequipa: Ediciones Nueva Era,
1961), 5; “A quienes hicieron posible mi viaje a la República Popular China.
A quienes—‘revolucionarios’ o nó—, tratan de hacerme la vida imposible por
haberlo realizado . . .”
14. SINAMOS, Grupos maoístas (Lima: CENPLA/SINAMOS, 1975), 14–16.
15. Partido Comunista Peruano, Conclusiones y resoluciones del IV Congreso
Nacional del Partido Comunista Peruano (Lima: 1962), 58–68; Sotomayor,
¿Leninismo o maoísmo?, 51; CVR interview with Carlos Tapia in Lima on
June 29, 2002, 1–2.
16. The request was ignored; Sotomayor, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo?, 47–48; José
Sotomayor Pérez, Revolución cultural proletaria (Lima: Ediciones Nueva
Democracia, 1967), 71.
17. Sotomayor, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo?, 48.
18. Ibid.
19. It is not clear whether this translator just happened to be in Bern, or whether
he traveled there for this meeting.
20. Sotomayor, ¿Leninismo o maoísmo?, 15–18.
106 Notes
21. Ibid., 19–20, 24, 29. While the Maoist PCP initially continued to call itself
the Partido Comunista Peruano, it later changed its name to Partido Comu-
nista del Perú (although it was initially inconsistent in signing its documents
with the new name). It followed the example of the Brazilian Maoists, who
distinguished themselves from the pro-Soviet Brazilian Communist Party by
naming themselves the Communist Party of Brazil.
22. Interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006; Gustavo
Gorriti, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” in David Scott Palmer, ed., Shin-
ing Path of Peru, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 170–171.
23. De la Riva, Donde nace la aurora, 134.
24. Ibid., 60.
25. See Jorge del Prado, “Informe de organización del comité central a la III
conferencia nacional,” in Conclusiones y resoluciones de la IIIa conferencia
nacional del P.C.P. (Lima: Editora Lima, 1960).
26. De la Riva, Donde nace la aurora, 95–97.
27. Ibid., 100–103.
28. Ibid., 133–134. The quote can be found in Karl Marx, “Revelations Concern-
ing the Communist Trial in Cologne,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 11:403.
29. The pro-Chinese faction was known as the PCP-Bandera Roja, and the pro-
Soviet faction was known as the PCP-Unidad. The names were derived from
the main periodical each faction published (with Bandera Roja, Red Flag in
English, copying the title of the Chinese Communist Party Central Commit-
tee’s newspaper [Hongqi in Mandarin]).
30. December 3, 1934, to be exact.
31. Interview with Juan Luis Pérez Coronado in Ayacucho on September 12,
2006; interview with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006. For
1958 as the year Guzmán joined the PCP, see, among other sources, “Abimael
Guzmán Reynoso: Una aproximación a su vida y pensamiento político,” 10,
on Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection (DPI) microfilm reel 12.
32. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR) interview with Abimael
Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on May 28, 2002, 15; “Fui a una
escuela de cuadros, una escuela que tenía dos partes, una primera política,
que comenzaba con el estudio de la situación internacional y terminaba con
la filosofía marxista, eran varios cursos y una segunda parte militar, cumplida
en una escuela militar en Nan Kin, donde estudiaba teoría y práctica de una
manera más profunda.”
33. Abimael Guzmán, “Interview with Chairman Gonzalo,” interview by Luis
Arce Borja and Janet Talavera, A World to Win, no. 18 (1992): 79. Reprinted
and translated from July 1988 editions of El Diario.
34. CVR interview with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on
May 28, 2002, 18, 21. This second trip to China lasted two months. The
dates are approximate, but Guzmán definitely returned to Peru before the
October celebration of the anniversary of the 1949 founding of the People’s
Republic of China.
35. Ibid., 26. Guzmán represents this decision by the Chinese as an overall policy
decision to stop providing economic support to other communist parties.
This is generally true, although there were exceptions.
36. Ibid., 16. Ellipses appear in the CVR transcript and seem to represent spots
where the audio recording was unintelligible. In general, the quality of the
audio recordings of the interviews conducted by the CVR with Guzmán
and Iparraguirre are not good, and it is remarkable that there are not more
ellipses in the transcript. However, I have identified a number of discrepancies
between CVR transcripts and corresponding audio recordings. In general,
Notes 107
though, the discrepancies do not substantially change the content of the
interviews.
Estaba en ese momento la Revolución Cultural, (. . .) cosas que me impre-
sionaron, cambios profundos, desde la forma de atención en que eran
recibidos los extranjeros antes y en la Revolución Cultural. Por ejemplo,
(. . .) tuvimos una ocasión de ir a una depuración de libros, recuerdo a un
escritor famoso, Mao Tun, (. . .)
Los desfiles eran distintos, cambios muy profundos, en todos los cam-
pos. Claro, cambios políticos muchos más grandes. Cuando yo estuve en
ese lugar, yo estuve en el mismo centro, con protección militar. Cuando
estuve el ’65 era conventual, silencioso; el ’67 . . .
El ’67 era estruendoso, a ciertas horas del día, marchas, (. . .). Bien, otra
cosa que me llamaba la atención, cuando se me informó que el Partido Comu-
nista había sido disuelto, solamente quedaba el Comité Central, como organ-
ismo único. Todos los militantes deberían volver a comprobar si tenían crédito
suficiente para ser comunistas. (. . .) Y así, luego la información es otra acción
cultural, residimos en eso que ha sido (. . .) una exposición sobre el pensam-
iento Mao Tse Tung, por primera vez que veía información de ese tipo.
37. Partido Comunista del Peru (Bandera Roja), IV Conferencia Nacional del
Partido Comunista Peruano (N.p.: 1964), 35; “Nuestras tareas fundamen-
tales y nuestros esfuerzos principales deben volcarse al campo.”
38. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; CVR inter-
view with Carlos Tapia in Lima on June 29, 2002, 4.
39. Saturnino Paredes, En Torno a la Práctica Revolucionaria y la Lucha Interna
(Peru: Editorial Bandera Roja, 1970).
40. Degregori, “La revolución de los manuales: La expansión del marxismo-
leninismo en las ciencias sociales y la génesis de Sendero Luminoso,” Revista
Peruana de Ciencias Sociales 2, no. 3 (Setiembre–Diciembre 1990).
41. On the use of Soviet manuals in Cuba, and Che Guevara’s reasons for the use
of these manuals (which were the same as those later widely adopted in Peru),
see K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 46–47.
42. Ranulfo Cavero, UNSCH, “. . . imposible es morir . . .” Universidad sata-
nizada, asfixiada y violentada (Huancayo: Naokim Editores, 2005), 43–44;
interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; Degregori,
“La revolución de los manuales,” 116.
43. Iván Hinojosa, “On Poor Relations and the Nouveau Riche: Shining Path and
the Radical Peruvian Left” in Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths, 65. On the
radicalization of Peruvian universities in the 1970s, see Nicolás Lynch, Los
jóvenes rojos de San Marcos: El radicalismo universitario de los años setenta
(Lima: El Zorro de Abajo Ediciones, 1990).
44. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006. Also inter-
view with Zenón Naveda in Lima on September 20, 2006.
45. Carlos Castillo Ríos, La educación en China: Una pedagogía revoluciona-
ria (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1973); Oswaldo Reynoso, Los eunucos inmortales
(Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 1995); Miguel Gutiérrez, Babel, el paraíso
(Lima: Colmillo Blanco Editorial, 1993). Gutiérrez worked in China from
1976 to 1979 and Reynoso from 1977 to 1989. See also César Ángeles L.,
“El socialismo en la novela peruana (o viaje a la China de Miguel Gutiérrez
y Oswaldo Reynoso)” Intermezzo Tropical 4 (July 2006): 75–86.
46. Hinojosa, “On Poor Relations and the Nouveau Riche,” 72.
47. Orin Starn, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999).
108 Notes
48. CVR interview with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on
May 28, 2002, 27; “Nosotros nos vamos a separar en febrero del ’70, en el
’71 tenemos una II Sesión Plenaria del Comité Central en Ayacucho, éramos
doce, ¡doce personas, nada más!, y en el Perú cincuenta y tantos.”
49. Ibid. The name “sendero luminoso,” or “Shining Path,” is unofficial. Sendero
always referred to itself as the PCP, but due to the plethora of other PCP fac-
tions also calling themselves the PCP, Sendero became known by its slogan
“por el sendero luminoso de Mariátegui,” which appeared (with some varia-
tion in wording) on the mastheads of some of its publications.
50. Degregori, El surgimiento de sendero luminoso, 185–186.
51. Cavero, UNSCH, 33–35; CVR interview with Carlos Tapia in Lima on June
29, 2002, 4–5.
52. Sendero itself uses this term, “generated organization,” for the mass organi-
zations it leads. It signifies that the organizations were created (“generated”)
by the party.
53. Degregori, El surgimiento de sendero luminoso, 184–185; interview with
José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; Catalina Adrianzén,
“Semblanza de Antonio Díaz Martínez (asesinado en el Penal de Lurigancho,
Lima, el 19 de junio de 1986),” Boletín Americanista 38 (1988): 24–25. Díaz
and other Latin Americans who didn’t speak Mandarin would refine first
drafts of Chinese to Spanish translations done by Chinese translators.
54. Interview with José Coronel in Ayacucho on September 11, 2006; interview
with Oswaldo Reynoso in Lima on September 21, 2006.
55. “Abimael Guzmán Reynoso: Una aproximación a su vida y pensamiento
político,” 4–5, 13 on DPI reel 12 and SIN Report (n.d., but appears to be
from 1987) on DPI reel 9. According to this source, Guzmán was briefly
arrested in 1972 and 1979 because of violent protests against closing the
school. However, these are the only references I have found to Guzmán’s
arrests for protests at the Escuela de Aplicación Guamán Poma de Ayala. It
seems strange that this detail would be missing in other sources on the history
of the Shining Path. Given that this source is a police report that synthesizes
earlier police records on Guzmán, it may indicate that arrest warrants were
issued but that he was not in fact arrested.
56. “Plan of Investigation in the Countryside.” This document can be found at
the CVR’s archive in Lima, Carpeta 0457–0475, document 0462.
57. The quote is from the last page of the document before page numeration
begins.
58. Ibid., 25.
59. The most authoritative, critical English translation of this document is Mao
Zedong, “Oppose Bookism,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to
Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
1995), 3:419–426. The Chinese word benbenzhuyi can be translated as either
“bookism” or “book worship.” Earlier translations of the document pub-
lished in Beijing used the term “book worship” rather than “bookism.”
60. “Plan de investigación en el campo,” 3.
61. Ibid., 17.
62. Ibid., 10.
63. “Retomemos a Mariátegui y reconstituyamos su partido,” in Luis Arce Borja,
ed., Guerra popular en el Perú: El pensamiento Gonzalo, 59–92 (Brussels:
Luis Arce Borja, 1989).
64. Ibid., 72.
65. Whether Guzmán is correct or not in his claim that he is faithfully interpret-
ing Mariátegui by casting him in this Maoist light is beyond the scope of this
chapter. Some Peruvian intellectuals, such as Alberto Flores Galindo, have
Notes 109
tried to rescue Mariátegui from the Peruvian communist left. See Iván Hino-
josa, “El Retorno de Mariátegui (Después del Diluvio),” Quehacer 88 (marzo/
abril 1994): 87–91 and Alberto Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui:
La polémica con la Komintern (Lima: DESCO, 1982). But certainly many
Peruvians have found Guzmán’s arguments about the convergence between
Mariátegui and Mao plausible.
66. Guzmán, “Retomemos a Mariátegui y reconstituyamos su partido,” 75.
67. Ibid., 81.
68. Ibid., 90.
69. Antonio Díaz Martínez, China: La revolución agraria (Lima: Mosca Azul,
1978), 16.
70. Ibid., 22–47.
71. Ibid., 16.
72. Ibid., 52, 121–122, 143.
73. Ibid., 91. Needless to say, had the “transforming nature based on the collec-
tive force of the masses” side not triumphed, the canal would not have been
built and the example would not have made it into Díaz’s book.
74. Ibid., 36.
75. On Quintanilla and Mezzich, and the peasant movements they participated
in, see Lino Quintanilla, Andahuaylas: La lucha por la tierra (Lima: Mosca
Azul Editores, 1981) and Florencia Mallon, “Chronicle of a Path Foretold?
Velasco’s Revolution, Vanguardia Revolucionaria, and ‘Shining Omens’ in
the Indigenous Communities of Andahuaylas,” in Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining
and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1998). On the incorporation of their organization into Sendero,
see “Abimael Guzmán Reynoso: Una aproximación a su vida y pensamiento
político,” 18 on DPI reel 12 and José Luis Rénique, La batalla por Puno:
Conflicto agrario y nación en los Andes peruanos (Lima: Instituto de Estu-
dios Peruanos, 2004), 205–207. While Mallon was uncertain whether or not
Quintanilla had joined Sendero, his membership has now been well estab-
lished. See also Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR) interview
with Abimael Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre in Callao on January 27, 2003,
12–13.
76. On Sendero’s build-up to war in 1980 and the internal struggle in Sendero,
see Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in
Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 21–36, for a
succinct summary. Guzmán’s notes on the ninth plenary session of the central
committee (May–June 1979) are particularly helpful for conceptualizing this
process. These notes are held at the archive of the Comisión de la Verdad y la
Reconciliación in Lima.
77. Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho,
1895–1980 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 173–185.
78. Gorriti, The Shining Path, 17.
79. Gorriti, The Shining Path, 55–56, 67.
80. For examples, see Billie Jean Isbell, “Shining Path and Peasant Responses in
Rural Ayacucho,” and Ronald H. Berg, “Peasant Responses to Shining Path
in Andahuaylas,” in David Scott Palmer, ed., Shining Path of Peru and Nel-
son Manrique, “The War for the Central Sierra,” in Stern, ed., Shining and
Other Paths. See also Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian
Reform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
81. Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat
of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” in Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths.
82. There is some danger here of overgeneralizing the experience of peasant
communities with Sendero. The many local studies of Sendero and peasant
110 Notes
communities show that there was considerable variation in communities’
experience with Sendero. See the various local studies in Palmer, ed., Shin-
ing Path of Peru and Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths, as well as Gorriti,
The Shining Path; Rénique, La batalla por Puno; Lewis Taylor, Shining Path:
Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997 (Liverpool: Liver-
pool University Press, 2006) and Mario Fumerton, From Victims to Heroes:
Peasant Counter-Rebellion and Civil War in Ayacucho, Peru, 1980–2000
(Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2002).
83. Prior to 1982, the PCP-SL had followed the Chinese practice of referring to
itself as Marxist-Leninist and referring to its ideology as Marxism-Leninism,
Mao Zedong Thought. The adoption of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism conve-
niently allowed the PCP-SL to add first “Guiding Thought” and later “Gonzalo
Thought” to the name of its ideology. See PCP-SL, “Documentos Fundamen-
tales,” in Guerra popular en el Perú: El pensamiento Gonzalo, 395–411.
84. “Desarrollemos la guerra de guerrillas,” in Guerra popular en el Perú, 181–
204.
85. “No votar: Sino generalizar la guerra de guerrillas para conquistar el poder
para el pueblo,” in Guerra popular en el Perú, 205–216.
86. Comité Central, Partido Comunista del Perú, ¡Superar el recodo, desarrol-
lando la guerra popular! (Peru: 1995).
87. Documentos de Información (Peru: Ediciones Voz Popular, 1983), n.p.
88. Carlos Alberto Castillo Vargas, “Rompiendo el silencio: Raucana, historia de
una posible base de apoyo del Partido Comunista del Perú, o cómo se formó
el ‘nuevo poder.’” (Lic. thesis, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos,
2006), 132.
89. Ibid., 135–136. On Chinese practices of prisoner reform, see Allyn Rick-
ett and Adele Rickett, Prisoners of Liberation (San Francisco: China Books,
1981).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. Interview with Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007.

Echazú and his comrades were told to change the name of their cell. In
Echazú’s telling of the story, the sudden and surprising criticisms of Stalin by
Khrushchev were explained by the Bolivian communist leaders to Echazú and
his cell-mates as amounting to “he killed people.”
2. This remains the case today, but much less dramatically so than in the 1930s.
3. For population growth and more generally on the impact of the Chaco War,
see Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles
for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007), 107.
4. The MNR was founded in 1941 and the PIR in 1940.
5. Both quotes taken from Herbert Klein, Orígenes de la revolución nacional
boliviana: La crisis de la generación del Chaco (La Paz: Editorial “Juventud,”
1968), 392–393.
6. Ibid., 393–394.
7. A summary of the conditions of indigenous peasants at the time of the 1952
revolution can be found in Alan Knight, “The Domestic Dynamics of the
Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions Compared,” in Merilee S. Grindle and
Pilar Domingo, eds., Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Per-
spective (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003), 59.
8. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–
1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 6–7.
Notes 111
9. On the strike, the PIR and the MNR, see Klein, Orígenes de la revolución nacio-
nal boliviana, 409–410; Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights, 168–169.
10. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 42.
11. Ibid., 85–86.
12. Ibid., 76.
13. Central Obrera Boliviana, Programa ideológico y estatutos de la Central
Obrera Boliviana: Aprobados por el Congreso Nacional de Trabajadores (La
Paz: COB, 1954), 13–14.
14. Who was also a noted international supporter of the MNR.
15. Mario Torres Calleja, China-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos (La Paz: Empresa Editora
“Universo,” 1961), 21–22.
16. Germán Quiroga Galdo, China: Gigante despierto (Bolivia: Ediciones “Pueb-
los Libres,” 1960), 13.
17. Torres, China-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos, 38.
18. Ibid., 14–16.
19. Quiroga, China, 30.
20. Ibid., 35.
21. Ibid., 48.
22. Ibid., 45.
23. Ibid., 288.
24. Ibid., 19–20.
25. Ibid., 280, 282–283.
26. Ibid., 273–278.
27. Torres, China-U.R.S.S. Dos procesos, 51–54.
28. Ibid., 55.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Ibid., 151.
31. Ricardo Anaya, “Las comunas populares en la economía china” Revista de
la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas 2, no. 2 (julio 1961): 17–27.
32. Ibid., 27.
33. Jesús Lara, Flor de loto: Mensaje de amor a la mujer china (Cochabamba:
Editorial América, 1960).
34. Ibid., 45–46.
35. Ibid., 49–50.
36. Ibid., 46.
37. Quotations are in Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 109.
38. Interview with Edgar Ramírez in La Paz on February 15, 2007; interview
with Félix Muruchi in La Paz on March 12, 2007; interview with Víc-
tor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007; interview with Jorge Echazú
Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007; Partido Comunista de Bolivia,
Documentos del II Congreso Nacional del P.C.B. (La Paz: Publicaciones
P.C.B., 1964); Luis Oporto Ordónez, “La mina de ‘Siglo XX’ (Potosí)
en la historia reciente: Federico Escóbar Zapata, 1924–1966,” Revista
del Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore 5 (1995): 25–36; Federico
Escóbar Zapata, “Mi vida,” Cultura boliviana 4 (May 1964): 7–9; Par-
tido Comunista de Bolivia (Marxista-Leninista), Federico Escóbar Zapata:
Hijo de la clase obrera (La Paz: Ediciones Liberación, 1974). One can get a
sense of the daily lives and struggles of the miners at Siglo XX in Domitila
Barrios de Chungara, with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of
Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1978).
39. Interview with Emilse Escóbar in La Paz on March 2, 2007.
40. Interview with Víctor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007; interview with
Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007.
112 Notes
41. The most basic organizational unit of the PCB was the party cell. About ten
to twelve members would comprise a cell. Many cells had names.
42. Arratia has an anecdote that illustrates some of the cultural confusion that
could take place in this international milieu. When she got off the train in
Bucharest, the young man whose job it was to officially greet arriving delega-
tions welcomed the Bolivian by kissing her on each cheek and once on the
mouth. She promptly slapped him.
43. Interview with Diva Arratia del Río in La Paz on March 1, 2007.
44. Interview with Víctor Reinaga in La Paz on March 13, 2007.
45. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007.
46. Everyone I interviewed who had attended the PCB(ML)’s founding congress
attested to Guevara’s role in providing funds via Zamora for the conference,
despite Cuba’s prior deportation of Maoist students. The meaning of Gue-
vara’s support for the founding of the PCB(ML), although a tempting subject
to speculate on, will have to await the attention of someone with more expert
knowledge of Guevara.
47. One gets a good sense of the issues most dear to the rank-and-file miners
in Domitila Barrios de Chungara, with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! and
María L. Lagos, Nos hemos forjado así: al rojo vivo y a puro golpe. Historias
del Comité de Amas de Casa de Siglo XX (La Paz: Plural Editores, 2006).
48. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007; interview with
Jorge Echazú Alvarado in La Paz on February 23, 2007; interview with Diva
Arratia del Río in La Paz on March 1, 2007; interview with Hugo Borda in La
Paz on March 11, 2007; interview with Víctor Reinaga in La Paz on March
13, 2007; interview with Eduardo Ayllón on July 15, 2010, in La Paz.
49. This brief and unsuccessful attempt to launch a Maoist “people’s war” is
sometimes noted in histories of Bolivia but has yet to be studied in its own
right. See, for example, Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 190–191 and
Xavier Albó, “From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari,” in Steve J. Stern, ed.,
Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th
to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 407–410.
50. Even today, Brazil registers land titles to Brazilian settlers within Bolivia, and
a substantial part of eastern Bolivia along the Brazilian border has effectively
been colonized by Brazil. See Ramiro V. Paz, Dominio Amazónico, 2nd ed.
(Santa Cruz: Impresiones San Antonio, 2005).
51. Interview with Hugo Borda in La Paz on March 11, 2007.
52. Interview with Oscar Vega in La Paz on February 7, 2007. During my vari-
ous meetings with Vega, who enthusiastically did what he could to aid my
research while I was in La Paz, the close connections between ABACH and
the Chinese embassy were demonstrated by repeated interruptions of our
meetings by phone calls with the Chinese embassy.
53. Interview with Oscar Zamora in Sucre on March 20, 2007.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: I-Apuntes, 1957–1966 (Mexico City: UNAM,

1973), 3:101.
2. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 2–3.
3. Whether Wolin’s description really does apply to France, I cannot say. But
given the relationships that Latin American Maoists had with French Maoists,
and Wolin’s lack of attention to Charles Bettelheim, a French professor who
Notes 113
played a key role in international Maoist networks (and who we met briefly in
Chapter 4), I suspect that he is wrong on this point in regard to France as well.
4. Interview with Simitrio Tzompazquelitl in Mexico City on March 21, 2006.
Tzompazquelitl later did a lengthy stint in prison for organizing street ven-
dors into a Maoist union.
5. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 212–213, 362 n139. While Gaddis
is inspired to use the term from a similar discussion in Vladislav Zubok
and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to
Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 214–215,
Gaddis is the one who fleshes the idea out.
6. Gaddis, We Now Know.
7. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1788; London: Penguin, 1994), 3:182.
8. Prasenjit Duara, “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive
Essay,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 264.
9. Cárdenas, Obras, 3:101.
10. For a discussion of efforts, especially by historians of Latin America, to move
beyond the historiography centered on the heights of diplomacy and politics
in Moscow and Washington, see Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now Know
and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War
Studies,” in Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin
America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008), 16–29. For recent works that do examine connections between
Latin America and other regions of the global south during the Cold War,
see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa,
1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) Missions
and Jerry Dávila, Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolo-
nization, 1950–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
11. Franz Schurmann’s concept of Chinese communist ideology as a “closed com-
munications system” is a useful starting point for approaching the works of
the Shining Path and other communist groups. A “closed communications
system” employs common categories of thought and a common language
that requires special training to understand and use. Franz Schurmann, Ideol-
ogy and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968), 58.
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Zubok, Vladislav, and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From
Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Index
A over 72, 75; see also Bolivian

ABACH see Bolivia-China Friendship Maoists; Communist Party
Association of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist);
agrarian reform see land reform and Revolutionary Nationalist
takeover Movement
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Bolivia-China Friendship Association
Americana (APRA) 51, 53 (ABACH) 87
Anaya, Ricardo 79–80 Bolivian Maoists 71–2
ANOCE see National Worker-Peasant- Bolivian Revolution of 1952 71, 75–6,
Student-Association 82
APRA see Alianza Popular Bolivian Workers’ Union 74
Revolucionaria Americana Braun, Otto 13
armed struggle: for Chapa 38–9, 40–1;
communist parties around world C
in 41, 104; for Gámiz 40–1, 103; capitalist world 15, 17, 99
Lombardismo and dynamics of Cárdenas, Lázaro 92
35; for Medrano 41, 42, 44–5; Castillo Rios, Carlos 60
in Mexico 35; for Peruvian Castro, Fidel 78–9, 103
Maoists 65–6 CCP see Chinese Communist Party
Arratia, Diva 84, 112 Chaco War: Bolivia and 72–4; Bolivian
Arruda, Diogenes 22–3 troop losses during 73; MNR
Asia, southeast 14–15 and PIR rising out of 73; social
changes caused by 73–4
B Chapa, Esther 104; as activist 36, 38,
Bettelheim, Charles 79, 112 41; armed struggle for 38–9,
Bolivia: Chaco War in 72–4; China 40–1; background and career
economic development model of 36; China travel providing
for 82; Chinese Revolution’s credibility for 46; Chinese
use in 82; indigenous people of Revolution as seen by 34–5;
73–4, 86; land reform in China Maoist China economic support
compared to 78, 79–80, 82; for 37, 38; Maoist ideology for
Maoism in, current 87, 112; 47; SMACP of 34–5, 37–8, 40–1
Maoist ideology in 71, 72, 87; China: Bolivian Maoists’ ties to 72;
military dictatorships in 71–2; economic policy of 31–2, 78,
mining and miners in 74, 75, 79–80, 82; Japanese invasion of
83; nationalist and Maoist 13; Latin America and, 1949–
divergence in, summary of 87; 1976 18–26, 99; Latin America
nationalist government of 74–5; diplomatic recognition of 25, 79;
unions in 74; U.S. influence Latin America economic ties with
126 Index
20; Latin American communists’ Americans receiving 17, 21, 23,
refuge in 25; Latin American 26, 80, 89; Lombardo and 33;
ignorance of history of 94; Medrano receiving 42
Latin American revolutionaries China: The Agrarian Revolution (Díaz
influenced by 19; Latin Martínez) 64
America ties with 11–12, 88; Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
as modernization model 92–3; 16; Chinese Revolution led
PCB-ML as pro- 84; Peruvian by 12; Cultural Revolution
Maoist birth role of, 1956– for 17–18; events leading to
1964 52–5; Peruvian Maoist formation of 12; foreign input
factionalism and authority from, into 12; history of 12–13; Latin
1964–1970 55–9; Peruvian America diplomatic tracks of
Maoists backed by 57; Soviet 19–20, 22–3; Latin American
socialist model versus 92–3; communists courted by 22–3;
U.S. as common enemy of Latin Lombardo first meetings with
America and 11; see also People’s 31; Long March and 12–13;
Republic of China Nationalist Party allied with
China, during Maoist era: Chapa 12, 13; Nationalist Party civil
economic support from 37, war against 13; PCB-ML tied
38; as exotic destination 80–1; to 84–5; peaceful coexistence
Friendship Hotel for visitors in and competition rejected by 17;
26–7; Latin Americans in 26–7, Peruvian Maoists aided by 49;
78–9, 101; Lombardo and New united front policies of 64–5;
Democratic government of 33–4; Xinhua News Agency in Latin
Mexico influenced by, summary America from 21, 56, 85; see
of 46–7; MNR leaders hosted in also Sino-Soviet split
76–9; PCP leaders hosted in 52, Chinese ideology see Maoist ideology
53–4, 105; PIR leader hosted in Chinese Revolution: Bolivian compared
79; Shining Path in 49–50; visitors to 82; Bolivia’s use of 82; CCP
and multi-stop tours in 26, 53 leading 12; Chapa’s view of
China, economic development in: 34–5; Cuba promoting 22, 59;
agricultural shift for 16; Bolivia Great Leap Forward and 17;
compared to model of 82; under historical overview of 12–13;
Deng Xiaoping 25–6; First Five- Latin American artists inspired
Year Plan for 14; MNR officials’ by 80–1; Latin American
impressions of 76, 77–9 communists influenced by
China, foreign policy of: in Cuba 21; 53; Latin American Maoism
dangers of 13–14; delegations in interpretation of 90–1; Lombardo
20–1, 46; diplomatic tracks from view of 31–2, 34, 41, 46, 102;
19–20, 22–3; domestic strain from Mexican Revolution compared
14; Latin American, in Maoist to 33; Mexico modeled on 32;
period 19, 99; Latin American Peru influence of 59–60; for
communists’ economic support in Peruvian Maoists 54–5, 58; PP(S)
24–6, 89, 101, 106; 1949–1956 influenced by 29, 104; Shining
13–15; peaceful coexistence in Path rising from 48–9, 66, 67–8;
14–15, 17; propaganda in 24; UNSCH influenced by 59–60;
revolutionary teachers as 14, 23, WFTU and 14, 30
38–9, 53, 56; in southeast Asia Chinese women 80–1
14–15; Taiwan recovery in 17; see Cold War: developing nations
also People’s Republic of China, designs for enlightenment
Sino-Soviet split in 92; global perspective for
China, Maoist training for foreign 93–4; Latin American pro-
communists in: Guzmán Chinese communists and 27,
receiving 56–7, 106; Latin 101; modernization visions
Index 127
competing during 92; traditional Five Principles of Coexistence 15
view of 93–4 Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario see
communism see specific topics Revolutionary Student Front
communist cell 51, 105 Friendship Hotel 26–7
Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist- FSTMB see Trade Union Federation of
Leninist) (PCB-ML): CCP ties of Bolivian Mine Workers
84–5; international experience
in 84, 112; leaders of 83–4; G
Maoist ideology applied by Gaddis, John Lewis 90–1
86–7; miners comprising base of Gámiz, Arturo 35, 39, 40–1, 103
83–5, 86; pro-China nature of General Union of Mexican Workers and
84; Shining Path compared to Peasants (UGOCM) 35, 39, 41
86–7; in Sino-Soviet split 83–4; Gibbon, Edward 91
as splinter group 83; Stalin Cell Gómez, Andrea 21–2
and intellectuals in 72, 84, 85, Great Leap Forward 17, 49, 77–8, 80,
111; UCAPO people’s war from 93
85–6, 112 guerilla warfare 55, 57–8, 62–3
Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) 71, Guevara, Che 45, 84, 86, 112
72–6, 79; see also Communist Gutiérrez, Miguel 60
Party of Bolivia (Marxist- Guzmán, Abimael 47, 70, 105, 108;
Leninist) China training course for 56–7,
Confederation of Mexican Workers 106; Cultural Revolution
(CTM) 29 influence on 57, 58; Mao
CTM see Confederation of Mexican and Mariátegui for 63–4,
Workers 108–9; Paredes versus 58–9,
Cuba 21, 22, 59 61; as PCP-BR leader 58–9;
Cultural Revolution 38, 39; end of revolutionary asynchronicity
25–6; Guzmán influenced by 57, from 91; Shining Path and 48,
58; Maoism in 18, 25–6; nature 63, 65–6; UNSCH position and
of 17–18; Shining Path affinity influence of 61
for 64–5, 68, 109; as youth
rebellion 18 H
Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl 50, 51
D
de la Riva, Carlos 52, 54–5 I
Deng Xiaoping 17–18, 25–6, 49, 54, indigenous people 51, 73–4, 86
87, 101 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
de-Stalinization 15–16, 22, 71, 99, 110 35, 41
developing nations 92 IPS see Political and Social Investigations
Díaz Martínez, Antonio 47, 59–60,
64–5 J
Donde nace la aurora (de la Riva) 52, Japan 13
54
Duara, Prasenjit 92 K
Dunkerley, James 76 Khrushchev, Nikita 15–16, 17, 22, 99
E L
Echazú Alvarado, Jorge 71, 87, 110 land reform and takeover 34, 43–4, 78,
Escóbar Zapata, Federico 83 79–80, 82, 104
Lara, Jesús 80–1
F Latin America: China and, 1949–1976
factionalism 55–9, 61 18–26, 99; China diplomatic
FER-SL see Revolutionary Student Front recognition from 25, 79; China
First Five-Year Plan 14 economic ties with 20; China
128 Index
foreign policy delegations and Lombardo Toledano, Vicente 14, 38,
20–1; China foreign policy 76, 103, 111; CCP first meetings
diplomatic tracks in 19–20, 22–3; with 31; China economic policy
China foreign policy propaganda for Mexico from 31–2; Chinese
for 24; China history ignorance Revolution as seen by 31–2,
of 94; China ties with 11–12, 88; 34, 41, 46, 102; as labor leader
Chinese history in, ignorance of 29; Mao influencing 32–3;
94; Maoist China and visitors Maoist China military strategy
from 26–7, 78–9, 101; Maoist and 33; Maoist China New
China foreign policy towards 19, Democratic government and
99; Maoist ideology interpreted 33–4; Maoist ideology spread by
by 88, 89, 90–1, 112; PRC 29–30; Mexico land reform and
contact context with 88–9, 90; industrialization for 34; People’s
Sino-Soviet split influencing 17, Party of 29; universal worker
89; U.S. as common enemy of and peasant characteristics for
China and 11; Xinhua News 32; WFTU Beijing banquet and
Agency and CCP in 21, 56, 85; 28–9, 30–4, 101
see also Sino-Soviet split, specific Long March 13
countries Lotus Flower: Message of Love to the
Latin America-China Friendship Chinese Woman (Lara) 80–1
societies 19–20, 29, 87; see
also Mexico-China Friendship M
Society Maoist ideology: in Bolivia 71, 72,
Latin American: agency 89–90; artists 87; Bolivian, current 87,
21, 80–1; nationalists 92–3; 112; for Chapa 47; as closed
revolutionaries 19, 90–1 communications system 94,
Latin American communists: CCP 113; in Cultural Revolution 18,
courting 22–3; China as refuge 25–6; difficulties for 47; French
for 25; China foreign policy 88; intellectuals influenced
as revolutionary teachers for by 60; international political
23, 53; China foreign policy trend in creation of 15–18;
economic support for 24–6, 89, Latin America and Chinese
101, 106; in China for Maoist foreign policy during period of
training 17, 21, 23, 26, 80, 89; 19; Latin American agency for
Chinese Revolution influence on 89–90; Latin American artists
53; Cold War and pro-Chinese spreading 21; Latin American
27, 101; Mao receptions for 11, interpretation of 88, 89, 90–1,
22–3, 89; Mao seminars held for 112; Lombardo in spreading
53; PRC aid to 90; Sino-Soviet 29–30; for Medrano 41, 45–6,
split and division of 23–4; Soviet 47; Mexico influenced by 28–30,
Union relations with 22–3 39, 46–7; for MNR 72, 76;
Latin American Maoism: appropriation PCB-ML applying 86–7; in PCP
of 88, 89, 112; Chinese 64; peasantry emphasized in 18;
Revolution through lens of in People’s Guerrilla Group 40;
90–1; current weakness of 94–5; for Peruvians 59, 60; in Shining
historically ignored 93–5; Mao Path 48, 49–50, 62–4, 68–70,
worshipped in 91 110, 113; in Sino-Soviet split 18;
Leguía, Augusto 50, 51 see also Bolivian Maoists; China,
Lenin, Vladimir 12, 23, 33, 39, 100 during Maoist era; Cultural
Li Dazhao 12 Revolution; Latin American
Lin Biao 14, 19 Maoism; Peruvian Maoists
“Little Red Book” 18 Mao Zedong 12, 16, 49, 57, 77, 79,
Liu Shaoqi 14, 17–18, 31, 79 84; Cultural Revolution and
Lombardismo 34–41 17–18; foreign policy principles
Index 129
of 13; guerilla warfare and 55; teacher and railway worker
Guzmán’s view of Mariategui strike in 35, 102; see also
and 63–4, 108–9; Latin American Chapa, Esther; Gámiz, Arturo;
Maoists’ worship of 91; Latin Lombardo Toledano, Vicente;
American receptions held by 11, Medrano Mederos, Florencio
22–3, 89; leadership established Mexico-China Friendship Society
13; Lombardo influenced by (SMACP) 29, 89; of Chapa
32–3; PCP leadership meeting 34–5, 37–8, 40–1; Declaration
54; people’s war quote from 48; of Principles and Statutes for
seminars for Latin Americans 37; differences between groups
concerning 53; for Shining Path of 37–8; formation of 35; as
67–8; social investigation for Lombardismo spin-off group 34;
62–3; Soviet Union from 90–1; as PRC propaganda outlet 35–6,
united front strategy of 55 38, 40, 46; purpose and function
María Sisón, José 24 of 35–6
Mariátegui, José Carlos 50; background military dictatorships 71–2
of 51; Guzmán’s view of Mao mining and miners 74, 75, 83–5, 86; see
and 63–4, 108–9; indigenous also Trade Union Federation of
people for 51; as Marxist 51; Bolivian Mine Workers
as PCP founder 51; as Peruvian MNR see Revolutionary Nationalist
communism founder 51; Shining Movement
Path and 49, 51, 61, 63 “More On the Historical Experience
Marxism 89; Li Dazhao interpretation of the Dictatorship of the
of 12; Mariategui and 51; in PIR Proletariat” (CCP) 16
73; revisionism 23, 100; stages
of development in 91 N
May 4th movement 12 Nationalist Party or Guomindang 12,
Medrano Mederos, Florencio 89; 13
ANOCE created by 43; armed National Worker-Peasant-Student-
struggle of 41, 42, 44–5; Association (ANOCE) 43, 44
background of 42; China travel Neruda, Pablo 19–20
providing credibility for 46,
104; Chinese training for 42; O
community involvement of 45; Odría, Manuel 52, 55
land takeover and squatters’ “On the Historical Experience of the
movements of 43–4, 104; Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
Maoist ideas for 41, 45–6, 47; (CCP) 16
mass organizations formed by orientalism 80–1
45; PRP involvement of 42–3;
Red Sundays promoted by 44; P
revolutionary asynchronicity Paredes, Saturnino 52, 58–9, 61
from 91 Partido Comunista del Perú (PCP)
Mexican Revolution of 1910 33 51; China hosting leaders of
Mexico: armed struggle in 35; China 52, 53–4, 105; Deng Xiaoping
economic policy for 31–2; China meeting with leaders of 54;
influence on, summary of 46–7; factionalism in 55–6, 106;
Chinese Revolution as model for Maoist ideology in 64; 1956
32; Lombardo land reform and uprising role of 52; pro-China
industrialization for 34; Maoist versus pro-Soviet factions within
ideology in 28–30, 39, 46–7; 52–3, 65–6; Shining Path in 61,
Maoist leaders in 29–30; PRD in 65, 108
29; revolutionary asynchronicity Partido Comunista del Perú-Bandera
for Maoists in 46–7; squatters’ Roja (PCP-BR) 55–6, 57–9, 61,
movements in 43–4, 47, 104; 106
130 Index
Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Peruvian Maoists: armed struggle for
Luminoso see Shining Path 65–6; background for 50–1;
Party of the Democratic Revolution Bolivian compared to 71–2;
(PRD) 29 CCP aiding 49; China backing
Party of the Revolutionary Left (PIR) 57; China-derived factionalism
71, 82, 110; Chaco War giving and authority for, 1964–1970
rise to 73; China visit by leader 55–9; China role in birth of,
of 79; Marxist approach of 73; 1956–1964 52–5; Chinese
MNR compared to 73; PCB Revolution for 54–5, 58; guerilla
receiving defectors of 73, 75, 79 warfare for 57–8, 62–3; Maoism
Paz Estenssoro, Victor 76, 77, 82 domesticated by 68–70; people’s
PCB see Communist Party of Bolivia war for 49, 66–8; see also
PCB-ML see Communist Party of Shining Path
Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist) PIR see Party of the Revolutionary Left
PCP see Partido Comunista del Perú Political and Social Investigations (IPS) 37
PCP-BR see Partido Comunista del PP(S) see People’s Party (Partido
Perú-Bandera Roja Popular)
peaceful coexistence and competition: PPUA see United Proletarian Party of
capitalist world and 15, 17, America
99; CCP rejecting 17; in China PRC see People’s Republic of China
foreign policy 14–15, 17; Five PRD see Party of the Democratic
Principles of Coexistence or 15; Revolution
Khrushchev promoting 15, 17, 99 PRI see Institutional Revolutionary Party
peasants 18, 67, 109–10 proletariat 50
Peng Dehuai 49 propaganda 24, 35–6, 38, 40, 46, 61–2,
People’s Guerilla Group (Grupo 67–8, 89, 90
Popular Guerrillero): Gámiz’s PRP see Revolutionary Party of the
35, 103; ideological resolutions Proletariat
of 39–40; as Lombardismo
spin-off group 35; Maoist ideas Q
incorporated in 40 Quiroga Galdo, Germán 76, 77, 78–9
People’s Party (Partido Popular) (PP(S))
29, 104 R
People’s Republic of China (PRC) 28; Rebellion in the Veins (Dunkerley) 76
formation of 13; Latin America Red Fatherland 60
contact context and 88–9, 90; Red Sundays 44
Latin American communists’ revolution see specific topics
aid from 90; Latin American revolutionary asynchronicity 46–7, 90–1
nationalists’ affinity for 92–3; Revolutionary Nationalist Movement
SMACP propaganda outlet for (MNR) 82, 111; in Bolivian
35–6, 38, 40, 46 revolution of 1952 71, 75–6;
people’s war 48, 49, 66–8, 85–6, 112 Chaco War giving rise to 73;
Peru: Chinese Revolution influence on China economic development
59–60; communism in 51–3; and 76, 77–9; China travel for
indigenous people in 51; Maoism leaders of 76–9; fascism in 73,
for people of 59, 60; political 75; historical background of
and social instability in 50, 52; 72–6, 110; leftist opposition to
proletariat growth from economic 75–6; Maoist ideology for 72,
factors in 50; radical tradition in 76; PIR compared to 73; social
50–1; Shining Path insurrection base alienated from 82–3
in 48, 110; Shining path response Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat
from government of 67; university (PRP) 42–3
radicalization in 59–60; U.S. Revolutionary Student Front (FER-SL) 61
military intervention in 66 Reynoso, Oswaldo 60
Index 131
S American communists’ relations
Salamanca, Daniel 72–3 with 22–3; for Mao 90–1; U.S.
Second United Front 13 and war with 17
Sendero Luminoso see Shining Path Spartacist Communist League 37, 38
Shining Path 60, 90; as “against history” squatters’ movements 43–4, 47, 104
49, 50; background for 48; Stalin, Joseph 12, 15–16, 33, 72, 110;
China visits from 49–50; Chinese see also de-Stalinization
propaganda and 61–2, 67–8; Stalin Cell 72, 84, 85, 111
Chinese Revolution crucial
to 48–9, 66, 67–8; Cultural T
Revolution affinity from 64–5, Torres Calleja, Mario 76, 77, 79
68, 109; current state of 105; Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mine
Deng Xiaoping denouncement by Workers (FSTMB) 74, 76, 77
49, 101; failures of 67; FER-SL
as student wing of 61; formation U
and origin of 48, 49; generalized UCAPO see Union of Poor Peasants
revulsion of 94; generated (UCAPO)
organizations of 61; Guzmán and UGOCM see General Union of
48, 63, 65–6; legacy of 70; Mao Mexican Workers and Peasants
for 67–8; Maoism domesticated Union of Poor Peasants (UCAPO) 85–6,
by 68–70; Maoist ideology in 112
48, 49–50, 62–4, 68–70, 110, united front strategy 55, 64–5, 67
113; Mariátegui and 49, 51, 61, United Proletarian Party of America
63; Mexican Maoists compared (PPUA) 45, 46, 47
to 47; PCB-ML compared to Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal
86–7; PCP and 61, 65, 108; de Huamanga (UNSCH): as base
peasant opposition to 67, 109–10; and training ground 61; Chinese
people’s war of 49, 66–8; Peruvian Revolution influence at 59–60;
government response to 67; Guzmán at 61; Shining Path at
Peruvian insurrection led by 48, 61–6
110; rural efforts of 65, 66–7; U.S. 92, 93–4; Bolivia influenced by 72,
student recruitment to teach 75; as China and Latin America
for 62; summary of history and common enemy 11; Peruvian
activities of 70; united front use by military intervention from 66;
67; at UNSCH 61–6 Soviet Union and war with 17
Sino-Soviet split: China aggression
in 17; China agricultural V
policy in 16; de-Stalinization Venturelli, José 19–20, 21, 22
reaction from CCP in 15–16; Villarroel, Gualberto 74–5
as international political trend
15–18; Latin America influenced W
by 17, 89; Latin American World Federation of Trade Unions
communists divided in 23–4; (WFTU) 14, 28–9, 30–4, 101
Maoist ideology in 18; PCB-ML world revolution 18–19
in 83–4; Peruvian communism
impact from 52, 53 X
SMACP see Mexico-China Friendship Xinhua (New China) News Agency 21,
Society 56, 85
social investigation 62–3
socialism 92–3; see also specific topics Z
Soria, Manuel 52, 53–4, 105 Zamora Medinacelli, Oscar 84, 85–6,
Sotomayor, José 52, 53–4, 105 87, 89
Soviet Union 93–4; China socialist Zhou Enlai 14, 15, 21, 26, 28, 42, 77,
model versus 92–3; Latin 79, 84, 89

Matthew Rothwell - Transpacific Revolutionaries - The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (2013, Routledge)

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Matthew Rothwell - Transpacific Revolutionaries - The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (2013, Routledge)

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Transpacific Revolutionaries

Matthew Rothwell is assistant professor of History at Texas Southern Univer-

2 From Slave Trade to Empire

3 Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa

5 Churchill, Roosevelt and India

6 Genocide and Fascism

7 Scientific Research in World War II

8 Restoration and History

1 China and Latin America 11

2 Mexico: The Wayward Disciples of Vicente Lombardo 28

3 Forging the Fourth Sword of Marxism: The Chinese Revolution

4 Bolivia: Nationalists and Maoists Diverge 71

I first became interested in Latin American Maoism when I stumbled upon it

Between 1949 and 1976, thousands of Latin Americans traveled to the

THE ORGANIZED INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY

In the past, scholars who investigated the influence of Maoism in Latin

THE “COMMON WIND” BLOWING FROM BEIJING

CHINESE COMMUNIST INFLUENCE ON LATIN AMERICA

The period of influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America coin-

On May 8, in Chengchow, chairman Mao Tse-tung received friends from

THE CHINESE REVOLUTION IN A NUTSHELL

CHINESE FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1949–1956

THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT AND THE CREATION OF MAOISM

After midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev summoned the

CHINA AND LATIN AMERICA, 1949–1976

LIFE FOR LATIN AMERICAN VISITORS AND RESIDENTS IN

I toast a new period of fraternal friendship between China and Mexico.

So toasted Vicente Lombardo Toledano at a banquet held by Zhou Enlai in

VICENTE LOMBARDO TOLEDANO AND THE BEGINNING

Vicente Lombardo Toledano was one of Mexico’s foremost labor leaders. In

In Beijing, the WFTU representatives were met by a high-level delegation led

And what about financial policy?—I ask my friends, remembering the

Lombardo’s Chinese friends answered:

All financial enterprises—they answer me—will be strictly controlled by

Mao Zedong is the leader of the greatest anti-imperialist national revo-

Lombardo’s comments to Mao merit some consideration. Did Lombardo

TWO SPIN-OFFS FROM LOMBARDISMO: ARTURO GÁMIZ’S

The Mexico-China Friendship Society

The People’s Guerrilla Group

It’s common to speak of progress and stability in the abstract but we

Chapa and Gámiz: From Lombardo’s Popular Front

THE GUERRILLA EFFORTS OF FLORENCIO MEDRANO

Our movement is also the result of a series of experiences like those of

Because of this, Medrano expressed his need to be close to the communities

Travel to China was a central feature in the domestication of Maoism in

You see?—continued Mao—that’s how to start a people’s war; it’s not

PERU’S REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION:

1956–1964: CHINA’S ROLE IN THE BIRTH OF PERUVIAN MAOISM

In addition to the study courses, seminar participants visited major cities,

The Content and Character of Peruvian

PERUVIAN MAOIST FACTIONALISM AND LEADERSHIP

In an earlier interview with El Diario, Guzmán related an episode from his

The Cultural Revolution was at that moment, (. . .) things that impressed

As Guzmán describes above, he was a witness to the Cultural Revolution in

THE BROAD INFLUENCE OF CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY

CHINA, SENDERO AND THE PEOPLE’S WAR, 1980–1992

The expectation that Sendero’s Peruvian revolution would follow a similar

THE CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: FROM THE CHACO

LOOKING TO CHINA AFTER 1952

statistics aren’t frozen numbers: they have an incredible mobility and

Jesús Lara: An Instance of Communist Orientalism

Perhaps you came to me in that