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Several scholars have studied the political, economic, and social context of the rise of the Shining Path, and a brief summary of the conditions in Peru in the late 1960s and 1970s is necessary to understand both the People’s War, and the emergence of women into the public sphere. Poverty and deprivation marked the lives of many Peruvian citizens, especially those who lived in rural, non-Spanish speaking communities. Enrique Mayer writes of the division between “deep”, or indigenous Peru, and “official”, or Hispanic Peru, and describes the ways indigenous Peruvians live with structural violence, the experience of “poverty, abuse, discrimination, racism, and arbitrariness and/or indifference by the state.”<ref>Enrique Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus, (Durhm: Duke University Press, 1992), 188-193.</ref> Rights for women in Peru were very limited; abortion after rape was illegal, female poverty was on the rise, and women of indigenous background faced virtually insurmountable obstacles.<ref>Kirk, The Monkey’s Paw, 78-80.</ref>
[[File:Ayacucho_church_by_night.jpg|left|thumbnail|300px|Ayacucho Cathedral]]
The “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces,” led by General Juan Velasco Alvardo came into power in 1968, the year that popular movements and protest erupted in Paris, Mexico City, Prague and other cities worldwide. Velasco enacted educational, agrarian and economic reforms to combat widespread material inequality, and prevent a more radical revolution from the left.<ref>Orin Starn, Carlos DeGregori, and Robin Kirk. <I>The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics, </I>ed. Orin Starn, carlos Ivan Degregori, and Robin Kirk, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 264.</ref> Velasco’s top-down reform movement was incomplete, and therefore highly combustive, creating a potent mix of expectation and frustration in a population of increasingly educated and politicized young Peruvians, who were caught at the intersection of reformist promises and structural impediments. <ref>Starn, DeGregori, and Kirk. The Peru Reader 264.</ref>
In 1969, a strike of educational workers in Ayacucho (south-central Peru)revealed the limits of Velasco’s reform and the growing dissatisfaction of teachers and students in Andean communities, what Orin Starn describes as the “climate of sharp unrest across the impoverished countryside.” <ref>Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution, Anthropologists and the People’s War in Peru,” Rereading Cultural Anthropology. 153; Ivan Hinojosa, “On Poor relations and the Nouveau Riche: Shining Path and the Radical Peruvian Left,” Shining and Other Paths, 70.</ref> The activism of members of SUTEP during the 1969 upheaval highlights the collision between the expectations and limitations fostered by the Velasco regime. This was a seminal event for the Shining Path, and used in later publications to contextualize and legitimize the uprising. Shining Path propaganda described the role of women, “In 1969, women heads of households smashed the doors at the Ayacucho food market, after the police closed it during the demonstrations…an elderly woman,…delivered a furious and spontaneous speech to the masses.<ref><I>The New Flag Magazine</I>, “How Women Advance the Revolution,” (1998), 1-2.</ref>
The “second “phase” of the reform movement started by Velasco was carried out by his successor, Moralez Burmudez, with a significant movement to the right. Velasco’s agrarian reform led to land take-overs and peasant movements, and according to Floencia Mallon, “if official attempts at popular mobilization and social redistribution seemed to generate a radicalization even more difficult to control, then better to stop Velasco’s ill-fated experiments and once again court the confidence of the investing classes."<ref>Florencia Mallon, “Chronicle of a Path Foretold? Velasco’s Revolution , Vanguardia Revolucionaria, and “Shining Omens” in the Indigenous Communities of Andahuaylas,”[9] Shining and Other Paths, 111.</ref> Activists, labor leaders, and teachers were fired, repressed, and deported. <ref>Hinojosa, “On Poor Relations,” 70-71.</ref> Promises kept, like expanded education and socialist reform, and promises broken, such as the lack of jobs for indigenous youth, deficient land reform, and the continued repression of social movements, combined to create what Starn calls an “enormous pool of radical young people of amalgamated rural/urban identity who would provide an effective revolutionary force.”<ref>Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution, Anthropologists and the People’s War in Peru,” <I>Rereading Cultural Anthropology</I>. 153</ref> Several leftist groups worked within the political and educational space opened up by the Velasco regime, while working against the repressive, inefficient, and indifferent Peruvian state. Other groups, particularly the Shining Path, refused to work within the state-defined system.
===Birth of the Shining Path===
