AHC: Democratic Peru

Could the Shining Path have ever taken over Peru? What would have been the effects of this?

I know a New York-born missionary priest who lived and preached among the indigenous Peruvians for 30 years. Outside of Lima, life was very dangerous for anyone perceived to be an establishment figure. Not surprisingly, a Marxist guerilla group had a, well, difficult relationship with Roman Catholicism. Not surprisingly, Father never wore (and even back in New York does not wear) clerical clothing, out of instinct I suppose.

While I am not that familiar with Fujimori's dictatorship, I suspect that neither Fujimori's OTL regime or the Shining Path would have been particularly concerned about human rights issues. The targets would change, but the disregard for human dignity would remain the same.
 
The Shinning Path never achieved widespread popular support. No democratic Peru will have a Shinning Path government. So the Shinning Path controlling Peru would result in another communist dictatorship with a Maoist flavor. Its humans rights record would be similar to other communists dictatorships trying to consolidate power, i.e. not good.
 
Neither the fact that Shining Path executed homosexuals nor the ongoing absence of political freedom in the first (and hopefully last) Maoist country suggest that there was a meaningful chance of Sendero Luminoso implementing democracy in Peru.
Interestingly, Maoists (ZAPU) were also a major faction in the Zimabwean war, although it was the semi-Leninist ZANU-pf that ultimately won.
 
Neither the fact that Shining Path executed homosexuals nor the ongoing absence of political freedom in the first (and hopefully last) Maoist country suggest that there was a meaningful chance of Sendero Luminoso implementing democracy in Peru.
Interestingly, Maoists (ZAPU) were also a major faction in the Zimabwean war, although it was the semi-Leninist ZANU-pf that ultimately won.

weren't Albania and the Khmer Rouge Maoist, at least de jure?
 
the thread title is not proposing that the shining path would bring democracy to peru, but is actually a reference to the name the khmer rouge gave to cambodia: Democratic Kampuchea
 

archaeogeek

Banned
weren't Albania and the Khmer Rouge Maoist, at least de jure?

The Nepalese communists are, too, de jure. OTOH, they've been a marked improvement on the monarchy, esp. with civil rights, but the leaders admit that they threw much of Mao's social ideas out of the window :p
 
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