Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a vile Maoist terror group enamored of Pol Pot terrorized the Peruvian countryside. They were communists known as the Shining Path and along with their ugly cousin known as Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), they specialized in murder. Being cowards, they didn’t just go after ‘oligarchs’ (whom they never seemed to find) but unarmed community organizers and civil society advocates, the people who wanted to spread the world democracy revolution by peaceful means. They especially went after those.

In the face of these remorseless, psychopathic Marxist death squads, Peruvians organized themselves into curious collectives, sometimes in the slums and sometimes high in the mountains where no cop was going to defend them anyway, even if he were honest. It sounds kind of socialist. But there was one important detail about these groups: they were explicitly formed to BEAT BACK the Maoist, Marxist Shining Path. The only practical way to do it in such survival-as-a-goal conditions was to work as groups. So they did.

These groups, working along with the great Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist who described the power of property rights as sources of untapped capital, crushed the Shining Path like a pincer. Against de Soto and Peru’s civil society advocates, that remorseless Shining Path terrorist movement ran completely out of gas. Their name stank. Nobody wanted to join them. And the government was able to sweep them up like garbage and throw them in jail where they belonged.

Today, I discovered a new blogger, Don Ball Carbajal of South American Journal, who wrote a fine memorialization of one of the Peruvian civil society advocates who was cold bloodedly murdered by Shining Path terrorists. Her name was Maria Elena Moyano and he tells her story here. Brave people like this who made Peru a different place than it was during the Shining Path’s reign of terror should not be forgotten. He writes:

Moyano was one heck of a brave woman who took on Sendero Luminso (Shining Path) during the peak of its violent revolution. She had gained popularity as an organizer of communal kitchens and women’s support groups in Villa El Salvador, one of Lima’s most crowded and impoverished slums. Her trajectory culminated in her election as deputy mayor of Villa El Salvador.

Read the whole thing here.