Land reform and the rise of Sendero Luminoso in Peru

The rise of Sendero Luminoso as an insurgent organization in Peru has posed a significant puzzle to students of Third World revolutions: Sendero seemed to gain strength in the aftermath of a sweeping land reform program whereas analysts have traditionally viewed land reform as a means of pre‐empting revolution by co‐opting the base of popular support necessary to sustain a guerrilla insurgency. We seek to unravel this puzzle by arguing that land reform itself disrupted the existing system of patron‐client relationships in the southern sierra in such a way as to render certain classes of cultivators ‐ specifically, the residents of peasant ‘indigenous communities’ ‐ more vulnerable to subsistence crises and therefore more susceptible to Sendero's appeal. Our argument begins with a description of the pre‐reform land tenure system and then describes the ways in which land reform disrupted many of the existing clientelist mechanisms without creating institutional alternatives capable of providing some measure of security against the risks of agriculture. Consequently, Sendero has been able to build its base of support by filling the void created precisely by the policies intended to neutralize its revolutionary appeal.