The other critical factor in the defeat of SL was its brutality which cost it nearly all its legitimacy in the Sierra and in Lima. That brutality turned the local people - districts and their dependencies - to arming themselves and forming the rondas. That the army, after some resistance, accepted the rondas and helped arm them and provided some communication capability was decisive in the Sierra. Cooperation with the police and govt worked in Lima for the people.

While working on my Masters In International Relations, I wrote a paper on SL, and what jumped out at me was that they essentially turned what appeared to be victory into defeat by relying almost solely on violence. There were several reports that predicted the success of SL, yet in the end, they lost the war. While they proclaimed to be a "Maoist" type insurgency, they never really adopted that philosophy, and instead of forming a relationship with the local people, their extreme brutality forced the locals into cooperation with the army, no small matter since the army was also implicated in many human rights abuses at the time. They also showed very little acumen when dealing with Perus indigenous people, and ignored their customs and culture in favor of communist doctrine. At one point, an SL leader said that he expected a million deaths during the "struggle." They killed community service workers to make the plight of poor Peruvians even worse, and widening the gap between rich and poor, ostensibly to cause the poor to rise against the rich. This however, backfired on them in a big way.

George