La Guerra Senderista: Hablan los Enemigos

This book tells two stories. The first is a general history of the internal war. Antonio Zapata tells, with historical rigor and narrative pulse, from the political germ that provoked the different splits of Peruvian communism in the sixties, to the final collapse of Sendero Luminoso with the capture of Guzmán. To do so, it focuses mainly on those who made the main decisions, the armed actors: on the one hand, the Armed Forces and the National Police, through their institutional or unofficial memories, and on the other hand, the Shining Path, through testimonies of its leaders, unpublished until today. Here is the second story: the war as seen through the eyes of Elena Yparraguirre. If Guzman was the ideologist of Sendero, Yparraguirre was the organizer: a tough and efficient woman who organized the closest thing Peru had to a killing machine. Without her, "Sendero would have been less lethal," says Zapata, who met 21 times with Sendero Luminoso's number three in the Chorrillos Women's Prison for this investigation. [Translated from Worldcat]