>>18286They were never going to win lmao, it's another myth spun by terminally online Gonzaloites that the Shining Path akshually controlled 80% of the country, but this is frankly untrue
They were active in 80% of the country, in terms of AREA by province, (in the same way that if I had control of all of the frozen tundra in Russia or Canada I would technically control 75%+ of the country but this is functionally useless) and only really had (rather weak when stacked against the total population size) numbers in a single province, and even then, that province is one of the mountainous ones, where not only is there severe lack of population density, but since this is the Andes, it's sort of like the Himalayas in that you can't really "own" a steep mountain in the same way you can "own" a valley or the "flat" terrain nearby.
>>18290They were Maoists, so anti-revisionist they actually denounced and fought against the ML MRTA guerilla group for being "Castroites" lmao, they did have peasantry autism but this was largely one of Gonzalo's many LARPs in that he wanted to be like Mao
Key difference being that Pre-Maoist and Maoist China were comprised of 80% to 90% peasantry, or at the very least people who live in the "countryside," whereas even at the beginning of the "PPW" less than 1/3 of the population in Peru lived in the country, around 30%, and a lot of these people were displaced into the cities, where ironically enough, they probably were poorer because they had no employment nor did they own their own small plot of land anymore, they were probably living in favela-esque slums you see all over at the edges of cities or in the poorer regions around the coast
tldr; Shining Path truly controlled a small amount of land in a single province, that province being one of the ones that is the most mountainous, never had membership exceeding even 1% of the Peruvian population at their peak, mechanical application of Mao's process killed them
>>18292That's great and all, but I defer to what most other Peruvians say in that the military actions were justified
Keep in mind that most Peruvians, even those in cities and even in the most bourgeois of districts live on the cliffs of poverty and are working class, especially back in the 1980s and 1990s, so if they're saying it was worth it to put a stop to the armed conflict, you can imagine how much they disliked whatever the SP was putting down lol, I always laugh whenever twitter-Gonzaloites attempt to say that "No bro you don't get it, all of the Peruvians who actually lived through the conflict are really the brainwashed ones, they haven't been graced with the education that my 1st world self has to see the truth, that the Shining Path did nothing wrong" always defer to the opinion of the masses whenever there is this sort of shit, it's a good filter to see which leaders/movements/organizations are actually popular or not (like in post-soviet or post-warsaw pact country's admiration for Stalin and Lenin)