1000 Points of Luminoso : SHINING PATH: Terror and Revolution in Peru<i> By Simon Strong (Times Books: $23; 256 pp.) </i>

Peru is a hard-luck case. In the 1500s, European adventurers and colonizers added their je ne sais quoi to what was already a head-spinning indigenous cultural mix, and the result is, today, a place of magical, frightening dissonance. Up in the Indian heights, or altiplano, farmers’ improvised shacks squat not far from arrogant terraced ruins of the Incan empire, gutted by European vandals. Up here, the air is thin and so are the peasants. In village squares, Indians in braids and bowler hats, people who believe in vampires and snake gods, attend whitewashed colonial Catholic churches--that is, in those villages that have not been wiped out by starvation, earthquake, mudslide, flood or massacre. Down in the cities, the very rich, very white elite builds walls around its mansions as the migration from altiplano to the city continues.

In Peru, up until 1979, you had to pass a Spanish literacy test in order to vote; the Indian majority, however, was illiterate and Quechua- or Aymara-speaking. In Peru, a left-leaning president managed to disappear people at a rate faster than that of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the hemisphere’s acclaimed master of disappearances. Armed columns patrol Peru’s fabulous countryside. Along mountain roads, a stroller taking in cataracts, gorges and cliff-hanging vineyards may end up besieged by drug traffickers, robbers, cattle rustlers, rebels--or dogs.

This is the country that spawned Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, one of the century’s most impressively brutal revolutionary armies. “If you find yourself in the street during curfew,” the 1989 South American Handbook warns offhandedly, “walk in the middle of the road waving a white object above your head, until you can report to a policeman or soldier.”

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Ah, for the days when the Sandinistas took over Managua and Tomas Borge was the most ascetic, fanatical leftist one supposedly had to fear. Ah, for Daniel Ortega’s $200 spectacles, a sure sign of what followers of Shining Path would call “bourgeois revisionism.” And poor old Castro. Cuba still hasn’t had a revolution, according to “Pensamiento Gonzalo,” the teachings of Abimael Guzman, Shining Path’s fearless leader (nom de guerre: Chairman Gonzalo). For Guzman, Castro is a “revisionist,” and Che, that romantic figure, a “chorus girl.” Guzman doesn’t kid around.

Guzman, shirtless and bearded, was spectacularly arrested in Lima during the night of Sept. 12, 1992, after leading a guerrilla war that has so far cost Peru as much as $20 billion in damages and taken, conservatively, 20,000 lives; some victims of Shining Path, others victims of Peru’s forces of order. According to police sources, Guzman’s safehouse was located when secret police, combing through refuse cans in the street, came upon discarded medication for psoriasis, from which the former philosophy professor suffers, and cigarette butts of the brand the chairman is known to smoke. With Guzman locked in solitary in an island prison, it was thought that Shining Path would at least retreat for a breather. But by Oct. 27, the U.S. State Department already had reissued a warning against all travel to Peru because of “increased terrorist violence.” On March 1, a car bomb exploded in downtown Lima.

Upon his arrest, Guzman, like Bogart or some hero from Camus, was rumored to have said laconically: “You win some, you lose some. This time, I lose.” As British journalist Simon Strong reports in “Shining Path,” however, Guzman’s lines at the time were less punchy, aimed as they were at posterity and a future audience of Sendero militants, as well as the international community.At his arrest, reports Strong, “the bespectacled ‘Red Sun’ (another of Guzman’s mythic nicknames) . . . looked around him a little quizzically, like a mole emerging from the ground and blinking in the sunlight while silently and rapidly assessing his new surroundings. . . . (He) appeared perfectly relaxed.”

Strong is a committed debunker. He never portrays Red Sun as the mad, reclusive hermit other journalists have given us. Strong sketches Guzman as completely as one can, given the paucity of information: the illegitimate son of a prosperous wholesaler of rice and sugar, someone who drinks beer and dances, is attractive to women, has friends, is often called Tio, or Uncle, by his followers, likes to talk, admires Dostoevsky, loves ice cream, cares about scholarship, knows his Bible, and happens to be a brilliant military strategist and the world’s latest banner-carrier for a certain bloody kind of communist revolution.

Shining Path is much in the style of the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, though Strong oddly never mentions this group in his analysis of Sendero. Young people--as young as 12--are often taken from villages that have been violently brought under Shining Path control, then trained and indoctrinated. Rebel recruits are warned against bourgeois sentiment for family, village, elders, country, etc. All sentiment is reserved for the party. Villagers, who almost invariably fear and despise the corrupt and exploitative government and local authorities, also fear the Shining Path.

Often, a village is caught between the violence of the army and the violence of the rebels. Whichever force is stronger in the area-- which usually means whoever manages to kill more villagers--carries the day, and wins the allegiance of the place. Many of Peru’s mountain provinces are today quasi-officially run by Shining Path, which has assassinated or co-opted all of the government’s regional representatives.

Shining Path enforces a strict morality: stealing, prostitution and corruption are severely punished and may result in execution for repeat offenders. But Shining Path administration and justice is not corrupt, Strong reports, and therefore is almost always less burdensome for the average Peruvian than official local government, with its endless bribes, its arbitrary arrests and its thieving sensibilities.

Guzman’s political strategy, as Strong reveals it, is brutally simple: All traditional leftist activism must be eradicated violently because it gives the Peruvian people hope outside the Shining Path organization and thereby slows the revolution (hence rebel attacks on the progressive wing of the Catholic Church and the assassination of shantytown activists and development workers).

The state must be undermined by guerrilla sabotage (hence the dynamiting of electricity pylons, water-supply systems, army barracks, banks and city halls); the peasantry must be brought into Shining Path through persuasion or coercion (hence the massacres in villages known or believed to be working with the army). In short, take no prisoners. Needless to say, this does not make Peru a pleasant place to live in. According to Strong, Shining Path is one of history’s very few truly nonaligned revolutionary movements. It apparently has received neither weapons nor funds from any foreign government. (Weapons are either stolen from the Peruvian armed forces, fabricated from the caches of Peru’s mining firms or, possibly, procured from trading with Columbian drug traffickers.)

For a book about such a complicated, dramatic and aberrant phenomenon, Strong’s “Shining Path” is remarkably flat, understated and colorless. Though his initial pages contain some melodramatic narrative about anonymous Shining Path sources and rebel love affairs in Sweden, most of the book details already known massacres (on both sides) or contains quotes from unpublished but dogmatic and unsurprising Shining Path documents. Much is made of El Diario’s lengthy interview with Guzman--partly because this is the only authoritative source of quotes from the chairman--but Guzman’s abstract verbosity and his ideologue’s stance make for tedious reading. For example:

“The two-line struggle is fundamental to us and has to do with conceiving of the party as a contradiction in accordance with the universality of the law of contradiction.”

Uh-huh.

Still, Strong’s explanation of how Shining Path emerged from the wreckage of Peru’s left, and how Guzman helped orchestrate the destruction and then steered his nascent movement through the ruins, picking up the bits and pieces he found useful, is important and telling for the rest of Latin America. Guzman’s triumphs, after all, were grounded in the Peruvian soil of illiteracy, economic injustice, bureaucratic corruption, racism and social stratification--fertilizers most Latin American countries can provide.

Shining Path’s victories show how, in such a setting, with very little material and money at hand, a single-minded strategic genius can actually build a vast and tightly knit armed movement capable of daring achievement. And this under the nose of the armed forces and while a very disapproving U.S. government stands by, virtually helpless. Guzman’s accomplishment may be repulsive, but it is certainly stunning.

In light of that accomplishment, Strong warns that small Shining Path support movements around the world could mature into some kind of global Maoist terror movement. This is Strong’s most shocking chapter, much of which was excerpted in the New York Times magazine. It’s hard to disagree with Strong that the world is ripe for some kind of violent quasi-organized upheaval, like the Anarchist movement before World War I. Still, his conspiracy theory seems far-fetched. Strong seems almost to be trying to create a global Shining Path terror network in order give his book more punch.

It is Strong’s opinion that the arrest of Guzman means Shining Path “probably . . . will never take power” in Peru. That probably makes you stop and think. Guzman’s aim for his movement was control of the country, which would have enabled Shining Path to institute a living revolution. This would probably have been a true nightmare, though Peru under dictator Alberto Fujimori--as under liberal president Alan Garcia--is living its own peculiar nightmare right now, and Shining Path has not gone away since Guzman’s arrest.

“Except for power,” Guzman liked to say, quoting Lenin, “all is illusion.” Is Guzman’s imprisonment an illusion? Who will be found to have more power, the dictator encircled by his generals or the prisoner in solitary, ill and losing weight? Whittled out of bone and underlined in blood, that quote from Lenin, with all its ambiguity, could be the motto of Peru today.

Wilentz is the author of “The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier” (Simon & Schuster).