As the cradle of South America's most advanced native American civilizations, Peru has a valuable and unique heritage among the nations of the southern continent. It encompasses a past that reaches back over 10,000 years in one of the most harsh and inhospitable, if spectacular, environments in the world--the high Andes of South America. The culmination of Andean civilization was the construction by the Incas, in little more than one hundred years, of an empire that spanned a third of the South American continent and achieved a level of general material wellbeing and cultural sophistication that rivaled and surpassed many of the great empires in world history.

Finally, redemocratization was also threatened from another quarter--the emergence, also in 1980, of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso--SL) guerilla movement, Latin America's most violent and radical ongoing insurgency. By 1985 its so-called "people's war" had claimed about 6,000 victims, most of them innocent civilians killed by the guerrillas or the army. Resorting to extraordinarily violent means, the Shining Path succeeded in challenging the authority of the state, particularly in the more remote areas of the interior, where the presence of the state had always been tenuous--the more so now because of the absence of the gamonal class. Violence, was a thread that ran throughout Andean history, from Inca development, the Spanish conquest and colonialism, and countless native American insurrections and their suppression to the fight for freedom in the 1820s, the War of the Pacific, and the longterm nature of underdevelopment itself.