In the first InsideGMT article on The Guerrilla Generation, I covered the famous urban guerrillas known as the Tupamaros in the Uruguay game. In this article, I’ll cover the other game set in South America, The Guerrilla Generation: Peru....
In the first InsideGMT article on The Guerrilla Generation, I covered the famous urban guerrillas known as the Tupamaros in the Uruguay game. In this article, I’ll cover the other game set in South America, The Guerrilla Generation: Peru. The Peru game depicts the Shining Path insurgency from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. As with Malaya in The British Way, Peru represents a less radical departure from the standard COIN model and provides a good starting point for COIN players transitioning to or from existing modern conflict volumes such as Andean Abyss, Cuba Libre, or A Distant Plain. Thematically, The Guerrilla Generation: Peru has a lot in common with the Colombian civil war depicted by the first COIN volume Andean Abyss. Both South American conflicts involved a leftist insurgency that outlasted the end of the Cold War, partially by becoming involved in the drug trade. However, as will be explained below, the Shining Path insurgency’s violence featured in Peru makes the FARC insurgency in Colombia look restrained by comparison.
The Guerrilla Generation: Peru allows players to learn about one of the most violent insurgencies in Latin American history, the Shining Path. The Shining Path insurgency operated as a highly centralized group that organized around a cult of personality of its leader Abimael Guzmán. The movement glorified the use of violence and carried out extensive civilian victimization. Unlike most conflicts in Latin America, the Truth and Reconciliation report conducted in Peru after the conflict found that the Shining Path committed more violence against civilians than government forces, responsible for 54% of the 69,820 reported deaths or disappearances. To accurately depict the conflict, the Peru game builds the group’s extensive use of violence into their Faction, but also makes sure to model the major drawbacks of such violence. Facing the brutal Shining Path insurgency is another Government faction that must balance their response to the insurgency with the restrictions of a democratic government. As in the Uruguay game, featured in the last InsideGMT article, the use of too much repression could lead to a military coup against the democratic government.
The Battle for the Highlands of Peru
Much of the conflict focused on a struggle over the highland communities of central Peru. The insurgency began by exploiting the grievances of these communities who felt left behind by the population in coastal areas, particularly in the department of Ayacucho. The Shining Path rapidly spread across the highland departments, using a mixture of political agitation and violent terrorism. Given the movement’s heavy emphasis on civilian victimization, the use of Terror Operations in Highland spaces is free for the Shining Path. However, every Terror used in Highland spaces places an Underground Rondas, one of the major mechanical changes in the Peru game. In response to the Shining Path’s brutality, highland communities began organizing self-defense groups, or rondas campesinas (‘peasant rounds’). Although the Government organized some of these groups, many were established independently as a local response to the Shining Path. Underground Rondas are not immediately threatening to the Shining Path and don’t count toward Control of a space. However, during each Propaganda Round, Underground Rondas may go Active, creating a number of difficulties for the insurgency: Active Rondas improve Government Assault, count toward Government Control, and remove Guerrillas during the Propaganda Round. The Government can also use its Organize Special Activity to place Active Rondas directly into spaces. The Shining Path may remove Underground Rondas peacefully by addressing the communities concerns through the use of their Govern Special Activity, or more brutally by using Attack at the expense of shifting the space toward Active Support.
Prototype map for Peru (not final art)However, as the number of Rondas grow in the highlands and undermine the Shining Path’s position, many Shining Path players will be tempted to follow Guzmán’s strategy of directing terror towards Lima and the other major Coastal areas. Each Terror marker in these spaces lowers Political Will at the Propaganda Round, to reflect the insurgency’s goal of making the Government appear helpless even in the heart of the country. To reflect the extensive Terror campaign in Lima, the Lima space may hold more than one Terror marker and often devolves into a struggle between Police and Guerrillas. A particularly ambitious, possibly even foolish, Shining Path player may even attempt to take Control of a poorly defended Lima.
The Organization and Operations of the Shining Path
As with the other games in this multipack, a major goal of The Guerrilla Generation: Peru is to highlight the organizational and strategic differences of the insurgent factions in the pack. I’ve already covered the group’s particularly brutal strategy that heavily emphasized terror tactics and civilian victimization, but not their organizational structure. The Shining Path is the most centralized insurgency of the four included in the box. The leadership at the top around Abimael Guzmán had tight control over subordinate commanders and often sent explicit strategic directives. This organizational structure offered benefits and liabilities for the group. On the one hand, it meant that the insurgency had a greater ability to follow a long-term organized strategy than other more decentralized groups. Mechanically, the Shining Path player possesses a Guzmán Directives Base that they secretly (or randomly if two-handed solo) swap with an on map Base. At the start of the Propaganda Round, if the Directives Base is still on the map, the Shining Path player may carry out a free Limited Operation in and adjacent to the Base. This enables last minute operations prior to the checking of Political Will. The insurgency also has a powerful Evade Special Activity that allows for a single Guerrilla to infiltrate into spaces where they normally would flip Active.
However, the highly centralized nature of the Shining Path insurgency came at a price. By centralizing decision-making so heavily on a single leader, the group made itself vulnerable to decapitation. In 1992, the capture of Guzmán and other top leaders severely weakened the insurgency. To model the importance of leadership decapitation the Track for the Peru game focuses on the “Hunt for Guzmán.” The Government Investigate Special Activity, Events, and the removal of the Guzmán Directives Base all shift the track towards Guzmán’s capture. The Shining Path may remove Guerrillas in Lima with their Evade Special Activity to attempt to throw off the search for Guzmán, who was actually hiding in Lima for most of the conflict due to his medical condition. If the Peruvian forces capture Guzmán, the effects are severe but not necessarily game ending, so long as the Shining Path player has managed to sufficiently drain Political Will.
Prototype ‘Hunt’ track (not final art)The Government Response
Like The Guerrilla Generation: Uruguay, the Government in Peru facing the Shining Path is democratic, having recently transitioned from military rule in 1980. Democracy shaped the counterinsurgency effort in several ways. First, departments had to be declared “emergency zones” to enable counterinsurgency tactics that required emergency powers, such as organizing rondas or inflicting collective punishments. Over the course of the conflict, emergency zones steadily spread throughout much of the highland departments. Most of the civilian victimization attributed to Government forces occurred within these areas. To model the tradeoff, the Government is more likely to gain Political Will if they use less Emergency Zones in Department spaces, but at the cost of having less flexibility about where they can use their Organize and Reprisal Special Activities. Even worse, if the Government player has placed down too many Emergency Zones and the Autogolpe Event comes up, then the democracy itself might fall in a “self-coup”, where the president colludes with the military to take power. As a democracy, the president of Peru also changed several times throughout the conflict, with each of the presidents having different priorities on how to conduct the counterinsurgency campaign. As with the Coup Cards in the Fire in the Lake COIN volume, the effect of each historical president will boost or hinder the Government player’s current plans.
Note: President Fujimori encouraged the spread of Government sponsored rondas, but also led the ‘autogolpe’ (self-coup) against democracy in Peru.For those looking to read more on the Shining Path and just starting to learn about the topic, I’d recommend Orin Starn and Migel La Serna’s popular history The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. For those wanting an account focusing less on personalities and more on broader trends and data, I highly recommend the summary of the Truth and Reconciliation report (which is also free!): https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/subsites/peru-hatun-willakuy-en/. For anyone curious about other games on the Shining Path, once again, the first and only game (so far) on the topic is by the legendary irregular wargame designer Brian Train: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7337/shining-path-struggle-peru. In the next article, we will move on to El Salvador, the first of the two Central American conflicts in the multipack – which surprisingly has no game by Brian Train!
Previous Article: The Guerrilla Generation: Uruguay
