Foreign Policy: Although you’ve written about the Shining Path in the past, your new book, La Cuarta Espada, is the first to examine the motivations of its leader, Abimael Guzmán. Why did you focus on him this time around? Why now?

Santiago Roncagliolo: Now, terrorism is not a Peruvian subject, but a global one. But the principal questions about it remain unanswered: What makes a normal student turn into a terrorist? What kind of people can be recruited by extremist groups, and how? Have they a common psychological profile? How can they achieve political goals by means of violence? What is their plan? You cannot ask these questions to people from ETA [the Basque militant group] or al Qaeda. But you can do it with the Shining Path leaders, because they are in jail and time has passed. This is a book about terrorists by themselves.

FP: The book is something of a personal reflection of life as a teenager and young adult in Lima during the Shining Path’s reign. How did incorporating your own experiences into the project change the way you covered your subject, if at all?

SR: Although I was working at the beginning [of my research] for the Spanish newspaper El País, I am not a foreigner in Peru. My personal story is a story about how people routinely live with violence, without even knowing there is a war around them. A soldier told me once: “Yes, we did terrible things at this war; we tortured, we killed, we kidnapped people. But this was not a dictatorship. You civilians elected the governments that ordered us to do so.” I wanted to show this civil society, living far from real war but scared to death, as we were, thinking we were innocents while staining our hands in blood.

FP: Did you meet Guzmán?

SR: There is no possibility of meeting Guzmán in prison. No journalist has ever done so. He is isolated from any family or personal visits, in a jail with more guards than prisoners, surrounded by a mine camp and a military base. But I talked to 70 people who have had personal contact with him since his childhood to the present moment. In the case of terrorists, what hit me the most was their faith. They talked about Guzmán as one would a divine entity. Not even his wife had a normal personal relationship with him. Even she called him “president.” The Shining Path believes in him as other people believe in God.

FP: How did researching his group change your perspective on or memories of the Shining Path, if at all?

SR: Now I understand better both the personal and political strategy of terrorism: Personally, they create a little world of people around a common truth, a truth that determines their love, friendship, and life. After a while, they cannot understand their own lives from that group, and they lose their individual will. That is the same kind of process that [we saw with Aum Shinrikyo], the Japanese sect that attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin gas in the 1990s. Politically, they have an enemy—the state or system—and they provoke that enemy. When a state accepts the war, it recognizes terrorists as rivals. If a state responds just by violence, it legitimizes them. It is the same with the Shining Path or al Qaeda. The establishment loses when it does what [the terrorists] want.

FP: One of the points you focus on in the book is the impact that failed romantic relationships had on Guzmán’s turn toward revolution. Given that such a mundane experience could catalyze a dangerous guerilla movement, do you worry that there are other, underlying factors in Peru that could again help to foment a similarly violent revolution?

SR: In the Guzmán case, the important factor was not the love relationship itself, but the feeling that he had no place in Peruvian society. Most of the Shining Path leaders had great personal expectations about themselves that somehow failed, creating a strong frustration and a feeling of injustice. They also had a will to believe. Many among them were Catholics before being communists. They were looking for a clear moral law in a confused world. Guzmán and Maoism offered that: a priest, a holy book, and a paradise called socialist utopia, as any religion. To kill people systematically, you need a transcendent ideology, which makes people’s lives less important. The Shining Path killed more than 30,000.

FP: Do you see some of Guzmán in today’s neopopulist leaders in Latin America? People like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales?

SR: On the contrary: Those governments have got the political left in Latin America to think there is no need for violence to achieve their goals. Now, [at least], they admit they must win elections. That is the natural evolution of the left in a democracy. But the Shining Path was not a normal leftist guerrilla group. It wanted no dialogue with other parties. They considered Cuba itself as a reformed but still capitalist regime. They accused Che Guevara of being bourgeois. Guzmán looked down on Deng Xiaoping’s China and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. He thought they were traitors to revolution, and that he was the only genuine heir of Marx, Lenin, and Mao: the fourth sword.

FP: What has the reaction been to La Cuarta Espada, both inside and outside Peru?

SR: I went to a few jails in Peru making lectures. There were soldiers and terrorists together in the audience. But for the first time, I saw them talking instead of shooting. That was the most beautiful reaction I received. We also sold three editions in one month, because there is still a lot of mystery around Guzmán. Abroad, each country sees the book through its own experience. In Chile and Argentina, it makes people think about their military regimes. In Spain, about civil war and terrorism. Reviews are good, but it has especially generated opinion columns. I like that, because the book deals with such universal issues as power, truth, and evil. In that sense, it is like a novel. But a real one. With real assassins.

FP: What will be the focus of your next book or film project?

SR: I am back in fiction. I am writing a novel and touring Europe with the last one, Abril Rojo. In English, I guess it will be published next year.

Santiago Roncagliolo is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, and blogger. He was the recipient of the 2006 Alfaguara Prize for literature for his book Abril Rojo.

Carlos Lozada wrote about La Cuarta Espada for the March/April 2008 issue of FP.