Abstract
José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) was a Peruvian intellectual, whose ideas about the problems of Peru were published in his book "Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality" (1928). He viewed the plight of the Indigenous population of Peru as a socioeconomic issue not a racial or educational problem. He wanted to adapt Marxism, a European ideology to the Peruvian reality, through a fusion of Indigenista and socialist ideas. The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the relevance of Mariátegui's ideas in relationship to three important events of the twentieth and twenty-first century in Peru: the agrarian reform under General Velasco's dictatorship in 1969, the rise of the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), and the election of Pedro Castillo to the presidency in 2021.
The conclusions are as follows. First, the agrarian reform undertaken by Velasco in 1969 was influenced by Mariátegui's belief that land redistribution was an essential step to eliminate feudalism in Peru. Although it redressed ownership inequities and diminished the power of the existing oligarchy, Velasco's agrarian reform failed because of poor planning and execution. Second, although Mariátegui died more than forty years before Sendero was founded, his name has been inexorably and inappropriately linked to this terrorist group by falsely attributing the phrase "Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution" to Mariátegui, and by erroneous claims that Mariátegui was a forerunner to Mao''s ideology. Third, the election of Pedro Castillo, a native of Chota, Cajamarca, who ran on a Marxist-Leninist-Mariateguista platform, to the presidency in 2021 and the massive protests following his arrest in December 2022, could represent what Mariátegui and Luis Valcárcel forecast in 1927: a renaissance of a "dormant" Andean population.
Mariátegui should be remembered as a courageous, honest, humble, non-dogmatic, prolific intellectual who was not afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom of his time, not as an iconic figure of Sendero Luminoso.