Description
- Abstract:
- The Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA), was a Peruvian insurgent group that operated in the 1980s and 1990s. Through investigation of MRTA propaganda and rhetoric, reflections from movement leaders, and existing scholarly analysis of the movement, this thesis argues that people were drawn to the MRTA largely because of their disillusionment with the Peruvian government’s ability to ameliorate poverty, inequality, and foreign economic exploitation. The MRTA successfully spoke to specific and shared grievances held by Peruvians, situated itself within Peruvian history, and positioned its politics to fall between the mainstream left and the far more extreme and violent Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a contemporaneous radical group that has received far more scholarly attention than the MRTA. The movement attracted university students, urban workers, rural Peruvians, and a handful of foreigners. The story of one outsider will be central to this thesis’s exploration of what drew people to the MRTA. Lori Berenson was an American woman who dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and moved first to Central America and later to Peru, where she was arrested in November 1995 and charged with terrorism for her involvement with the MRTA. Lori Berenson spent fifteen years in Peruvian prisons and has become a symbol of both the violence perpetrated by insurgent groups during the Peruvian Civil Conflict and the government’s anti-democratic brutality that characterized Peruvian society in the final years of the 1900s. Understanding what drew Lori to the MRTA and putting her motivations in dialogue with those of Peruvian supporters will fortify the argument of this thesis and supplement academic scholarship on the MRTA and late 20th century Peru.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2025
- Concentration: History
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Citation
Saxl, Emily M.,
"“¡Venceremos!” (We will prevail!): Investigating the Allure of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement"
(2025).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/42m0-rd84
