The Struggle to Build Awareness of Peaceful Solutions to Exclusion
For ILD’s research to make a real impact on the Peruvian status quo, de Soto and his team realized that they had to find a way to force official Peru to face up to the massive presence of extralegality in the country --which was sure to stall every effort at improving the Peruvian economy-- and then realize that there was a way out of this predicament. The ILD had looked closely at extralegality and had discovered that the poor were not Peru’s biggest economic problem but a major part of the solution. The Peruvian Government, however, had another pressing problem: terrorism.
ILD researchers had interviewed extralegals all across Peru and had found information that pointed to the reforms the country could face to take the vast majority of the population out of exclusion, turning them into actors of the solution, not in the center of the problem.
The Shining Path
By the mid-1980s, a home-grown group of radical Maoist guerillas who called themselves “Sendero Luminoso” --the “Shining Path”-- had become the most aggressive political force in Peru. Its prime constituency was that same massive group of people excluded from the Peruvian economy that the ILD had documented. The Shining Path already controlled one third of Peru, and the guerillas had been bombing affluent and commercial areas of Lima to terrorize the population --and its political and intellectual opposition-- and build its popular support for its promise of “revolution.” The left of center Government of Alan Garcia was trying to smash the guerillas. In this fight to death between the Government and The Shining Path, the odds were going in favor of the guerillas, according to many political commentators in South America who were also predicting that outside forces would have to intervene to prevent a Shining Path victory that was then likely to destabilize the political situations in Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia.
The Government fought back through its police and the army, but no one was confronting the Shining Path with better arguments and ideas, much less with solutions to poverty in Peru. The ILD moved to try to fill that intellectual vacuum.
The Other Path
The ILD decided that it was imperative to launch a massive media campaign to publicize its empirical findings and its ideas for how to reform Peru’s legal system. It began in 1985 with a 12 page report in Peru’s leading newsweekly magazine about political affairs, Caretas. A series of articles about the ILD’s work and findings then appeared in Peru’s most prominent daily newspaper, El Comercio --with graphs and pictures illustrating the dimension of informality in Peru. The ILD publicity campaign continued through 1986: Working with the press, television, and radio, ILD staffers generated news releases, essays, conferences, seminars, even comic books and jingles broadcast over the radio --an unprecedented, all-out effort to call attention to the fact that the majority of economic activity in Peru took place in what was then known as “the informal sector.” The ILD also created its own “Office of Public Attention” to inform and advise the political parties who wanted to confront the issue of informality.
In late 1986, Hernando de Soto published his first and seminal book, El Otro Sendero (The Other Path), based on more than five years of ILD research. The book instantly became indispensable for understanding Peru’s economy as well as life in Peru and Peruvians in general. For de Soto --and his Peruvian audience-- the book was also a direct intellectual challenge to the Shining Path, offering to the poor of Peru not the violent overthrow of the system but “the other path” out of poverty, through legal reform. As he later recalled in the prologue [0] to a new U.S. edition of the book published in 2002:
As early as 1984, I became convinced that the Shining Path would never be eliminated as a political option, without first being defeated in the world of ideas. Like many, I felt that Sendero’s major strength stemmed from its intellectual appeal to those excluded by the system and its ability to generate a political cause for natural leaders, whether in universities or shantytowns. Sendero’s chief, Abimael Guzman, was a former philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga, in the south-central Andes of Peru. His strategy was no mystery: he wanted to bully the intellectual opposition into silence, capture the people’s imagination, and create a revolutionary argument “secure from all refutation,” as the French Marxist thinker Georges Sorel (1847 - 1922) would have said.
Many Peruvian intellectuals spoke and wrote against violence in general and participated in candle-carrying marches calling for peace, in general. Few, however, dared attack Sendero publicly by name. In fact, the name “Sendero” itself inspired such fear that it was uttered only in a whisper. This expansive wave of terror allowed Guzman to appear invincible, an alpha male that few intellectuals were prepared to mess with. By terrorizing his critics into silence, the murderous professor had more than enough rhetorical space to advance his “revolutionary message” within Peruvian society.
To prove to my compatriots that there was nothing magical or superior in Sendero’s proposal for a new society, I titled my book El Otro Sendero, The Other Path. Though I had written a straightforward book about development and not terrorism, I organized the text to counter the Shining Path’s well-worn fare against liberal democracy and capitalism, dealing with their arguments one by one, starting with the assumption --obviously false to anyone who bothered to walk through the streets of Lima-- that poor Peruvians were a social class naturally disposed against markets and democracy.