Liberation Ludology, Part Two: Peru

When last we visited Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation, we looked at a localized urban insurgency in Uruguay, one that failed to bring about a socialist revolution, but eventually, after a period of military rule, saw former revolutionaries elevated to government positions, including the presidency itself. Today’s scenario casts a wider net, not to mention a more tangled one. When the scenario opens in 1980, Peru has only recently emerged from its own period of ideologically complicated military dictatorship. Riven by debt and poverty, Peru now has a freshly elected civilian government that’s reluctant to give the military too much latitude, while a philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán has just launched one of the most vicious insurgencies in Latin American history: the Shining Path. Welcome back to the countryside, comrade. For long-time enthusiasts of the COIN Series, Peru finds itself on something closer to home turf than the Uruguay scenario. Unlike that country’s…