Mass RAIL fights the whole injustice system, and we've picked a few winnable battles that we focus a lot of our energy on: stopping the control units torture cells, and returning the prisoners deported to Texas. Read up on it here, and get involved!

People of the Shining Path
UMass Campus Center Rm 911
Thursday March 9, 7pm

The Communist Party of Peru, commonly called Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path in the mainstream press, has led a protracted people's war since 1980 in order to fundamentally change Peruvian society -- to do away with the violence of poverty and starvation, to give the land to those who till it, to end the oppression of wimmin. The documentary People of the Shining Path was made in 1992, and is one of a small handful of Western media pieces which lets members and supporters of the Communist Party speak for themselves. At the time, ruling circles in the united $tates and Peru thought the victory of the Communists was imminent, and publicly slandered the Communists as "terrorists." But behind closed doors, counterinsurgency experts cautioned them not to believe their own rhetoric, and pointed out that the strength of the Communist movement lay in the work it did organizing the masses towards true self-rule.

Come see People of the Shining Path and make up your own mind. Are peasants caught between a repressive central government and the 'terrorists?' Or do they make up the bulk of the revolutionary movement, which is meeting their basic demand for land? Does the Communist Party exploit wimmin, or are they playing a dynamic and leading role in the revolution? Is people's war an oxymoron? Or is it true that -- because the current regime uses limitless force to defend poverty and starvation -- without a people's army, the people have nothing?