War of Shadows The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon [Paperback]

War of Shadowsis the haunting story of a failed uprising in the Peruvian Amazontold largely by people who were there. Late in 1965, Ash?ninka Indians, members of one of the Amazon's largest native tribes, joined forces with Marxist revolutionaries who had opened a guerrilla front in Ash?ninka territory. They fought, and were crushed by, the overwhelming military force of the Peruvian government. Why did the Indians believe this alliance would deliver them from poverty and the depredations of colonization on their rainforest home? With rare insight and eloquence, anthropologists Brown and Fern?ndez write about an Amazonian people whose contacts with outsiders have repeatedly begun in hope and ended in tragedy.

The players in this dramatic confrontation included militants of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), the U. S. Embassy, the Peruvian military, a renegade American settler, and the Ash?ninka Indians themselves. Using press reports and archival sources as well as oral histories, the authors weave a vivid tapestry of narratives and counternarratives that challenges the official history of the guerrilla struggle. Central to the story is the Ash?ninkas' persistent hope that a messiah would lead them to freedom, a belief with roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jungle rebellions and religious movements.

Michael F. Brownis Professor of Anthropology at Williams College. He is the author ofTsewa's Gift: Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society(1986).Eduardo Fern?ndezis a development anthropologist and the author ofPara que nuestra historia no se pierda(So That Our History is Not Lost).