Why did Peru's peasant patrols govern themselves by assembly in the north and by commandos in the south?
In 1980 the Shining Path opened its war on the Peruvian state by burning a voting center in Chuschi, Ayacucho. Over the next seventeen years it became the most violent communist insurgency in the western hemisphere. One of the most effective responses did not come from the army. It came from the peasants themselves.
The patrols, rondas campesinas, here called Night Watchers, had little money and no experience, and for years they were illegal. Thousands of indigenous communities formed them anyway. They were extralegal but not criminal: they organized outside the law, without profit motives or systematic crime.
Sources cited in the paper: Degregori et al. (1996); TRC (2003); Ideele (1994).
Every patrol faced the same problem. To defend a village you have to give someone the right to use force. Patrollers can then use that right for themselves: shirk the night shift, settle personal scores, pocket the beer money. So the question the paper asks is:
How does the kind of external threat a group faces shape how it governs itself?
The first Night Watcher patrol was formed in 1976 by the community of Cuyumalca in northern Peru to fight theft and assault. The southern patrols appeared around 1983 to fight the Shining Path. Both were peasant initiatives that later entered the legal system. Inside, they looked nothing alike.
Switch between regions to see how each patrol was organized (Table 1 of the paper).
The theory draws on Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962). Any rule for collective decisions involves two costs:
Decision-making costs: the time and effort needed to reach agreement. They rise as more people must consent.
External costs: what you expect to suffer when a decision goes against you, such as being sent on a night shift or punished on a leader's word. They rise as fewer people must consent.
A community picks the rule that minimizes the sum of the two. The paper's contribution is to show that the time horizon moves both curves at once. An existential threat with no predictable pattern shortens the horizon. Deliberation becomes slow and dangerous, so decision-making costs rise. People are also more willing to tolerate a strongman, because they expect the emergency, and the strongman, not to last.
Move the slider to change the villagers' time horizon. The curves are a stylized version of the paper's argument, not estimates.
Any enforcement system makes two kinds of error. The time horizon decides which one a community would rather make.
The paper's main hypothesis follows. Peasant vigilantes rely on hierarchy to enforce their agreements if and only if they face a short time horizon and an existential threat.
The northern threat was serious. Bands of cattle rustlers raided at night, killed and raped, and sold through chains of truckers, dealers and slaughterhouses. But they did not want to rule the villages, and their raids were persistent and predictable. Peasants still lived off the land, so their horizon stayed long.
A long horizon makes reputation work. A patroller who cheats loses future income and standing, so the arrangement enforces itself:
"A knowledge of 'what's going on' meant that a prosperous store-owner could not plead poverty to escape a fine for missing patrol for a month. A woman known for letting her pigs stray into neighboring fields could not claim never to have allowed the animals to roam free."Starn (1999, 139)
Peer-to-peer enforcement. Women's committees made sure the men patrolled. A man could fight back against other men, but attacking a group of señoras would make him a laughingstock:
"Those who dodged service could expect to be roused out of bed by the wives of other villagers, fined, or even whipped."Starn (1999, 78)
Checks on the patrol itself. The assembly elected and removed leaders and banned patrols from acting for private gain. When a whipping was ordered, a relative often held the lash, and anyone who held back was whipped too. Justice aimed at reconciliation, because everyone had to keep living together:
"We're all peasants, all poor. Why punish someone so bad they can't work? Or send them to rot in jail? How will their families survive? In the night watch you take your whip strokes, and then correct yourself, and go back to your life."Villager quoted in Starn (1999, 88)
The checks worked almost too well. Leading a patrol was so draining and closely watched that volunteers were hard to find. "This job tires you out. The problems never end, and people are never satisfied, and talk about you behind your back."
The Shining Path was a different kind of enemy. It wanted to replace the community's order. It killed village authorities, carried out random public executions, and planted informers inside the villages. In the words it used for itself, it had "one thousand ears and one thousand eyes." Forming a patrol made a village a target:
"Against the use of the military and their peasant supporters, we responded with a forceful action: Lucanamarca. … We executed 80 villagers."Abimael Guzmán, quoted in TRC (2003)
With no predictable pattern to plan around, deliberation became slow and dangerous, and no one knew which neighbor was a spy. So communities handed authority to commandos. Villagers had to register and carry passes. Passwords, flag ceremonies and training became compulsory. Commerce was restricted. Planning took place at night in the hills, in secret:
"No one could know, it was a matter of life and death; we were forbidden from even telling our wives because people said there were gossips."Patrol leader, quoted in La Serna (2012, 170)
Punishment in the south looked more like the terrorists' own methods than like northern reconciliation. Falling asleep on guard could mean execution. The hierarchy also brought its own internal rent-seeking, which Del Pino (1992) documents: commandos settled personal disputes, seized resources, and abused outsiders.
"They were like gods… they acted like kings, and with the positions they held, they practically were kings."Peasant from the Apurímac valley, in La Serna (2012, 203)
Villagers accepted these external costs because they expected them to be temporary. Like other revolutionary movements, the threat was not expected to last.
If the time horizon drives structure, hierarchy should weaken when terror recedes. Coronel's (1996) fieldwork in Huanta, Ayacucho, lets us follow three southern communities through the conflict. In all three, authority went to the commandos as violence rose and returned to the assembly as violence fell.
Select a community. The line is a schematic of how vertical its governance was, drawn from Coronel's account; it is not measured data.
"Members of the self-defense committees join the productive tasks with the purpose of rebuilding their family and communal economy. The [patrols] in each base get involved in the communal dynamic: elections, accountability … and enforcement of sanctions decided by authorities of the Assembly."Coronel (1996, 108)
Three alternative explanations are plausible. The evidence rejects each one. Click a hypothesis to see why.
The internal structure of extralegal organizations is especially sensitive to the shadow of the future.
Hierarchy and democracy were not cultural inheritances or orders from the state. They were tools. Peasants chose whichever one kept the cost of controlling opportunism lowest given how far ahead they could plan. When tomorrow was predictable, they governed in a circle where "it was easy for anyone to get in a word." When it was not, they accepted kings, and they took the kings back down once the threat had passed.
The Night Watchers grew into a force of about 120,000 combatants. Fighting alongside some 30,000 soldiers, they helped defeat the Shining Path. The logic of the paper, that threats shape governance through the time horizon, applies to self-defense groups, militias and community policing wherever the state is absent.