Earlier today, I was made aware of a book called CIA Shining Path: Political Warfare written by someone very close to Juan Velasco Alvarado, President of Peru and pro-soviet socialist (so tankie in fact, he contemplated invading Chile after Pinochet’s coup).
The book only exists in Spanish and through some effort, I managed to grab a pdf which I’m uploading here https://gofile.io/d/o8OlG0, and I managed to auto-translate the book in a raw file.
I now have the translation on a google drive and I need help from my comrades who want to contribute to do the following (in this order):
- Clean up the document. There are a ton of PDF artefacts left. Page numbers, line breaks that shouldn’t be here…
- Use styles to format the text. Chapters, subchapters…
- Finally, proofread the translation and fix it. If you speak Spanish and can compare to the original book, that’s even better (I have some Spanish comprehension but I doubt it’ll be enough).
If you want to participate, just comment here and I’ll send you the link as anyone with it can edit the source. Then you can just get to it as you want. I’m gonna be adding some instructions on the first page for editors but yeah, that’s about it.
Much appreciated!
I read the introduction (in Spanish), and its extremely interesting. Basically the author lays out an argument that the “Shining Path” was a reactonary movement, not revolutionary nor Marxist. Unfortunately I wont have time to contribute to the translation.
It certainly seems like a trove of information just from the few bits I’ve been reading while formatting the document. The first chapter focuses on the geopolitical considerations of Peru and the rest of South America in regards to the USA and USSR. I’m fixing up the second chapter now which delves into the Shining Path, and some of the stuff the author says (from the machine translation, which is worth what it’s worth and will require side-by-side reading with the original material) really exposes the SP as a counter-revolutionary, opportunist force. He also claims it’s no secret that the CIA distributed the little red book in south american universities in the 1960s to exacerbate the sino-soviet split.
To be honest most of the work doesn’t even require much effort, just a lot of time. But any line fixed is helpful. Right now I’m consolidating all lines into paragraphs, as the PDF extracting messed up the formatting (but what else is new with PDF 🙄). So the work is pretty much this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/819494707075743756/886599887989383218/GIF_12.09.2021_15-10-26.gif
If you ever want to help, even if it’s just 10 minutes, I can send you the google docs link. I use a simple system for progress checking so anyone can pick up at any time and start working.