Back in NYC.
Talked to a woman at a friend's house who has been spending a lot of time in the Peruvian Amazon who says the Shining Path still exists. She said the global media just lost interest after Guzman was captured, but the organization mutated and lives on. She said it now is more involved with the drug traffic that passes through the jungles where Peru, Brazil and Columbia come close, and that the Shining Path use indigenous people — both Meztizo and indigenous — as necessary guides and forced help — they would get lost without local guides and wouldn't be able to find food either.
Conflicts arise (these people are basically kidnapped) and individuals and villages are massacred. It's a low grade war, as it always was for the Shining Path, but the ideology has almost vanished. Where originally it may have been a Maoist peasants revolt, it became, like the Red Guard or Khmer Rouge, an excuse for both the neighborhood bullies and the aggrieved to avenge themselves and wield power. Kids with guns. Imagine a thousand Columbines.
Apparently, the U.S. armed the Colombian militia groups by routing arms through Peru. (It was illegal for the US to actually supply arms.) Vast amounts of guns passed through this region — the woman said that if all those arms reached their source, Columbia would be the best armed country on Earth. Naturally a fair amount got skimmed off.
If conflicts and wars go unreported do they exist? Well, yeah they are happening, but they don't exist in the global sense — they aren't affecting policy and finances in ways that we are aware of — at present. I suspect, optimistically, that what should be news eventually becomes history. At some future point there will be an interest in this area and someone will dig and ask and discovers what was going on. The massacres, drug and weapon running with become the back story to some future present situation. Maybe.
I wonder if there are lots of other conflicts dragging on in other regions below the media radar. How much do we not know? How much is hidden from us or have we forgotten? We marvel that the Arabs were the repository of so much science and literature for hundreds of years — that the genius or Rome and Athens was "forgotten" by medieval Europe but the Arab world kept it safe — we wonder how could that be? Surely now, with the world wide web and global communications we wouldn't never "lose" a whole area of knowledge.
But maybe we could. We wouldn't know, would we?
