This is the first work exploring the colonial roots, modern context, trajectory and legacy of the Shining Path insurgency in the region of Huancavelica, Peru, one of Peru’s most impoverished and Quechua-speaking regions. The use of terroristic violence to implement a revolutionary and exclusivist ideology was without precedent in Latin America, presaging later movements such as ISIS. Integrating interviews, testimonials, survey data and the vast primary and secondary literature on the insurgency, this work examines how Huancavelican communities experienced and continue to shoulder the consequences of an exterminatory conflict thirty years after the insurgency was largely, although not entirely, defeated.