María Elena Moyano

Moyano was born in the Barranco district of Lima. Her activism began in her teens, as a member of the Movimiento de Jóvenes Pobladores, a youth movement in Villa El Salvador, a vast shantytown (pueblo joven) on the outskirts of the capital, largely populated by migrants from the rural parts of Peru.

In 1984, aged 25, she was elected president of the Federación Popular de Mujeres de Villa El Salvador (Fepomuves), a federation of women from Villa El Salvador. Under her leadership, the organization grew to encompass public kitchens, health committees, the Vaso de Leche program (which supplied children with milk), income-generating projects, and committees for basic education. In 1990, Moyano left her position in Fepomuves and shortly thereafter was elected deputy mayor of the municipality of Villa El Salvador.

Moyano also supported the organization Vaso de Leche which was to deliver milk to Lima's poor neighborhoods so that children could have at least one cup of milk a day.[1]

Moyano's mother laundered clothes for a living and had seven children. Moyano grew up with her six siblings, namely Rodolfo, Raul, Carlos, Narda, Eduardo, and Martha. For many years, Moyano wanted to be a secretary, but her mother encouraged her to study law. Moyano's husband Gustavo encouraged her to apply to Garcilaso de la Vega University so she could study sociology. The movie Courage (1999) depicted her studying poverty in Peru and her turn towards secularism and socialism. Moyano believed that soup kitchens were a form of expressing grievances.

The Shining Path, founded by Abimael Guzmán, was trying to consolidate its hold on the poorer neighborhoods of Lima. They were suspicious of all social organizations in Peru.

Fear and terror often motivated women, particularly those who lived in poverty, to organize and participate in social and political activism. The war between the Shining Path and the military left many women vulnerable since incidences of rape were reported against both groups. Cholas (the pejorative term for indigenous Peruvian females) were raped the most by men in the military, reported by Robin Kirk on a report she created for the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch. The Shining Path additionally intimidated those that worked in social organizations through death threats and ultimately killed quite a few.

Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path, was captured in September 1992. This was during the government of Alberto Fujimori, who suspended the Constitution, dissolved congress and created a tight bond with the military. Under Fujimori's rule, many were arrested and executed.

The Shining Path considered Moyano a counter-revolutionary and a manipulator. She blamed the leftist movement in Peru for supporting the Shining Path. Moyano went on to publicly confront Shining Path by calling them terrorists and no longer revolutionaries. She also confronted the police, accusing them of violence and murders.

In a distributed pamphlet, the Shining Path attacked Moyano accusing her of cheating, lying and planting bombs. Moyano rebutted each attack by stating that she would never "destroy what [she] has built with [her] own hands."

Moyano had been apart and helped found organizations before the attempted influence of the Shining Path. Later, she would use these organizations to help the resistance against the Shining Path. She did not support the Shining Path and did not support government actions, arguing that "we are living in a dirty war [in which] women are being violated; community leaders are being detained; the entire town is being obliterated".[1] Despite being a shantytown twenty years earlier, Villa El Salvador was now a place of many organizations such as women's clubs. Moyano was one of the people who helped found FEPOMUVES in 1983 or the Popular Women's Federation, comprising seventy women's clubs. Each club represented what they called a residential group, comprising 384 families.[1] There were many women's federations across the country as soon as a new shantytown appeared Moyano would send some of her representatives to organize another federation. Their objective included the evaluation of women's roles and opportunities for training and empowerment. They also decided to study the problems of their community and the reasons underlying their poverty [1]  She was elected president of FEPOMUVES in 1984 at the age of 25 and one of her first goals was supporting the Vaso de Leche program.

Moyano admitted that Alfonso Barrantes Lingan, the mayor of Lima at the time, did not keep many promises but one of the few he did was the Vaso de Leche program, a program that provided a daily food ration (milk in any of its forms or another product) to a beneficiary population in a situation of poverty and extreme poverty.[2] Moyano and the women's federation helped promote the Vaso de Leche by working to make the program work. Moyano and the federation organized themselves into small Vaso de Leche groups.[1] They only received raw milk and each woman needed to use their own kettles, sugar and cloves to make the milk more palatable. In 1986, Moyano and the women of Villa El Salvador proposed that the Vaso de Leche be autonomous, being managed by committee of women instead of Lima's city government. Moyano felt as if the women knew more about the program than any government official for her and the women were the ones to receive the milk, put it through a kettle, add sugar and cinnamon and distribute it.[1] On 9 March 1987, the Vaso de Leche program's directorship was officially transferred to the Popular Women's Federation. Moyano organized the program in Villa El Salvador or at the district level. Moyano also saw the Vaso de Leche as opportunities for women to learn organizational and developmental skills while building self-esteem.[1] She wanted women to feel empowered and capable despite the sexist attitude in Peru at the time. She also helped create a communal kitchen in Villa El Salvador in develop alternate solutions to alleviate problems of hunger, unemployment and the misery they had been suffering.[1]

Despite the huge successes, the economic crisis and the Shining Path had caught up with her. Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru, organized an economic shock program with the intention to break the cycle of inflation by letting prices rise once and for all to reasonable levels, ending costly subsidies that for years were financed simply by printing currency, trimming the bloated government payroll, lowering tariff barriers to admit cheaper imports and allowing the value of the inti to fall to levels that will make Peruvian exports competitive in order to fuel a recovery.[3] This caused crazy price rises-overnight in which prices of bread and milk tripled. The cost of noodles and newspapers quadrupled and the price of cooking gas increased 25-fold.[4] Gasoline increased 30-fold and half a million workers were fired.

The Shining Path took advantage of this. Moyano's programs had been hit hard by Fujishock, but she made sure they were not destroyed. The Vaso de Leche program and communal kitchens still handed out food and milk, easing the shock on the poor. Moyano was not known by the Shining Path at this time and she was not targeted yet, but winning the election for deputy mayor gave her a political position. The women of the women's federation along with Moyano organized neighborhood defense committees to defend themselves against the Shining Path.[1] Moyano had caught the Shining Path's attention as she ran all these programs which halted communist fervor, was deputy mayor and was setting up defense committees. The Shining Path accused her of working for the government and of manipulating women. One day, the Shining Path planted a bomb in a Vaso de Leche center and blamed Moyano for it. Moyano took a public stand, no longer calling them revolutionaries but terrorists. She vowed that the Shining Path "would not close communal kitchens" and called "upon women to dispel the fear provoked by Sendero".[1] She was successful and organized protests and peace marches against the Shining Path. She had a voice in such a time where opposition was suppressed by the Shining Path. She kept giving out milk, kept marching and kept working despite the Shining Path's death threats.

After actively confronting the Shining Path, she began to contemplate her death. Since many women activists in Peru such as Maria Antenati Hilario and Margarita Astride de la Cruz were assassinated, she felt it could happen to her as well. Out of all of them, the most significant one was the death of Juana Lopez in August 1991. Moyano would begin to receive death threats only two weeks after the incident. The Shining Path began to tell her to leave her post or she would die. The Shining Path called for a call to arms against the capital on 14 February 1992 and on that same day she organized a women's march against terror.[1] The Shining Path's call to arms failed, although not because of Moyano and other community leader's protests. Still, the Shining Path was frustrated with these community leaders. On 15 February 1992, Moyano was celebrating her son's birthday when she went outside to a parilla or a barbeque. There armed men and women surrounded Moyano and other people on the beach. Moyano was shot various time by a woman in front of her son Gustavo and her husband David Pineki (she married him in 1980). Her body was then dragged to the town square and blown up with dynamite. She was 33. It was because of her defiance to the Shining Path that Moyano was targeted for elimination.

Thousands of people attended her funeral. Later, a statue honoring Moyano was erected in a plaza in the center of Villa El Salvador and her autobiography was published. The assassination of Moyano was one of the last major actions carried out by the Shining Path. In September 1992, Guzmán was arrested and a majority of the leadership of the organization fell shortly thereafter.

Moyano has been honored through a film after her death titled Coraje (Courage). The film was written and directed by Alberto Durant.

• "The Assassination of María Elena Moyano"
• Review of The Autobiography of Maria Elena Moyano (2000)
• Pictures of Maria Elena Moyano by www.amigosdevilla.it
• "El Asesinato de Maria Elena Moyano - Especial de TV Peru" (in Spanish). YouTube. February 13, 2012.
• "Sucedio en el Perú - María Elena Moyano - bloque 1/5" (in Spanish). YouTube. October 20, 2009.
• Courage

• Shaw, Lisa and Stephanie Dennison. Pop Culture Latin America: Media, Arts and Lifestyle. ABC-CLIO, 2005. Print.
• Moyano, Maria E. The Autobiography of Maria Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activist. Trans. Patricia S. Taylo Edmisten. University Press of Florida, 2000. Print.
• Heilman, Jaymie Patricia. Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.
• Gorriti, Gustavo, and Robin Kirk. The Shining Path. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999. Print.
• "Courage," (1999 film).
• Starn, Orin and La Serna, Miguel The Shining Path - Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019.