In the capital city of Lima, revolutionaries attacked a police station in a poor neighborhood. Peru lies on the Pacific Coast of South America. From a narrow plain along the coast, the Andes Mountains rise to nearly 20,000 feet, then fall off to the jungles and forests of the Amazon basin to the east and north. Ever since the Spanish conquest 500 years ago, Peru's people have been brutally exploited, first by the conquistadors and later by imperialist powers like the U.S. and by a handful of rich Peruvian capitalists and landlords. Millions of Peruvians barely survive-many eat less today than the Incas did five centuries ago.
Most peasants have little or no land.
Indigenous peoples, who make up nearly half of Peru's population and often speak Quechua or Aymara, are discriminated against and kept on the bottom of society. In 1980 Peru's government was holding elections, but the PCP knew this vote would change nothing. Only a revolution that overturned the whole system could truly solve the people's problems. There, government forces are weaker than in the cities and millions of peasants thirst for liberation. Small groups of guerrillas, armed with slingshots and dynamite, attacked police stations, captured weapons and drove out government forces.