This article examines the radicalization of carnival practices and music in the Fajardo province of Ayacucho, Peru, at the outset of the Shining Path guerrilla war in 1980. The simultaneous rise of formal song contests and Shining Path organizing in Fajardo cannot be separated in this history as both were key elements in a popular regional discourse of modernization and development. Often interpreted as transparent statements of Maoist propaganda, or, conversely, as organic expressions of Andean peasant rebelliousness, revolutionary song performances are instead positioned here as complex sites where local attitudes to politics and ideology were created, debated and transformed. In May 1980 the “Peruvian Communist Party—Shining Path” declared war on the Peruvian state with an act of political theatre, burning ballot boxes in a small Andean town on the eve of the country’s first democratic elections in more than a decade. In the euphoria of a seemingly successful return to democracy after twelve years of military dictatorship, the tiny Maoist party’s declaration of war in a remote corner of Ayacucho was dismissed as irrelevant or missed entirely by most political observers. Even within Ayacucho, the incident took four days to make the local paper and was quickly forgotten in the wash of electoral cover- age. In the bloody decade that followed, the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, or just sendero in its Spanish shorthand) would become increasingly hard to ignore. The guerrillas’ “theatre” of war plunged the nation literally and figuratively into darkness as electric pylons and the bodies of alleged “reactionaries” were blown up in signature acts of sabotage and terror. In response, the Peruvian government launched a counterinsurgency campaign in late 1982 that quickly ranked as one of the hemisphere’s most repressive in those violent years. By the time Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán was captured in 1992, 30,000 people or more had been killed or “disappeared”, hundreds of thousands displaced, and the demo- cratic system the guerrillas fought so hard to overthrow usurped, ironically, by an autocratic president who was intent on stopping them. Music figures importantly in any account of Peruvian life, and in reading the voluminous literature on the Shining Path—dubbed senderology by Peruvian pundits—one gets the impression that the war was fought on musical grounds as fiercely as it was in the mountains. Perhaps in an attempt to retain some of the BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 11/i 2002 pp. 9–42 JONATHAN RITTER Siren songs: ritual and revolution in the Peruvian Andes