[1] When Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán launched his insurgency against the government in 1980, the Peruvian armed forces by and large ignored the threat at the very outset.
Because the very core of the movement was land and wealth redistribution, the insurgency was confined to rural areas in the Andean regions inhabited by indigenous and Amerindian groups, and largely off the radar of the government.
They would dynamite buildings and make big symbolic gestures, such as "blowing up a major general's tomb or hanging dogs".
[1] In 1983, one of the first peasant uprisings occurred in Huaycho (a small village in the Ayacucho Region) took the rest of the Peruvian nation by surprise, as it had previously been thought that the Shining Path was a well-received movement everywhere.
[1] This resistance to the Shining Path was met with praise and respect from national media and the Peruvian president as a "brave and resolute" response to a generally unpopular group.
The Peruvian military, their auxiliaries the rondas campesinas, and the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas all committed human rights atrocities during the course of the conflict.
The Peruvian Marine Infantry made a policy of clearing the countryside for battle, and relocating people to strategically defended areas.
It was in one of these new settlements that the first official civil defense committee was developed by the citizens, based on the military's model of government.
[3] Specifically, the “Comites de Autodefensa” (Committees of Self-Defense) were to work in tandem with the military and/or the police to provide local defense of their villages.
Even though the internal conflict is now largely confined to the VRAEM and has greatly diminished since 1992, the term rondero is still used in everyday speech in Peru to signify a volunteer neighbourhood watchman either the countryside or in the suburbs of cities such as Lima or Trujillo.
These days, the defining quality of the rondero appears to be that he is unpaid, unlike the ubiquitous "Huachiman" and the uniformed security guards that are seen outside of homes and business all over Peru.