Antonio Díaz Martínez

Antonio Díaz Martínez (May 3, 1933 – June 19, 1986) was a Peruvian agronomist, anthropologist, and Maoist revolutionary, considered a terrorist by the Peruvian government.

He worked at the Agrarian Reform Institute of Peru and was a professor at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, in Ayacucho.

Martinez later became a senior member of the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (PCP-SL) until his arrest by Peruvian authorities on 16 December 1983. He was extrajudicially executed during the Peruvian prison massacres after an uprising of Shining Path prisoners held in the prisons of San Juan de Lurigancho and El Frontón. In his writings it is clear Martínez had no intention of rejecting modern technology, on the contrary he speaks on the importance of technical training and implementation of new techniques in addressing the problems of the Peruvian countryside. His criticisms of university-led development projects found in Ayacucho: Hambre y Esperanza were not based in their use of novel technology or agricultural methods, but rather that the implementation of these changes did not involve the peasantry themselves. Instead the local peasants found specialists ignored the centuries of ecological knowledge their communities had accumulated and imposed themselves as the sole sources of agricultural expertise. His experiences over the course of his research in Ayacucho led Martínez to conclude that all attempts to impose development from above were doomed to fail, and that these failures came to legitimize the view, among development officials and experts, that the indigenous were lazy and unwilling to accept change. However, Martínez would argue that the blame for this failure was instead on the part of the alleged experts, which proved unable to win the trust or support of the local peasantry. This ultimately led him to the view that any fundamental change in the rural areas was impossible without also transforming the whole of Peruvian society, Martínez ends Ayacucho: Hambre y Esperanza with a tightly summarized view of the Shining Path ideology 11 years before the party first issued its demands:Peru will have to take the socialist road to development, the only road left to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries of Latin America

Works

Ayacucho: Hambre y Esperanza. Martínez, AD. 1969. Contribución al Estudio del Latifundio. Martínez, AD. 1970. China: La revolución agraria. Martínez, AD. 1978.