The Other Path

The Other Path : The Invisible Revolution in the Third World
by Hernando de Soto

Altering the way we perceive underdeveloped countries, this revolutionary volume focuses on Lima, Peru, and how its internal economies and political alliances function. De Soto also describes the surprising and revolutionary world of the "informals," those who work outside the law to achieve their goals.

The Fight Against Terrorism is not only military. In the long term, it is also -- perhaps even primarily -- economic. How do we create economic and social conditions in third-world countries that will prevent terrorist organizations and ideas from taking root? How do we give ordinary people in these countries better alternatives than supporting drug lords or terrorists? In the classic The Other Path, Hernando de Soto describes how he and his organization, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, faced this problem in Peru in the 1980s -- and how they solved it. In a world in which the root causes of terrorism are once again a pressing concern, this book is more relevant than ever.

Of all the terrorist movements since World War II that had any realistic potential to form a national government, only one was decisively defeated on the battleground of ideas. Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, arose in Peru in 1980. It was distinguished by both the radicalism of its Maoist ideology and the viciousness of its tactics. An American diplomat, Bernard Aronson, called the Shining Path "the most murderous guerilla group ever to operate in the Western Hemisphere" and compared them to the Khmer Rouge. At one point this group commanded eighty thousand followers-two-thirds the size of Great Britain's standing army-and was the single largest political organization in the country.

The task of making the Shining Path politically irrelevant was accomplished primarily by ideological means. Hernando de Soto offered an alternative vision of Peru's poor. Rather than see them as the proletariat, he showed that they were in fact budding entrepreneurs whose greatest desire was not to bring down the market economy but to join it.