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Peru: Shining Path guerilla leader Abimael Guzman dies

September 12, 2021

The insurgent leader was responsible for 70,000 deaths and disappearances over 12 years. He sought to bring Maoist style communism to Peru through methods like those of Cambodia's Pol Pot.

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Abimael Guzman, founder and leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, enters to the courtroom during his new trial at the Naval Base in Callao
Abimael Guzman led a Maoist insurgency in Peru that led to the death and disappearance of 70,000 and the displacement of hundreds of thousandsImage: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Mejia

The charismatic leader of the violent Shining Path insurgency in Peru, Abimael Guzman, has died age 86 in a military hospital following an illness.

A former philosophy professor, Guzman launched an insurgency against the Peruvian state in May of 1980, symbolically burning ballot boxes on the eve of Peru's first democratic elections after 12 years of military rule.

It took Peru's security forces 12 years to arrest Guzman, known to his followers as "Presidente Gonzalo," in a Lima safe house.

Guzman as the 'Fourth Sword of Marxism' in his insurgency

Guzman preached a messianic vision of a classless Marxist utopia and considered himself to be the "Fourth Sword of Marxism" after Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Views of Karl Marx in Berlin

In songs and slogans, the Shining Path celebrated violence and death, labeling it necessary to "irrigate" the revolution. At its peak, the Shining Path could claim around 10,000 members who actively waged war against the state and the people of Peru, bombing electrical towers, bridges and factories in the countryside, assassinating mayors and murdering civilians.

In the insurgency's later years, they indiscriminately bombed civilians in the capital, Lima, before Guzman's capture in 1992. He was sentenced to life in prison for terrorism and other crimes.

Abimael Guzman in prison clothes and an orange vest is escorted by three members of Peru's security forces in camouflage with their faces covered by balaclavas.
It took Peru's security forces more than a decade to crack Shining Path's vertical cell structure and arrest Guzman hiding in a Lima safehouseImage: picture-alliance/dpa

A year after his arrest, he called for peace talks. The Shining Path had displaced at least 600,000 people and caused an estimated $22 billion in damages.

A 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined 70,000 had either been killed or disappeared as a result of the guerrillas' activities.

While the Shining Path was never fully defeated, it does claim just a few hundred members now.

Guzman's legacy in Peru's politics

Peru's president Pedro Castillo tweeted news of the death of Guzman, calling him "responsible for the deaths of countless lives of our compatriots."

"Only in democracy will we construct a just and developed Peru for our people," he added.

Castillo has faced criticism over the alleged links of two of his cabinet ministers to the Shining Path. Prime Minister Guido Bellido has been investigated for alleged sympathies with the group and police records from the 1980s made public in the media show Labor Minister Iber Maravi was a member and fugitive of the group.

Noam Lupu, associate director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, told AP by email, "Shining Path's violence is a big part of why Castillo's is the first explicitly leftist presidential administration in Peru since the 1980s.''

ar/rc (AFP, AP)