Abimael Guzmán

Abimael Guzmán (born December 3, 1934, Arequipa, Peru—died September 11, 2021, Callao) was the founder and leader of the Peruvian revolutionary organization Shining Path (in Spanish, Sendero Luminoso). According to Peru’s 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 54 percent of the estimated 70,000 deaths in Peru’s 20-year insurgency conflict were caused by the Maoist Shining Path led by Guzmán.

Guzmán was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Peruvian businessman, and his mother abandoned him when he was a young boy. He excelled as a student but showed little interest in politics until his late teens, when he began associating with leftist intellectuals. He became the protégé of the painter Carlos de la Riva, who was an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin, and he joined the Peruvian Communist Party in the late 1950s.

In 1962 Guzmán was appointed professor of philosophy at the National University of San Cristóbal del Huamanga in Ayacucho, a remote, desperately poor province where many of the students were of Indian heritage and often the first in their families to obtain an education. He began to hold weekly political discussions with students and colleagues and spoke passionately against the injustices of Peruvian society and the need for Indian peasants to rebel. By the late 1960s the discussion group had become a political faction calling itself the Communist Party of Peru.

Guzmán studied the theories of Mao Zedong, which held that a successful communist revolution did not require an industrialized urban proletariat. Instead, an agrarian preindustrial society could be transformed into a modern communist society by making the peasantry politically conscious. Between 1965 and 1967 Guzmán visited China several times and saw the Cultural Revolution unfold. Seeing Mao’s theories put into practice radicalized Guzmán, and he returned to Peru convinced that a rapid violent revolution was necessary to destroy Peru’s existing government and institute a peasant dictatorship.

By the mid-1970s Guzmán’s leadership of the Communist Party of Peru had transformed it into a guerrilla army, which took the name Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) from a quotation by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Early adherents from San Cristóbal became Guzmán’s top commanders and closest advisers, with his first wife, Augusta, assuming a leading role. Guzmán ran the organization with an iron fist; new recruits were required to sign a loyalty oath not to the Shining Path but to Comrade Gonzalo, the nom de guerre Guzmán had chosen for himself. As the organization’s power increased, his followers regarded him as the “Fourth Sword” of communist thought, after Marx, Lenin, and Mao. His ability to inspire complete devotion in his followers, especially in his officers—college-educated middle-class intellectuals—was crucial to the Shining Path’s success.

The Shining Path began military operations in Ayacucho in 1980, rapidly winning peasant support. Guzmán’s tight-knit hierarchical organization easily resisted infiltration by the military. Guzmán regarded anyone with the slightest connection to the state as a potential target, and the Shining Path did not hesitate to torture and kill anyone it perceived as an enemy, including civilians. By the late 1980s, in part because of lucrative connections to the drug trade, the group controlled the majority of Peru’s countryside.

In 1988 Guzmán decided to focus on Peru’s urban coast, particularly the capital, Lima. For four years, the Shining Path made steady gains as its bombing campaigns and assassinations immobilized the capital, and the country was brought close to anarchy. In April 1992 Pres. Alberto Fujimori suspended the constitution and declared a state of emergency, effectively placing the country under martial law. In September Guzmán and 14 other top Shining Path commanders were captured and quickly received life sentences from a military court. In 1993 he was moved to a specially built prison in Callao, west of Lima.

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The dictatorial control Guzmán exerted over the Shining Path proved to be the movement’s downfall. With no clear second-in-command to take over leadership, the organization rapidly disintegrated. In 1993 Guzmán helped negotiate a peace agreement with the government that provided amnesty for former Shining Path fighters. Though Guzmán’s conviction was overturned by a constitutional court in 2003, he was retried by a civilian court that likewise sentenced him to life in prison in 2006. In 2010 Guzmán was allowed to marry his longtime lover and former high-ranking member of Shining Path, Elena Iparraguirre, who was also serving a life sentence. Eight years later he was convicted of orchestrating a 1992 car bombing that killed 25 people in Lima. Guzmán received another life sentence.