The Shining Path Insurgency
A philosophy lecturer began an insurgency in the Peruvian Andes in 1980, and some 70,000 people died over the next two decades. Abimael Guzmán taught at the university of Ayacucho, one of the poorest regions of the country, and had built a Maoist faction over a decade of splits in the Peruvian left. The Shining Path took its name from a slogan of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. The war began on the eve of the first elections after twelve years of military rule, with ballot boxes burned in a village. Its method was the destruction of the state in the countryside: killing officials, teachers, aid workers, priests, agronomists and any peasant leader who was not theirs, hanging dogs from lampposts in Lima, and running trials in village squares. It killed a great many more peasants than soldiers, and its worst massacres — Lucanamarca in 1983, forty per cent of the war's victims by the later commission's count — were of the people it claimed to represent. The state's response killed the other large share. The armed forces were given the emergency zones and conducted mass disappearances, and the truth commission that reported in 2003 attributed about 54 per cent of deaths to Shining Path and roughly a third to state forces. Three-quarters of the dead spoke Quechua as a first language, in a country where a fifth of the population did. Guzmán was captured in 1992 above a dance studio in Lima and died in prison in 2021. Alberto Fujimori, who presided over the capture and over much of the repression, dissolved his own congress in 1992 and was later imprisoned for authorising death squads. Peru has spent the years since arguing about whether the commission's account of the war is the true one.
- Year: 1980 CE
- Category: Civil War
