Abimael Guzman
Abimael Guzmán founded the Shining Path and conducted the most violent insurgency in Peruvian history. Born in Mollendo in 1934, the illegitimate son of a merchant, he studied philosophy and law at Arequipa, writing theses on Kant and on the bourgeois democratic state, and became a professor of philosophy at the university in Ayacucho in 1962. Ayacucho was among the poorest departments in Peru, and the university had just reopened, drawing first-generation students from the countryside. Guzmán recruited from them, placing graduates as schoolteachers across the region for years before any fighting began. He visited China during the Cultural Revolution and returned convinced that Maoist people's war was applicable. He took the name Presidente Gonzalo and developed Gonzalo Thought as a fourth stage of Marxism, and his cult of personality within the movement was absolute. The Communist Party of Peru — Shining Path began armed action on the day of the 1980 elections, burning ballot boxes in a village, and grew through the 1980s across the highlands and into Lima. Its method was terror against anyone in its way: it killed peasant leaders, elected officials, aid workers, trade unionists and rival leftists, massacred whole communities that resisted, including sixty-nine people at Lucanamarca in 1983, and car-bombed Lima. The state's counterinsurgency was itself responsible for large numbers of disappearances and massacres. The truth commission attributed about 54 per cent of some 69,000 deaths to the Shining Path. He was captured above a dance studio in Lima in September 1992, displayed in a striped uniform in a cage, and sentenced to life. He died in prison in 2021.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: rebel_leader, ideologue
