Shining Path Movement

The Shining Path grew out of the intellectual and political turmoil at the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga in the impoverished city of Ayacucho, Peru. In 1962, 28-year-old Abimael Guzman, an active member of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), went to Ayacucho after accepting a position as a philosophy professor. Guzman sought to reinvigorate the revolutionary movement by using the university as the central hub of recruitment, education, and community involvement. In 1965, the PCP sent Guzman to China, where, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, he learned the fundamentals of Maoist revolutionary strategy (i.e., “people's war”). Guzman returned to Peru thoroughly convinced that a strict adherence to Maoist doctrine must underlie any revolutionary activity and that to swerve from Maoist thought in the implementation of a revolutionary program—be it on a national or world scale—would result in failure.

In 1969 the Partido Communista del Peru split into two ideologically opposed factions: a pro-China organization headed by Saturnino Paredes and a more strident Maoist faction headed by Guzman. Guzman, in an attempt to position his faction as legitimate heir to the original Peruvian Communist Party, adopted the name Partido Communista del Peru—Por el Luminoso Sendero de Martiategui (Communist Party of Peru—In the Shining Path of Mariategui), after Jose Carlos Mariategui, founder of the original PCP. Not surprisingly, official party statements and pro–Shining Path commentary disseminated throughout the world demanded the movement be referred to as the PCP. However, as the organization became newsworthy in the 1980s, popular media preferred the millenarian tone of Shining Path, a term that arguably better captures the spirit of the organization's violent and dogmatic appropriation of Cultural Revolution–era Maoism.

By the time of Guzman's capture on September 10, 1992, approximately 4.4 million people, amounting to 20% of Peru's entire population, lived in areas controlled by the Shining Path. These areas included much of the Andean south and the coca-producing Upper Huallaga Valley in the north of the country. Control of the Upper Huallaga Valley was particularly disturbing to the United States and precipitated a rise in U.S. military presence in Peru in an effort to squelch perceived “narcoterrorism.”

The Shining Path's strict dogmatism accounts in part for the violence that earned the organization its reputation as Pol Potistas and that caused the deaths of more than 30,000 men, women, and children during the Shining Path's decade long insurrection. Among the more notable atrocities perpetrated by the Shining Path were the 1983 church massacre of 70 men, women, and children from the village of Lucanamarca, and the February 1992 public execution of Lima activist Maria Elena Moyano. An outspoken critic of the Shining Path's tactic of murdering leftist activists and progressive civic leaders, Moyano was dragged from a party in the Lima shantytown of Villa El Salvador where she worked and shot in the head. Senderistas then exploded her body with sticks of dynamite.

Moyano's violent death prompted President Alberto Fujimori to take autocratic control of the government, suspending Peru's constitution and dissolving the congress, in what was termed an autogolpe, or self-coup. Five months later, detectives arrested Guzman at a private residence in Lima. Although exact numbers are difficult to determine, it is estimated that some 25,000 Peruvians were actively involved in Shining Path [Page 1284]activities at the time of Guzman's arrest. These thousands were held together more by the mythical qualities they endowed on their leader than by any real organization or system of governance. Hence, after Guzman's capture, followed later by an amnesty program for party members, the Shining Path became ineffectual. Guzman remains in prison serving a life sentence.

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