Reynoso, Abimael Guzmán (1934–)

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (aka Presidente Gonzalo; Comrade Gonzalo) was the founder and leader of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a terrorist organization in Peru.

The illegitimate son of a wealthy Peruvian businessman, Guzmán was born in December 1934 in Arequipa, Peru. His mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when he was five, and he is generally known by the name of his father, Guzmán. 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, an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin; Guzmán joined the Peruvian Communist Party in the late 1950s.

In 1962 Guzmán was appointed to the post of professor of philosophy at San Cristobal del Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a remote, desperately poor province inhabited mostly by Peruvian Indians. There, Guzmán began to hold weekly political discussions with students and colleagues; he was a passionate speaker, and his tirades against the injustices of Peruvian society and the need for Indian peasants to rebel found a receptive audience. Many students were of Indian heritage, and often the first in their families to obtain an education. 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 [Page 521]practice radicalized Guzmán, and he returned to Peru convinced that a rapid, violent revolution was necessary to destroy Peru's existing government and culture and institute a peasant dictatorship.

Under Guzmán's leadership, by the mid-1970s the Communist Party of Peru had begun to transform itself into a guerrilla army—the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a name taken from a quotation by the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariátigua. Early adherents from San Cristobal became Guzmán's top commanders and closest advisors, with his wife, Augusta, assuming a leading role. Guzmán ran the organization with an iron hand; 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, Guzmán's revolutionary fervor began to assume legendary proportions, and 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.

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