Abimael Guzman (3 December 1934-11 September 2021) was the first leader of the Shining Path movement in Peru, leading it from the 1960s until his capture in 1992, when Oscar Ramirez succeeded him.
Biography[]
Abimael Guzman was born on 3 December 1934 in Tambo, Arequipa, Peru to a father who illegitimately fathered him and a mother who died when he was five. He lived with his mother's family first and later with his father, moving to the city of Arequipa, where he studied at the Colegio De La Salle. At San Agustin National University, he was disciplined yet shy and obsessive, and he was attracted by Marxism. In 1962 he became a professor of philosophy at San Cristobal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, and he met anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, with the two of them leading the Shining Path movement of Marxists. In the 1970s Guzman was imprisoned for opposition to the regimes of Juan Velasco Alvarado and Fernando Belaunde Terry, and in May 1980 Guzman declared a popular uprising against the United States-backed dictators of Peru. The Shining Path, based around the Andes Mountains in Ayacucho, fought against the government to implement communism through a revolution, but the Shining Path's brutal methods, prohibition of alcohol, and strict curfews led to popular action against the group. In 1983, 69 peasants were killed by the Shining Path in the Lucanamarca massacre, and English psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple stated that he believed that, if the Shining Path were to come to power, their atrocities would dwarf those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1992, President Alberto Fujimori arrested Guzman, and the next year Guzman declared peace with the government, splitting the rebels. In 2006 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and terrorism, and he served his jail sentence next to Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) leader Victor Polay and his former enemy, National Intelligence Service chief Vladimiro Montesinos (ironically an enemy of the Shining Path and the man who built the prison). He died in prison in 2021 at the age of 86.