Peru: Abimael Guzmán, the founder of the Shining Path, has passed away | The Peruvian guerrilla leader had been detained since 1992

From Lima

A day before the 29th anniversary of his capture, Abimael Guzmán, founder of Shining Path, the Maoist armed group that operated in the 1980s and 1990s, died in prison. According to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), the internal war has left around 70,000 dead. Just over half of those deaths are attributed to Sendero. Guzmán was captured in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence he was serving in an individual cell at a Navy base. There he died at 6:40 am on Saturday due to “health complications”. He was 86 years old. No details of these complications were given.

As soon as news of Guzmán’s death became known, the Shining Path leader was described by all political sectors as “a bloody terrorist”, “genocide” and other similar expressions. A debate erupted over what to do with your body. There are proposals to cremate his body and throw his ashes into the sea, remembering what happened with Osama Bin Laden, to prevent his grave from becoming a place of pilgrimage for trekkers. The Minister of Justice, Annibal torresHe noted that this possibility was under evaluation. Guzmán’s only relative is his wife, Elena Iparraguirre, who is in prison, also sentenced to life. She was captured with Guzmán. It was number two on Sendero.

As president Pedro Castillo he spoke with a message on Twitter. “The terrorist leader Abimael Guzmán, responsible for the loss of countless lives of our compatriots, has passed away. Our position condemning terrorism is firm and unwavering. It is only in democracy that we will build a Peru of justice and development for our people, ”wrote the president. The minister of the Interior, Juan Carrasco, He described Guzmán as “the greatest genocide in the history of Peru”. Other ministers spoke in the same line of condemnation of the late leader Senderista. These reactions from the government condemning Guzmán come in the midst of the campaign of the political and media opposition of the right, which accuses Castillo and certain ministers of having an alleged proximity with the political heirs of the rambling, grouped in the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef), ask for an amnesty for Guzmán. The government rejects this link.

President Gonzalo

Abimael Guzmán, who called himself “President Gonzalo” by his supporters he claimed to be “the fourth sword of world Marxism”, after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He studied law and philosophy and founded the Communist Party of Peru – Sendero Luminoso in the early 1970s, while he was a professor at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, in the Andean region of Ayacucho. In May 1980, the day of the presidential elections which marked the return to democracy after twelve years of military dictatorship, Sendero began his armed actions, which he called “people’s war”, by attacking an electoral center in the rural commune of Chuschi. , in Ayacucho. The senderista violence erupted against a background of deep poverty, inequality and widespread economic, social and racial exclusion, especially in the Andean communities where the Maoist group originated.

The internal war, which started in Ayacucho, has spread to almost the whole country. Terrorist car bombings, sabotage of the electricity grid to cause blackouts in Lima and other cities, assassinations of authorities and popular leaders and massacres of peasant communities who opposed their presence were part of Senderista’s bloody actions. The military, backed by civilian governments, responded with kidnappings, torture, disappearances, extrajudicial killings and mass killings of peasants. The Senderistas and the military murdered peasants whom they accused of not supporting them. The TRC describes this period as “the most intense, widespread and prolonged episode of violence in all of Republican history.” Most of the casualties were civilians outside the conflict, 75 percent of the dead were Quechua-speaking natives.

Grotesque

On September 12, 1992, Guzmán was captured in a house in a bourgeois neighborhood in Lima by a special police team dedicated to his search. Not a single shot was fired during the capture. It was on the second floor of a house in which a dance academy functioned on the first floor, erected as a cover for the hiding place of the most wanted man in the land. A few days after the capture of the Senderista leader, the Fujimori government staged a grotesque spectacle, featuring him in a black and white horizontal striped prisoner costume locked in a cage to be filmed and photographed. Since then, he has been locked up in the naval prison where he died this Saturday. With his leader detained, Sendero quickly collapsed. Guzmán called on his supporters to lay down their arms. Only one senderista column remains, the one that broke with the founder of Sendero years ago and operates in a rugged coca growing area as an armed group allied with drug trafficking.

In the hours following Guzmán’s death, the long bloody night of the internal war was recalled in the media, but this is a partial memory, centered on Sendero’s crimes, ignoring widespread human rights violations committed by the state, that various sectors are trying to hide or justify. Abimael Guzmán is deceased, the Shining Path is defeated, but the conditions of exclusion and poverty in which the Senderista violence arose are still in force. Of these, the media and power groups do not speak.