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The imprisoned rebel leader who had been ill in recent months passed away at the age of 86.
The government stated that in a bloody Maoist revolution, the insurgent Sendero Luminoso or the leader of Shining Path Abimael Guzman, who nearly overthrew the Peruvian state, died in prison. He is 86 years old.
Guzman was arrested in Lima, Peru in 1992, and was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life after being convicted as a “terrorist”.
The head of Peru’s prison system, Susana Silva, told RPP radio on Saturday that Guzman had been ill in recent months and was discharged from the hospital in early August.
She said his health had deteriorated in the past two days without further explanation, and added that Guzman will receive more medical care on Saturday, but at 6:40 am local time (11:40 GMT) Points) died in his cell.
As a former professor of philosophy, Guzman was a lifelong communist who traveled to China in the late 1960s and was in awe of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. He was determined to bring Mao Zedong’s communist brand to Peru through the class war he initiated in 1980.
Guzman founded the Shining Path, transforming it from a chaotic group of farmers and radical students into a powerful rebel group. An estimated 69,000 people were killed in the internal conflicts initiated by the Shining Path between 1980 and 2000, most of them in the impoverished inland areas of Peru.
In this file photo taken on October 14, 1992, the leader of Shining Path Abimael Guzman exhausted his life in Lima after the military court did not overthrow his life sentence. Last appeal [File: Hector Mata/AFP]“Road of Radiance”‘s bold and well-planned attacks, informants and spy networks, and Guzman’s incredible ability to evade arrests gave him an almost legendary reputation that seems to appear everywhere at the same time.
His followers call Guzman the fourth sword of Marxism after Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, and worship him in revolutionary hymns, songs, posters and literary works.
He studied law and philosophy at the University of San Agustin in Arequipa, where he wrote two graduate thesis: Kant’s Space Theory and another entitled Law of the Democratic Bourgeois State.
“Mr. Guzman was a very smart man, very studious and very disciplined,” recalled one of his professors, Miguel Rodriguez Rivas.
His few works, although rarely respected by Marxist scholars, have become the mantra of followers of the Shining Path, who repeat his words as if they were biblical truths.
After Guzman’s spacious safe house in Lima was captured by the police in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment, the Shining Path collapsed largely due to military threats, although there are still remnants to this day. In 2018, Guzman was sentenced to a second life imprisonment for 25 deaths in a car bomb attack in Lima in 1992.
Guzman’s first wife, Augusta La Torre, died mysteriously in the late 1980s. In 2010, he married his long-time girlfriend Elena Iparraguirre, who is serving life imprisonment like Guzman. Both women are leaders of the Shining Path.
From left to right are Angelica Salas, Osman Morote and Martha Huatay; (sitting) Sendero Luminoso (SL) fighter leaders Elena Iparraguirre, Abimael Guzman and Maria Pantoja [File: AFP]
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