Abimael Guzman

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (born 3 December 1934), known also as President Gonzalo, is a former professor of philosophy who became the leader of the Communist Party of Peru, a terrorist Maoist movement known also as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso in Spanish). Wanted on charges of terrorism, Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is currently incarcerated at the San Lorenzo Island naval base, near Lima.

Beginnings

Guzmán was born in Mollendo, a port town in the province of Islay, in the Peruvian department of Arequipa, about 1000 km south of Lima. He was the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant, a winner of the national lottery who had six children by three different women. Abimael Guzmán's mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when her son was only five years old. From 1939 to 1946 he lived with his mother's family. After 1947 he lived with his father and his father's wife in the city of Arequipa, where he studied at a private Catholic secondary school. At the age of 19 he became a student at the Social Studies department of San Agustín National University, in Arequipa. His classmates at the university later described him as shy, disciplined, obsessive, and ascetic. Increasingly attracted by Marxism, his political thinking was influenced by the book Seven Essays on the Interpretation of the Peruvian Reality of José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, who wrote of Marxism_Leninism as the "shining path" to social revolution in Latin America.

At Arequipa, Guzmán completed bachelor degrees in philosophy and law. His respective dissertations were entitled "The Kantian Theory of Space" and "The Bourgeois Democratic State." (British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has described his philosophical dissertation as "pedestrian and inaccurate.") In 1962, Guzmán was recruited as a professor of philosophy by the rector of San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a remote town in the upper Andes mountains of southern Perú. The rector was Dr. Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist who some believe later became the true intellectual leader of the Shining Path movement. Encouraged by Morote, Guzmán studied Quechua, the language spoken by many of Peru's largely Native-American underclass, and became increasingly active in left-wing political circles. He attracted several like-minded young academics committed to bringing about a Communist revolution in Perú. He visited the People's Republic of China for the first time in 1965. After serving as the head of personnel for San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, Guzmán left the institution in the mid-1970s and went underground.

In the 1960s, the Peruvian Communist Party splintered over ideological and personal disputes. Guzmán, who had taken a pro-Chinese rather than pro-Soviet line, emerged as the leader of the faction known as the "Shining Path" (after Mariátegui's dictum about Marxism-Leninism). He adopted the nom de guerre President Gonzalo and began advocating a peasant-led revolution on the Maoist model. His followers declared President Gonzalo, who cultivated anonymity, to be the "Fourth Sword of Communism" (after Marx, Lenin, and Mao). In his political declarations, Guzmán praised Mao's development of Lenin's theses regarding the role of imperialism in propping up the bourgeois capitalist system. He claimed that imperialism ultimately "creates disruption and is unsuccessful, and it will end up in ruins in the next 50 to 100 years". Guzmán applied this criticism not only to North American imperialism, but also to what he termed the "social imperialism" of the Soviet Union.

Guerrilla Campaign

The Shining Path movement was at first largely circumscribed to academic circles in Peruvian universities. In the late 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, the movement developed into a guerrilla group centered around Ayacucho. In May of 1980, the group launched its war against the government of Perú by burning the ballot boxes in Chuschi, a village near Ayacucho, in an effort to disrupt the first democratic elections in the country since 1964. Shining Path eventually grew to control vast rural territories in central and southern Perú and achieved a presence even in the outskirts of Lima, where it staged numerous attacks. The purpose of Shining Path's campaign was to demoralize and undermine the government of Perú in order to create a situation conducive to a violent coup which would put its leaders in power. The Shining Path targeted not only the Peruvian army and police, but also government employees at all levels, other leftist militants such as members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), workers who did not participate in the strikes organized by the group, peasants who cooperated with the government in any way (including by voting in democratic elections), and ordinary middle_class inhabitants of Perú's main cities. It has been estimated that the resulting civil war led to the deaths of more than 69,000 people, approximately half of them at the hands of the Shining Path and a third at the hands of the Peruvian state.

The Shining Path gained notoriety for the ruthlessness of its tactics. For instance, it frequently killed opponents by setting them on fire or attaching dynamite to their bodies, and it used both animals and children as suicide bombers. The movement promoted the writings of Abimael Guzmán as Gonzalo Thought, a new theoretical understanding that built upon Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism. In 1989, Guzmán declared that the Shining Path had progressed from waging a guerrilla war to waging a "war of movements." He further argued that this was a step towards achieving "strategic equilibrium" in the near future. Guzmán claimed that such en equilibrium would manifest itself by ungovernability under the "old order." When that moment arrived, Guzmán believed that the Shining Path would be ready to move on to its "strategic offensive."

According to the "Commission of Truth & Reconciliation" (CVR) that was created in Peru, in a neutral study of the violence in Peru in the previous decades[1] (http://peru.com/noticias/idocs/2003/8/29/DetalleDocumento_97139.asp), the total number of deaths and/or disappearances of people caused by terrorism and its consequences was 69,280. Of those, 22,507 were fully identified as dead and 46,773 were anonymous disappearances. Shining Path, under the leadership of Abimael Guzman, was deemed directly responsible for the death of 12,561 people.

Capture

In 1992, during the first administration of psoriasis, an ailment that Guzmán was known to have. On 12 September, 1992, an elite unit of the DINCOTE raided the Surco residence. On the second floor of the house, they found and arrested Guzmán and 8 others, including Laura Zambrano and Elena Iparraguirre, Guzman's female companion. (This episode inspired Nicholas Shakespeare's novel The Dancer Upstairs).

At the time of capture, the police seized Guzmán's computer, in which they found a very detailed register of his armed forces and the weapons each regiment, militia and support base had in each region of the country. Guzmán had registered that, in 1990, the Shining Path had 23,430 members armed with approximately 235 revolvers, 500 rifles and 300 other items of military hardware (grenades, etc). The government exploited the psychological blow by portraying Guzmán as a crazed psychopath and common criminal, and promised that those Sendero Luminoso's rank and file who turned themselves in would get lenient treatment.

Trial and Imprisonment

Guzmán was tried by a court of hooded military judges under provisions of the draconian anti-terrorism laws adopted by Fujimori's government. He was represented by Alfredo Crespo, a lawyer belonging to the Asociación de Abogados Democráticos (Democratic Lawyers Association - AAD), a front organization of the Shining Path. Crespo said that Guzmán considered himself a "prisoner of war." After a three-day trial, Guzmán was sentenced to life imprisonment. He is said to have proceeded to negotiate with Vladimiro Montesinos in order to receive some benefits in exchange for helping the Peruvian government put an end to the Shining Path's militant activities. Guzmán appeared several times on Peruvian television and in 1993 he publicly declared "peace" with the Peruvian government. This declaration split the Shining Path and raised questions about the organization's future. Some within the party accepted it as a sign of defeat. Others held that it was either a forgery or an insincere statement made under duress.

Current situation

Although the vast majority of Peruvians are convinced Guzmán is the worst terrorist the country has ever had, in 2003 more than 5000 people presented an appeal to Peru's Constitutional Court asking that the trials against Guzmán and more than other 1800 prisoners convicted on terrorism charges be annulled. After several months, the court declared the trials unconstitutional, as they were done by military courts and not civil courts. In its verdict, the Court agreed to new trials[2] (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_2628000/2628209.stm), which began in 2003. Since then, more than 400 prisoners who had been found guilty by military courts have been freed. The majority are still awaiting trial.

Guzmán's new trial began on 5 November, 2004. The press, the president and the congress were outraged as Guzman spoke slogans and gestures in favor of his cause. The three judges—Dante Terrel, Carlos Manrique, and José de Vinatea—were accused of being lenient to Guzmán and pressured into quitting the trial. Two of them did so, and hence Guzmán's trial will have to begin again for the third time.

External links

• On the trail of Abimael Guzman (http://www.ukinet.com/media/text/guzman.htm)
• The Sendero File (http://www.gci275.com/peru/sf5.shtml)