Sendero Luminoso, or The Shining Path, were a Maoist guerrilla organization in Peru,
founded as an offshoot of the Communist Party of Peru in early 1970’s.1 It’s founder, Abimael
Guzman, was an academic, devoted to bringing about a revolution in Peru. In 1965, Guzmán
visited the People’s Republic of China for the first time and was impressed by Chairman Mao’s
methods and beliefs, sparking him to cultivate his own leftist leanings. Upon his return to Peru,
he accepted the position of professor of philosophy at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University
in Ayacucho, where he met several other like-minded academics, including the rector of the
university, Dr. Efraín Morote Best, who has often ben called the true intellectual leader of the
Shining Path.2 At first the group that Guzmán led, was not composed of killers, but merely
intellectuals who taught their beliefs at universities, including the National University of
Engineering in Lima and the National University of San Marcos, as well as Guzmán’s own. This
was the case until Guzmán left San Cristóbal in the mid-1970’s and went underground—marking
the beginning of the Shining Path’s formation. However, the “People’s War” was not launched by
the Shining Path until 1980. At that point, the organization’s goal was relatively simple: to
replace what it saw as a bourgeois government with what they called a “New Democracy”. At the
time of the start of the internal conflict in Peru, Abimael Guzmán stated the Shining Path’s
beliefs and goals as:
“...the masses need to be taught by overwhelming acts so that ideas can be
pounded into them... the masses in the nation need the leadership of a
communist party; we hope that with more revolutionary theory and
practice, with more armed actions, with more people’s war, with more
power, to reach the very heart of the class and the people and really win
them over. Why? In order to serve them—that’s what we really want.”3
The Shining Path intended to achieve a state of pure communism in Peru and believed that this
was possible through inducing a cultural revolution, imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat,
and eventually sparking a full-scale revolution. In this, they had the support of many of the
Peruvian peasants in the earliest years of the Shining Paths operation. At first, the group’s only
activities were typically Maoist—the execution of corrupt officials, for example—and this won
over the hearts and minds of the peasants, who in the words of Santiagio Roncagliolo, the author
of a biography of Guzmán, “were looking for a clear moral in a confused world. Guzmán and
Maoism offered that: a priest, a holy book, and a paradise called socialist utopia, as any
religion.”4 With the coming of the Shining Path, many peasant communities were given what
they had previously lacked—order. The Shining Path organized Popular Committees, there were
weekly meetings, and youth were enlisted in the guerrilla’s Popular Army. All of this gave the
people the impression that they were being looked out for, that they were safe. With the coming
of the Shining Path, at first many communities were more tranquil than before. One newly
elected village leader, La Morada, commented:
“The compañeros behave well, they are well mannered and treat people
couteously. They helped us get rid of the homosexuals, prostitutes, and
criminals that used to gather around here. They told them to leave; those
that didn’t showed up dead in the road. No town official was about to
intervene. In addition they organize weekly meetings; they call the people
together and we listen to lessons on politics. They taught us that we had
been exploited and that now the party will support us. The best thing,
though, is that now the police don’t abuse us like they used to and nobody
steals a thing. You can leave your car in the middle of the road unlocked
for several days, go back and actually find it completely intact.”5
It was this feeling of security that the Shining Path originally gave the people that made the
peasants support the Shining Path, as well as the fact that these militants seemed to care more
about the peasant communities than the government did. The government just underlined this
point when they did nothing about the Shining Path’s more illegal activities, such as the
assassinations of minor government officials. However, the peasant’s kindly feelings towards the
Shining Path soon dissipated as it became clear that they would go to any lengths to achieve their
goals. Soon people became terrified of the organization and the government was forced to
become involved, and they eventually managed to capture Guzmán. Although the Shining Path
believed that they could achieve their goals through violence, their extreme measures were
eventually the cause of their downfall.
It’s brutal methods were in the end what brought the Shining Path down as the actions
they made caused the organization to lose the valuable support of the peasants as well as
eventually catch the attention of the government. Since the Shining Path launched it’s “People’s
War” in 1980, it is estimated that over 30,0006 deaths alone have been recorded (though some
have even put the number at around 70,000).7 Who knows how many more people “disappeared”
and were never reported anything more than “missing”? Who knows how many thousands were
injured or had their families and lives torn apart? There are hundreds of stories recounting the
atrocities the Shining Path has committed—often seemingly without a purpose. One community
leader from the province of San Miguel told the story of a Shining Path group that brutally
murdered the people of five communities:
“We are more afraid of Sendero than we are of the army or of the police.
Let me tell you something that happened. I have a friend who is a health
worker. He works in the medical post of Lechemayocoq, the seventh
annex of San Pedro. In a meeting of the five communities there, which
he attended, they told about 1,000 Sendero militants who entered the
region and killed the young and old. They carried off flesh; that is to say
they cut off the flesh with knives and carried it off in sacks. They left
behind only bones and skeletons.”8
The Andean people have a myth about a supernatural being, called the ñaqa, that carries off body
fat to build churches and bells and—in a more recent addition to the myth—to pay the enormous
foreign debt.9 Since the Shining Path adopted this brutal and atrocious method of murder, the
people have dubbed them the new ñaqas, saying that they take the fat of people with no more fat
left to give in order to feed the Shining Path’s armies. Their are many stories like this one, of the
Shining Path doing something so horrible that the Peruvians tried to come up with explanations
for their behavior—as surely no Peruvian could behave in such a way. The ñaqas—supernatural
demons—were the solution for one region. For another, the Shining Path were foreign militants.
A village authority, during a meeting with a government human rights commission, asked:
“But most of them are foreign, right? They’re from the other side. ... They
were more ruthless; … [they were] more. . . savage; they demonstrated
that they were not Peruvians.”10
By the time the Shining Path began to commit such atrocities, very few peasants were on their
side any longer and the government had begun to take an interest in the organization’s doings. By
late 1981, the government began to send investigators and members of human rights
commissions to the affected regions to discover what was going on and their discoveries were
horrible. In one region, twenty to thirty people were killed every day.11 In another, people told
how Shining Path militants often hacked their victims to death with machetes in order to save
ammunition.12 The irony of the matter is that, all the time the Shining Path was out committing
mass murders, Abimael Guzmán and other Shining Path leaders were spouting their beliefs that
no innocent civilian should be harmed. They even created a set of rules which all Shining Path
members were required to follow. This Shining Path “law” has been described as one with
“hyper-christian” morals, except that punishment for any type of infringement was death. The
law had two parts, the cardinal rules and commandments and went as follows:
“The three cardinal rules are: (1) Obey Orders; (2) Take from the masses
neither a single needle, nor a single piece of string; (3) Turn over
everything which is captured. The eight commandments are: (1) Speak
courteously; (2) Pay an honest price for everything purchased; (3) Return
everything borrowed; (4) Give compensation for anything broken or
destroyed; (5) Do not hit or injure people; (6) Do not take farm produce;
(7) Do not abuse women; (8) Do not mistreat prisoners.”13
As is obvious, the Shining Path paid no heed to these rules in practice, but instead continued to
murder innocents, assassinate government officials, plant car bombs, torture information out of
prisoners, and forcibly conscript peasants into the Shining Path. By 1982, the government really
began to take action against the Shining Path and in mid-1983, the government had declared the
Shining Path a terrorist organization and its leaders were targets. It was not until much later, in
1992, that the government’s efforts came to fruition and Abimael Guzmán was caught. However,
would any of that have even happened if the Shining Path had just stuck to its original plan of
teaching about their beliefs? No, of course it wouldn’t. Because the Shining Path chose to
become a guerrilla organization and use methods such as assassination, murder, sabotage, and
torture, they were declared enemies of the state and consequently hunted down and eventually
vanquished.
As the Shining Path used such harsh methods, the Peruvian government declared them a
terrorist organization and their leaders became the most wanted men in Peru which resulted in
the capture of Abimael Guzmán, their leader. On September 12 of 1992, Abimael Guzmán and
several other high-ranking Shining Path officials were apprehended in an old apartment building
in Lima. The capture was carried out by the National Directorate Against Terrorism (DINCOTE)
who had had agents watching the building for weeks and routinely checking the garbage. They
eventually raided the house after determining that the house produced more garbage than its
supposed single resident could possibly have made and after an agent discovered an empty tube
of antibiotic for the skin disease psoriasis—which Guzmán was known to have.14 Altogether,
thirty arrests were made that night and afterwards, activity levels all over the country decreased
due to uncertainty and dissent among the Shining Path’s ranks. Following Guzmán’s capture, the
Shining Path had no real leader until early 1999 when Oscar Ramirez Durand was elected.
However, later that very same year, Ramirez Durand and his second-in-command were captured,
resulting in the “official” disbanding of the Shining Path. All of this came about through the
Shining Path’s use of violent and extreme measures which, as they believed, would help them
achieve their goal, but, in reality, only served to bring about their undoing.
In reality, the Shining Path brought about its own destruction the moment its leaders
made the decision to form a guerrilla organization. From that point onwards, the Shining Path
grew steadily more violent and attracted more attention, eventually gaining official terrorist
status in 1983. In 1992, their founder and leader, Abimael Guzmán, was captured and the Shining
Path fell into disarray with no one to lead them. After 1992, the Shining Path really began its
decline, never managing to equal the 10,000 members it had at the height of its power.15 In 1999,
the organization was officially disbanded. But what if Abimael Guzmán had never made the step
from peaceful political party to terrorist guerrilla organization? Would then, Abimael Guzmán
and many others be in prison serving life-long sentences? Would thousands of innocent
Peruvians have been murdered? Would the Maoist party of Peru—the Shining Path—have
fallen? No. None of these things ever would have happened because none of the violence the
Shining Path instigated would have occurred. The government would have had no cause to shut
down the Shining Path if the Shining Path had not given it to them in the form of a series of
brutal attacks on the government and civilians. And if all this is so, then why did nobody see
where things were headed when Guzmán proposed the idea of a guerrilla organization in the
mid-1970’s? Why did people follow him? He offered them a light, a hope in the darkness. He
gave them a purpose and a way to attain it. In the words of Santiago Roncagliolo:
“In the case of terrorists, what hit me most was their faith. They talked
about Guzmán as one would a divine entity. Not even his wife had a
normal relationship with him. Even she called him ‘President’. The
Shining Path believes in him as other people believe in God.”16
1
"Gonzalo, de nombre oficial Abimael Guzmán Reynoso," http://webpages.ull.es/users/
capburoc/biografia-Abimael.htm (accessed October 28, 2009).
2
"Gonzalo, de nombre oficial Abimael Guzmán Reynoso," http://webpages.ull.es/users/
capburoc/biografia-Abimael.htm (accessed October 28, 2009).
3
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 58.
4
Roncagliolo, Santiago. “A Look Inside the Shining Path.” Interview by Foreign Policy. February 2008.
Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id:4200 (accessed October 23, 2009).
5
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 129.
6
Shawn Choy. “Terrorism—In the Spotlight: Sendero Luminoso,” Terrorism Project, http://www.cdi.org/
terrorism/sendero.cfm (accessed: October 26, 2009)
John Pike, “Sendero Luminoso (SL) Shining Path,” GlobalSecurity.org, http://www/globalsecurity.org/
military/world/para/sendero_luminoso.htm (accessed: October 18, 2009)
7
Kathryn Gregory, “Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists).” Council on foreign relations, http://
www.cfr.org/publication/9276/ (accessed: October 19, 2009)
Bloody Peruvian terrorist also had fuzzy side, Latin American Herald Tribune, 2008, (accessed: October
29, 2009)
8
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 93.
9
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 92.
10
11
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 93.
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 93.
12
Kathryn Gregory, “Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists).” Council on foreign relations, http://
www.cfr.org/publication/9276/ (accessed: October 19, 2009)
13
Palmer, David Scott, ed. Shining Path of Peru. 2nd ed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. p. 128.
14
"The Sendero File," Peruvian Graffiti, http://www.gci275.com/peru/sf4.shtml (accessed
November 2, 2009).
15
Kathryn Gregory, “Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists).” Council on foreign relations, http://
www.cfr.org/publication/9276/ (accessed: October 19, 2009)
16
Roncagliolo, Santiago. “A Look Inside the Shining Path.” Interview by Foreign Policy. February 2008.
Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id:4200 (accessed October 23, 2009).