Shining Path
The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Peru-Sendero Luminoso, usually referred to as simply Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path), is a Maoist guerrilla group in Peru famed for their use of violent and terrorist tactics. Its stated goal is to destroy existing Peruvian institutions and replace them with a communist peasant revolutionary regime. Many consider the organization a terrorist group. The organization is on the United States Department of State's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, meaning (among other things) that it is illegal for US citizens to provide any aid to the group.
Shining Path was founded by former university professor Abimael Guzman (a.k.a. President Gonzalo) in the late 1960s, and his teachings created the foundation of its militant Maoist doctrine. When Peru's military government allowed elections for the first time in a dozen years in 1980, Shining Path was one of the few insurrectionary groups which declined to take part, instead launching a guerrilla war by attacking election infrastructure in the highlands of the province of Ayacucho.
Throughout the 1980s, Shining Path grew in both territory it controlled and the number of militants in its organization. By 1991, it had control of much of the countryside of the center and south of Peru and had a large presence in the outskirts of Lima, Peru's capital city, where they executed terrorist attacks against the city's infrastructure and residents.
During this era, Shining Path used tactics that included conscription of children, forced labor, executions by stoning and throat-slitting (ostensibly to save bullets), destruction of the electricity infrastructure, indiscrimate bombings, and targeted assassinations of political opponents.
However, in fighting Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces also committed many atrocities. It destroyed villages and massacred campesinos it suspected of being supporters of Shining Path. Many of these abuses are now slowly coming to light.
On September 12, 1992, Guzman was captured by Peruvian special forces; shortly thereafter the rest of Shining Path's leadership fell as well. At the same time, Shining Path suffered embarrassing military defeats to campesino self-defense organizations — supposedly its social base — and the organization fractured into splinter groups.
Although Shining Path has virtually disappeared, Peruvian armed forces still sporadically arrest active Shining Path members. The Ene and Apurimac valleys on the eastern slopes of the Andes, some 300 miles southeast of Lima, are considered the last bastion of the group. The government believes a small number operate there in alliance with drug traffickers.
In April 2000, commander Jose Arcela Chiroque, a.k.a. Ormeno was captured; followed by another leader, Florentino Cerrón Cardozo, a.k.a. "Marcelo" in July 2003. In November of the same year, Jaime Zuniga, also known as "Cirilo" or "Dalton," was arrested after a clash in which four guerrillas were killed and an officer wounded. Officials said he took part in planning the kidnapping in June of 71 workers of Argentine company Techint, who were working on a gas pipeline in the jungle. He was also thought to have led an ambush against an army helicopter in 1999 in which five soldiers died.
In addition to fighting the Peruvian government, Shining Path also had armed conflicts with another Peruvian guerrilla group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), campesino self-defense groups organized by the Peruvian armed forces, and legally-recognized parties of the Peruvian Left.
Sources
- Terrorist Group Profiles, Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School
- Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995, ed. Steve Stern, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 1998 (ISBN 082232217X)