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Shining Path

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                            Communist Party of Peru
   Shining Path's flag

                        Communist Party of Peru flag.

       Active    1980 - Present
      Country    Peru
     Allegiance  Maoism, possibly narcotics traffickers
       Branch    The People's Guerrilla Army is the official name of the armed
                 branch of the party.
        Role     Guerrilla warfare
        Size     Probably a few hundred fighters
    Garrison/HQ  Unknown, probably Upper Huallaga Valley
     Equipment   Small arms and dynamite
      Nickname   Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path
       Motto     "Long live the People's War," "It is Right to Rebel"
       Colors    Red
   Anniversaries May 17, 1980
                                   Commanders
      Current
   commander     Comrade Artemio
      Notable
   commanders    Abimael Guzman (imprisoned)
                                    Insignia
   Identification
   symbol        Hammer and sickle
   Identification
   symbol        Initials "PCP"

   The Communist Party of Peru (Spanish: El Partido Comunista del Perú),
   more commonly known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), is a Maoist
   guerrilla organization in Peru. The more familiar name distinguishes
   the group from several other Peruvian communist parties with similar
   names (see Communism in Peru). It originates from a maxim of José
   Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the original Peruvian Communist Party:
   "El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución"
   (“ Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”). This
   maxim was featured in the masthead of the newspaper of a Shining Path
   front group, and Peruvian communist groups are often distinguished by
   the names of their publications. The followers of the group are
   generally called senderistas. All documents, periodicals and other
   materials produced by the organization are signed by the Communist
   Party of Peru (PCP). Academics refer to them as PCP-SL.

   Shining Path's stated goal is to replace Peruvian bourgeois
   institutions with a communist peasant revolutionary regime, presumably
   passing first through the Maoist developmental stage of New Democracy.
   Since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992, it has only
   been sporadically active. Shining Path's ideology and tactics have been
   influential on other Maoist insurgent groups, notably the Communist
   Party of Nepal (Maoist) and other Revolutionary Internationalist
   Movement-affiliated organizations.

   Widely condemned for its brutality, including violence deployed against
   peasants, trade union organizers, popularly elected officials and the
   general civilian population, Shining Path is on the U.S. Department of
   State's "Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations" list. Peru, the
   European Union, and Canada likewise regard Shining Path as a terrorist
   group and prohibit providing funding or other financial support.

Origins

   Shining Path was founded in the late 1960s by former university
   philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán (referred to by his followers by
   his nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo), whose teachings created the
   foundation for its militant Maoist doctrine. It was an offshoot of the
   Communist Party of Peru — Bandera Roja (" red flag"), which in turn
   split from the original Peruvian Communist Party, a derivation of the
   Peruvian Socialist Party, founded by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1964.

   Shining Path first established a foothold in San Cristóbal of Huamanga
   University, where Guzmán taught philosophy. The university had recently
   reopened after being closed for about half a century, and many students
   of the newly-educated class adopted Shining Path's radical ideology.
   Between 1973 and 1975, Shining Path gained control of the student
   councils in the Universities of Huancayo and La Cantuta, and developed
   a significant presence in the National University of Engineering in
   Lima and the National University of San Marcos, the oldest university
   in the Americas. Sometime later, it lost many student elections in the
   universities, including Guzmán's own San Cristóbal of Huamanga, and
   decided to abandon the universities and reconsolidate itself.

   In the beginning of 1980, Shining Path held a series of clandestine
   meetings in Ayacucho, known as the Central Committee's second plenary.
   It formed a "Revolutionary Directorate" that was political and military
   in nature, and ordered its militias to transfer to strategic areas in
   the provinces to start the "armed struggle". The group also held its
   "First Military School" where militants were instructed in military
   tactics and weapons use. They also engaged in the " criticism and
   self-criticism," a Maoist practice intended to avoid repeating mistakes
   and purge bad habits of work. During the First Military School, members
   of the Central Committee came under heavy criticism. Guzmán did not,
   and he emerged from the First Military School as the clear leader of
   Shining Path.

Guerrilla war

   When Peru's military government allowed elections for the first time in
   a dozen years in 1980, Shining Path was one of the few leftist
   political groups that declined to take part, and instead opted to
   launch a guerrilla war in the highlands of the province of Ayacucho. On
   May 17, 1980, the eve of the presidential elections, it burned ballot
   boxes in the town of Chuschi, Ayacucho. It was the first act of war by
   Shining Path. However, the perpetrators were quickly caught, additional
   ballots were shipped to Chuschi, the elections proceeded without
   further incident, and the incident received very little attention in
   the Peruvian press.

   Throughout the 1980s, Shining Path grew in both the territory it
   controlled and the number of militants in its organization,
   particularly in the Andean highlands. It gained some support from
   peasants by beating and killing widely disliked figures in the
   countryside. For example, it often executed cattle rustlers, whose
   crime is considered particularly egregious in poor Peruvian villages.
   It also killed managers of the state-controlled farming collectives and
   well-to-do merchants, who were unpopular with poor rural dwellers.
   These actions caused the peasantry of many Peruvian villages to express
   some sympathy for the Shining Path, especially in the regions of
   Ayacucho, Apurímac, and Huancavelica. However, only a small minority of
   peasants were ever as enthusiastically Maoist as the Shining Path
   cadre.

   Shining Path's credibility was also bolstered by the government's
   initially tepid response to the insurgency. For a long time, the
   government simply ignored Shining Path, believing it to be relatively
   benign or, as press said in the first years, that they were only
   "lunatics." Additionally, the civilian president, Fernando Belaúnde
   Terry, was reluctant to cede authority to the armed forces, as his
   first government had ended in a military coup The result was that, to
   the peasants in the areas where the Shining Path was active, the state
   appeared impotent. When it became clear the Shining Path represented a
   threat to the state, the government declared an "emergency zone" in the
   Ayacucho area, and granted the military the power to arbitrarily arrest
   any suspicious person. The military used this power extremely
   heavy-handedly, detaining scores of innocent people, at times
   subjecting them to torture and rape. In several massacres, the military
   wiped out entire villages. Military personnel took to wearing black
   ski-masks to hide their identity as they committed these crimes.

   Shining Path's attacks were not limited to the countryside. It mounted
   attacks against the infrastructure in Lima, killing civilians in the
   process. In 1983, it sabotaged several electrical transmission towers,
   causing a citywide blackout, and set fire to the Bayer industrial
   plant, destroying it completely. That same year, it set off a powerful
   bomb in the offices of the governing party, Popular Action. Escalating
   its activities in Lima, in June 1985 it again blew up electricity
   transmission towers in Lima, producing a blackout, and detonated car
   bombs near the government palace and the justice palace. It also
   started fires in several shopping malls. At the time, President
   Fernando Belaúnde Terry was receiving the Argentine president Raúl
   Alfonsín. In one of its last attacks in Lima, on July 16, 1992, the
   group detonated a powerful bomb on Tarata Street in the upscale
   district of Miraflores in Lima, killing more than 20 people and
   destroying several buildings.

   During this period, Shining Path also targeted specific individuals,
   notably leaders of other leftist groups, local political parties, labor
   unions, and peasant organizations, some of whom were anti-Sendero
   Marxists. On April 24, 1985, in the midst of presidential elections, it
   tried to assassinate Domingo García Rada, the president of the Peruvian
   National Electoral Council, severely injuring him and mortally wounding
   his driver. In August 1991, the group killed one Italian and two Polish
   priests in the department of Ancash. The following February, it
   assassinated María Elena Moyano, a well-known community organizer in
   Villa El Salvador, a vast shantytown in Lima.

   By 1991, Shining Path had control of much of the countryside of the
   centre and south of Peru and had a large presence in the outskirts of
   Lima. As the organization grew in power, a cult of personality grew
   around Guzmán. The official ideology of Shining Path ceased to be
   Maoism (or "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought"), and was instead
   referred to as "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo thought." (often
   referred to, in Spanish, as MLM-PG).

   Shining Path also engaged in armed conflicts with Peru's other major
   guerrilla group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and with
   campesino self-defense groups organized by the Peruvian armed forces.

   Although the extent of Shining Path atrocities and the reliability of
   reports remains a matter of controversy, the organization has been
   frequently accused of particularly brutal methods of killing. The
   Shining Path explicitly rejected the very idea of human rights. A
   Shining Path document stated:

          We start by not ascribing to either Universal Declaration of
          Human Rights or the Costa Rica [Convention on Human Rights], but
          we have used their legal devices to unmask and denounce the old
          Peruvian state. . . . For us, human rights are contradictory to
          the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a
          social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights.
          "Human rights" don't exist except for the bourgeoisie man, a
          position that was at the forefront of feudalism, like liberty,
          equality, and fraternity were advanced for the bourgeoisie of
          the past. But today, since the appearance of the proletariat as
          an organized class in the Communist Party, with the experience
          of triumphant revolutions, with the construction of socialism,
          new democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it has
          been proven that human rights serve the oppressor class and the
          exploiters who run the imperialist and landowner-bureaucratic
          states. Bourgeois states in general. . . . Our position is very
          clear. We reject and condemn human rights because they are
          bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, and are
          today a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally
          Yankee imperialists.

Decline

   While Shining Path quickly seized control of large areas of Peru, it
   soon faced serious problems. Shining Path's Maoism was never popular.
   It never had the support of the majority of the Peruvian people, and
   quickly lost almost all sympathy that it once had.

   Many peasants were unhappy with its rule for a variety of reasons, such
   as its disrespect for indigenous culture and institutions, and the
   brutality of its "popular trials" that sometimes included "slitting
   throats, strangulation, stoning, and burning." While punishing and even
   killing cattle thieves was popular in some parts of Peru, Shining Path
   also killed peasants and popular leaders for even minor offenses.
   Peasants were also offended by the rebels' injunction against burying
   the bodies of Shining Path victims.

   Shining Path also became disliked for its policy of closing small and
   rural markets in order to end small-scale capitalism and to starve
   Lima. As a Maoist organization, it strongly opposed all forms of
   capitalism, and also followed Mao's dictum that guerrilla warfare
   should start in the countryside and gradually choke off the cities.
   Peasants, many of whose livelihood depended on trade in the markets,
   rejected such closures.

   In several areas of Peru, Shining Path also launched unpopular
   campaigns, such as a prohibition on parties and the consumption of
   alcohol.

   Most Marxist Peruvian political parties considered Shining Path's
   analysis – that Peru was a semi-feudal nation analogous to China in the
   1930s and 1940s – as deeply flawed.

   Faced with a hostile population, the guerrilla war began to falter. In
   some areas, peasants formed anti-Shining Path patrols, called rondas.
   They were generally poorly-equipped despite donations of guns from the
   armed forces. Nevertheless, Shining Path guerrillas were militarily
   attacked by the rondas. The first such reported attack was in January
   1983 near Huata, when some rondas killed 13 senderistas; in February in
   Sacsamarca, rondas stabbed and killed the Shining Path commanders of
   that area. In March 1983, rondas brutally killed Olegario Curitomay,
   one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the
   town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot
   him. As a response, in April, Shining Path entered the province of
   Huancasancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua,
   Muylacruz and Lucanamarca, and killed 69 people, many of whom were
   children, including at one who was only six months old. Also killed
   were several women, some of them pregnant. Most of them died by machete
   hacks, and some were shot at close range in the head This was the first
   massacre by Shining Path of the peasant community. Other incidents
   followed, such as the one in Hauyllo, Tambo District, La Mar Province,
   Ayacucho Department. In that community, Shining Path killed 47
   peasants, including 14 children aged between four and fifteen.
   Additional massacres by Shining Path occurred, such as the one in
   Marcas on 28 August 2003.

   Theodore Dalrymple wrote that "The worst brutality I ever saw was that
   committed by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, in the days when
   it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its
   massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge. As a doctor, I
   am accustomed to unpleasant sights, but nothing prepared me for what I
   saw in Ayacucho, where Sendero first developed under the sway of a
   professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman."

Government response and abuses

   In 1991, President Alberto Fujimori issued a law that gave the rondas a
   legal status, and from that time they were officially called Comités de
   auto defensa ("Committees of Self Defence"). They were officially
   armed, usually with 12-gauge shotguns, and trained by the Peruvian
   Army. According to the government, there were approximately 7,226
   comités de auto defensa as of 2005; almost 4,000 are located in the
   central region of Peru, the stronghold of Shining Path.

   The Peruvian government also clamped down on the Shining Path in other
   ways. Military personnel were dispatched to areas dominated by Shining
   Path, especially Ayacucho, to fight the rebels. Ayacucho itself was
   declared an emergency zone, and constitutional rights were suspended in
   the area. The government also sent forces to take back an Ayacucho
   prison that had recently been taken over by its own incarcerated
   Shining Path members. The military forces used mortars and automatic
   weapons, killing at least 35 as family members watched. This was caught
   on film and shown in a documentary entitled People of the Shining Path.

   Initial government efforts to fight Shining Path were not very
   effective or promising. Military units engaged in many human rights
   violations, which caused Shining Path to appear in the eyes of many as
   the lesser of two evils. They used excessive force and killed many
   innocent civilians. Government forces destroyed villages and killed
   campesinos suspected of supporting Shining Path. They eventually
   lessened the pace at which the armed forces committed atrocities such
   as massacres. Additionally, the state began the wide-spread use of
   intelligence agencies in its fight against Shining Path. However,
   atrocities were committed by the National Intelligence Service, notably
   the La Cantuta massacre and the Barrios Altos massacre, both of which
   were committed by Grupo Colina.

   A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) established by President
   Alejandro Toledo found in a 2003 report that 69,280 people had died or
   disappeared – 22,507 fully identified as dead and 46,773
   disappearances. Shining Path was estimated to be responsible for the
   death of 31,331 people According to a summary of the report by Human
   Rights Watch, "Shining Path… killed about half the victims, and roughly
   one-third died at the hands of government security forces… The
   commission attributed some of the other slayings to a smaller guerrilla
   group and local militias. The rest remain unattributed." The MRTA was
   held responsible for 1.5% of the deaths.

Capture of Guzmán and collapse

   On September 12, 1992, Peruvian police captured Guzmán and several
   Shining Path leaders in an apartment above a dance studio in the
   Surquillo district of Lima. The police had been monitoring the
   apartment, as a number of suspected Shining Path militants had visited
   it. An inspection of the garbage of the apartment produced empty tubes
   of a skin cream used to treat psoriasis, a condition that Guzmán was
   known to have. Shortly after the raid that captured Guzmán, most of the
   remaining Shining Path 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. Guzmán's role as the
   leader of Shining Path was taken over by Óscar Ramírez, who himself was
   captured by Peruvian authorities in 1999. After Ramírez's capture, the
   group splintered, guerrilla activity diminished sharply, and previous
   conditions returned to the areas where the Shining Path had been
   active.

21st century

   Although the organization has virtually disappeared, a militant faction
   of Shining Path called Proseguir (or "Onward") continues to be
   sporadically active in the region of the Ene and Apurimac valleys on
   the eastern slopes of the Andes, some 300 miles southeast of Lima. It
   is believed that the faction consists of three companies known as the
   North, or Pangoa, the Centre, or Pucuta, and the South, or Vizcatan.
   According to the Peruvian government, the faction consists of around
   100 hardliners from other (now disbanded) regional Shining Path units.
   The government claims that Proseguir is operating in alliance with drug
   traffickers.

   The Proseguir faction has been blamed for an upsurge in guerrilla
   activity in the region during 2003. On June 9, 2003 a Shining Path
   group attacked a camp in Tocache, Ayacucho, and took 68 employees of
   the Argentinean company Techint and three police guards as hostages.
   They had been working in the Camisea gas pipeline project, a gasoduct
   that would take natural gas from Cusco to Lima. According to sources
   from Peru's Interior Ministry, the terrorists asked for a sizable
   ransom to free the hostages. Two days later, after a rapid military
   response, the terrorists abandoned the hostages. According to rumor,
   the company paid the ransom.

   Government forces have had a number of successes in capturing
   Proseguir's leading members. In April 2000, Commander José Arcela
   Chiroque, called "Ormeño", was captured, followed by another leader,
   Florentino Cerrón Cardozo, called "Marcelo" in July 2003. In November
   of the same year, Jaime Zuñiga, called "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
   of the Techint pipeline workers. He was also thought to have led an
   ambush against an army helicopter in 1999 in which five soldiers died.

   In 2003, the Peruvian National Police broke up several Shining Path
   training camps and captured many members and leaders. It also freed
   about 100 indigenous people held in virtual slavery. By late October
   2003 there were 96 terrorist incidents in Peru, projecting a 15%
   decrease from the 134 kidnappings and armed attacks in 2002. Also for
   the year, 8 or 9 people were killed by Shining Path, and 6 Senderistas
   were killed and 209 captured.

   In January 2004, a man known as Comrade Artemio and identifying himself
   as one of the last free Shining Path leaders said in a media interview
   that the group would resume violent operations unless the Peruvian
   government granted amnesty to other top Shining Path leaders within 60
   days. Peru's Interior Minister, Fernando Rospigliosi, said that the
   government would respond "drastically and swiftly" to any violent
   action. In September that same year, a comprehensive sweep by police in
   five cities found 17 suspected members. According to the interior
   minister, eight of the arrested were school teachers and another two
   were high-level school administrators.

   Despite these arrests, Shining Path continued to exist in Peru. On
   December 22, 2005, Shining Path ambushed a police patrol in the Huánuco
   region, killing eight. Later that day they wounded an additional two
   police officers. In response, President Alejandro Toledo declared a
   state of emergency in Huánuco, and gave the police the power to search
   houses and arrest suspects without a warrant. On February 19, 2006, the
   Peruvian police killed Héctor Aponte, who was believed to be the
   commander responsible for the killing of the policemen. After the
   killing, the minister of the interior said that he believed that
   Shining Path would be defeated.
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