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Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path is a Maoist guerrilla organization in Peru; it calls itself the Communist Party of Peru (Partido Comunista del Perú). Its stated goal is to replace Peruvian bourgeois institutions with a communist peasant revolutionary regime. After the capture of its leader Abimael Guzman in 1992, it has only been sporadically active.
The movement's ideology and tactics have been copied by other Marxist guerrilla groups, notably the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in Nepal.
Sendero is still on the U.S. Department of State's "Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations" list. The United Kingdom and European Union likewise regard Shining Path as a terrorist group and prohibit providing funding or other financial support.
History
PCP propaganda for electoral boycott Shining Path was founded in the late 1960s by former university professor Abimael Guzmán under the alias Presidente Gonzalo ("Chairman" or "President" Gonzalo), whose teachings created the foundation of its militant Maoist doctrine. It was an offshoot of the Communist Party of Peru – Bandera Roja ("red flag"), which in turn split from the mainline Communist Party of Peru in 1964. 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 booths in the highlands of the province of Ayacucho.
Between 1973 and 1975, Shining Path was able to control the student councils in the Universities of Tacna and Huanuco, and was able to gain an important presence in the University of Engineering in Lima and the San Martin de Porres University. After some time, Shining Path decided to abandon the universities under the slogan "Retake Mariátegui", and set the objective of "reconstructing the party".
In 1977, Shining Path started moving its focus for armed actions from the provinces to the cities. In the beginning of 1980, it had a clandestine celebration in Ayacucho of the IX Plenary of their Central Committee. It formed a "Revolutionary Directorate" that was political and military, and ordered their militias to transfer to strategic areas in the provinces, to start the "armed revolution". On May 17, 1980, as their "First act of war", Because the group advocated boycotting elections, it burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi, Ayacucho, on the eve of the presidential elections.
Throughout the 1980s, Shining Path grew in both the 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 it mounted attacks against civilians and the infrastructure.
On September 12, 1992, Guzmán 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. Guerrilla activity diminished sharply thereafter, with peace returning to many of the areas where Shining Path had been most active.
In addition to fighting the Peruvian government, Shining Path also engaged in armed conflicts with Peru's other major Peruvian guerrilla group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), with campesino self-defense groups organized by the Peruvian armed forces, and with legally-recognized parties of the Peruvian Left.
In combatting Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces sometimes used excesive force and many innocent civilians were killed. Government forces destroyed villages and killed campesinos suspected of being supporters of Shining Path. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) established by President Alejandro Toledo found in a 2003 report that the total number of deaths and/or dissapearances of people caused by revolt its consequences was 69,280. Of those, 22,507 were fully identified as dead and 46,773 were anonymous dissapearances. Shining Path was directly responsible for the death of 12,561 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 other major Peruvian guerrilla group during this period, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), was held responsible for only 1.5% of the deaths. [1] (http://www.oneworld.net/article/view/66920/1/)
Although the extent of Shining Path atrocities and the reliability of reports remains a matter of controversy, the senderistas have been frequently accused of notably brutal methods of killing and of targeting leadership of other leftist groups for assassination, including "local leaders of political parties, labor unions and peasant organizations, many of whom were anti-Sendero Marxists." A typical report of Shining Path atrocity can be found in The Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1988: "The insurgents hung the women on a wall and hacked them with knives and machetes before slitting their throats, police said."[2] (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1988/HJV.htm)
Major terrorist actions
- 1983: Shining Path sabotaged several electrical transmission towers producing a citywide blackout. Then, it set fire to the Bayer industrial plant, burning it down completely. That year, Shining Path also set off a powerful bomb in the offices of the then-governing party, Popular Action.
- April 24, 1985: Shining Path intercepted the car of Mr. Domingo García Rada, the President of the Peruvian National Electoral Council, and tried to kill him with bullets that severely injured him and eventually killed his driver. This is considered the "formal" beginning of Shining Path continuous terrorist operations in the capital city of Lima. At the time Peru was in the midst of Presidential elections.
- June 7, 1985: Shining Path used a bomb to destroy one or more electricity transmission towers, producing a blackout in the city of Lima, and detonated some car bombs near the government palace and the justice palace. They also stared fires in several shopping malls. At the time, Raúl Alfonsín, the President of Argentina, was being received by Fernando Belaúnde, then President of Peru. This was the first time that Shining Path used car bombs.
- August 1991: Shining Path killed two Polish and one Italian priest in the Department of Ancash. They later blew up their bodies with dynamite.
- February 15, 1992: Shining Path assassinated María Elena Moyano, a leader of a popular women's movement in Peru.
- July 16, 1992: Shining Path sets its most powerful bomb on Tarata Street, in Lima, killing more than 40 people and destroying several buildings.
- June 9, 2003: A Shining Path group of terrorists attacked a camp in Tocache, Ayacucho, and took 68 employees of the Argentinian 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 Cuzco 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.
Current Situation
Although Shining Path has virtually disappeared in much of Peru, a militant faction known as 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. Government forces have had a number of successes in capturing its leading members. In April 2000, commander José 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 the 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 2003, The Peruvian National Police broke up many Shining Path terrorist camps and captured many members and leaders. It also freed more than 200 indigenous people held in virtual slavery. For the year, terrorist incidents amounted to 115 (a decrease of 15% from the 134 kidnappings and armed attacks in 2002). Also for the year, 6 military and 3 private defense personnel were killed, and 6 Shining Path terrorists were killed and 209 captured.
In April 2004, a man known as Artemio and identifying himself as one of the last free Shining Path leaders gave a media interview where he stated that the group will resume violent operations unless the Peruvian government grants an 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 of the same year, a comprehensive sweep by police in five cities netted 17 suspected members. The interior minister stated that eight of the arrested were school teachers and another two were high-level school administrators.
Quote
- Shining Path "has bombed police headquarters and municipal offices, gas stations and middle-class apartment buildings, think tanks and public schools. It has paralyzed the country with so-called armed strikes, and set fire to bus drivers who defied its orders to stay at home on strike days. It has murdered peasant families and leftist leaders. Most often, victims are killed in full view of their family or community. Sometimes they are hanged and sometimes shot, but often an execution-squad member— in many cases a woman — delivers the coup de grace with a knife. Sometimes the tail of a live cat will be set on fire and then the animal will be let loose on a field of corn ready for picking. Sometimes a man who has just finished casting a mandatory vote in a national election will have the finger with the telltale electoral ink hacked off." Source: Alma Guillermoprieto, "Letter from Lima: Down the Shining Path," New Yorker, 8 Feb. 1993, p. 64-75.
Fiction
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)
- "Coup against Shining Path", La Republica (Lima), November 13, 2003
External links
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