LIMA, Peru (AP) – Abimael Guzmán, a brutal leader in Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was arrested in 1992, died Saturday in a military hospital after falling ill. He was 86 years old.
Guzmán died at 6.40am this morning, according to Justice Minister Aníbal Torres.
Guzmán, a former professor of philosophy, launched an insurgency against the government in the 1980’s and led to the bombing of several bombs and the killing of civilians in subsequent years. Guzmán was arrested in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism and other crimes.
President Pedro Castillo wrote online that Guzmán was responsible for the “ many ‘lives.
“Our anti-terrorism environment is stable and stable. Only in a democracy can we build Peru for justice and the development of our people,” Castillo said.
However, Castillo was criticized for speaking to his ministers in the Shining Path. Prime Minister Guido Bellido has been investigated by government officials out of sympathy for the group. Last week, journalists wrote a police report on the 1980s stating that Minister of Labor Iber Maraví is a member of the Shining Path and a fugitive.
“We will never forget the tragedy of that time, and his death will not undo his mistakes,” Finance Minister Pedro Francke said.
Guzmán preached a messianic vision of a poorly trained Maoist utopia about true communism, calling himself the “Fourth Sword of Marxism” after Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong. He encouraged civilian change where terrorists take control of areas and then move to cities.
The Guzmán faction declared war on the end of the Peruvian elections in May 1980, the first democratically elected vote in 12 years.
Throughout the 1980s, a man known as President Gonzalo set up an organization that grew to 10,000 militants before being captured in the Lima detention center in September 1992 by a special Peruvian police force with the help of the United States. From then on, he was kept in a military camp on the Pacific coast where he was arrested for trying to seduce him.
By the time Guzmán convened peace talks a year after his arrest, violent killings have killed thousands of people in Peru, leaving at least 600,000 people and costing about $ 22 billion.
“Unlike other terrorist groups that have left the region, (Shining Path) targeted civilians and tried to intimidate them, both in cities and in the countryside,” Noam Lupu, director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, said in an email about Shining Path. “The fear that this has brought to Peru was shocking, and it has become known to Peruvian politics and the people since then. The Shining Path violence is one of the reasons why Castillo is the first leader to remain in Peru since the 1980s.”
The 2003 Commission on Shining Path condemned more than half of the nearly 70,000 people killed and missing as a result of a number of insurgent groups and attempted government crackdowns between 1980 and 2000.
Yet it remained a political party formed by Guzmán’s followers seeking forgiveness for “all political prisoners,” including the founder of the Shining Path. The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Right has failed, however, to register as a political party in 2012 in the face of fierce opposition from the Peruvian people and the painful memories of the Shining Path.
In his hymns and other words, the Shining Path celebrated the shedding of blood, explaining that death is essential to “watering” change.
Its militants have bombed power towers, bridges and factories in rural areas, killing mayors and killing people in villages. In the past years of terrorists, they have kidnapped civilians in Lima with an indiscriminate bomb.
For 12 years, the Peruvian authorities have been unable to destroy the Shining Path, organized in a nearby immovable cell. Guzmán narrowly escaped capture in Lima in June 1990, but he escaped.
In January 1991 police in Lima found a voting tape showing Guzmán and other rebel leaders mourning the death of his wife, Augusta La Torre, nicknamed “Comrade Norah.” For nearly 15 years Guzmán’s senior, La Torre was ranked No. 2 in the Shining Path under his prehuman death in 1988.
Investigators believe he may have been killed or forced to commit suicide because of internal politics.
The film showed Guzmán, wearing dark glasses and flipping his fingers dancing wildly from the 1960’s song Zorba the Greek. This is the first portrait of the people of Peru since the statue was struck in 1978.
After La Torre’s death, Elena Iparraguirre, better known as “Comrade Miriam,” became Guzmán’s wife.
Guzmán married Iparraguirre in 2010 in a maximum-security prison in Lima where he spent time in prison. Iparraguirre, who was also arrested in 1992, came from the women’s prison during the ceremony.
Guzmán was initially sentenced to life imprisonment by a secret military court, but the Peruvian Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that the original ruling was not unconstitutional and ordered a new trial. He was also sentenced to life in prison in 2006.
The Shining Path was severely weakened after Guzmán’s capture and later called for peace talks. Smaller gangs are still active in remote valleys, producing cocaine and protecting drug traffickers.
Guzmán was born a wealthy businessman in Tambo, Arequipa, south of the Andes in Peru on December 3, 1934.
He studied law and philosophy at the University of San Agustin in Arequipa, where he authored two essays: “Theory of Space in Kant” and another law in the “Democratic-Bourgeois State.”
“Mr. Guzmán was a very talented man, very educated, very talented,” recalls Miguel Rodriguez Rivas, one of his professors.
Guzmán worked as a lecturer in 1963 at the State University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, a poor Andean capital that has been neglected for years by top Peruvian officials in Lima.
In Ayacucho, he joined the Chinese Rage Party, or “Red Flag,” as the leader of the “military committee” and visited China in 1965.
Later on his return to Ayacucho, Guzmán realized that the politicians had removed him from the party and formed his own party.
A native of the white supremacists who have ruled Peru since the Spanish invasion of the Inca empire about 500 years ago, Guzmán enlisted the sons and daughters of Quechua-speaking Quechua-speaking people who gradually took over the reins of the university.
During the 1970s, his students who followed his students traveled to the countryside to thoroughly explore the areas to be used over the years including the rebel commanders in the area.
For more than 10 years, Guzmán patiently prepared to wage war on the so-called “rotten and old-fashioned” territories in Peru, surprising the government.
Peruvian officials were debating what to do with Guzmán’s body.
Torres told state television he had learned about the cremation and warned that “paying homage or inciting remembrance of Abimael Guzmán” would be taken as an apology for the terrorist attack.
Sebastián Chávez, a lawyer from Guzmán, said that the decision was based on his wife, Iparraguirre, who is being held in a prison in Lima.
“They will decide what happens,” he said.