The image of that man, locked in a cage and dressed in the typical prison suit, horizontal black stripes on a white background, had the surreal air of a bad movie comedy, in which the actor shouted anti-imperialist slogans and shook his fist threatening.
Abimael guzman, alias comrade [o presidente] Gonzalo, was hunted on September 12, 1992 in a house in the district of Surquillo, Lime. He was shown to the international press as a subdued wild animal, and he lived up to his role in the performance.
This was, in fact, the culmination of a tragedy of more than 20 years of blood and political delusion. A terrorist journey that, illuminated by Maoist Marxism, sought to save Peruvians from themselves, to build a new revolutionary peasant regime.
The guerrilla that led the comrade Gonzalo he attacked all over Peru and confronted the police and the army. But showed his greatest ferocity against the common people, ignorant, poor and inhabitant of remote places, that still today maintains the most primitive farming systems, aided by draft beasts and with irrigation invented in Inca times.
This population, with a conservative mentality and with ideas anchored in values from hundreds of years ago (see how the new populist indigenism has led to the presidency of Peru a Pedro Castillo a few weeks ago), was the victim of bloody punishments and massacres carried out by enlightened guerrillas from Shining Path.
Different sources, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attribute to him up to more than 41,000 murders, in a conflict that exceeded 70,000 dead, with major massacres of Sendero in Lucanamarca (Ayacucho), Mapotoa and Yaynapango (Ashaninka communities of the central jungle).
And it all started with a Philosophy professor, born in 1934 (on December 3) in Mollendo, in the south of the country along the Pacific, in a region where the old language is spoken. quechua, which he himself learned as an adult, as part of his intellectual journey.
Dysfunctional family
His hazardous childhood in a family that today would be defined as unstructured, bastard son of a landowner, took Abimael Guzmán to Arequipa. He studied Law and Philosophy, opting for political thought under the intense intellectual influence of the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), Jose Carlos Mariategui.
Guzmán was already a professor of Philosophy at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga (Ayacucho), in the 60s, when his thinking was radicalized, as a member of the PCP.
In 1965 he visited the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and shortly after went into hiding, with the idea of reproducing the same process in his Peru.
He endorsed a phrase by Mariátegui “Marxism-Leninism is the luminous path of the future”, and headed a radical split from the Communist Party that I ended up being known with two ominous words: Shining Path.
The group’s activity during the first years was maintained in academic circles of subversion until the 70s, while Latin America was torn between military dictatorships: Pinochet in Chile, He saw in Argentina, Stroessner In Paraguay, White Castle in Brazil, Banzer in Bolivia, Bordaberry in Uruguay … and Velasco Alvarado in Peru, overthrown in turn by Morales Bermudez in 1975.
In some cases they were right-wing dictatorships and in others, the opposite. Guzmán decided to pursue his own political model, launching a terrorist offensive against the state in 1980 (on May 17), precisely when the first democratic elections since 1963 were being held.
“Fourth sword of communism”
His strategy was to corner the big cities from the countryside. His followers said of him that he was the “fourth sword of communism”, after Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao.
Maybe the enlightened Gonzalo He did not count on the peasants themselves resisting his forces, opposing self-defense groups, armed and supported by the Government. The level of violence rose year by year, while the guerrilla was entrenched in Peruvian society for more than a decade.
They say that the leader of Sendero was ‘against’ weapons, considering them somewhat bourgeois, and therefore never made an effort to obtain them abroad. His force was supplied by stealing them from the security forces. He even censored other Latin American guerrilla movements, such as the Che Guevara, whom Guzmán considered “sold to Moscow.”
But something changed for the guerrillas on July 28, 1990, when the Peruvian-Japanese (with dual nationality) Alberto Fujimori President of the Republic was elected at the polls.
Fujimori, with the country on the verge of collapse due to the continuous guerrilla attacks, turned all his energies into defeating the Shining Path, to the point of giving himself a self-coup on April 5, 1992 to take all the powers and bypass any control.
At the beginning of his term, as elected president, Fujimori formed the so-called Special Intelligence Group (GEIN), belonging to the National Directorate against Terrorism, with the specific mission of beheading the Shining Path, whose followers practiced a true cult of the personality of their leader.
For Abimael Guzmán, fortune began to decline, his group caught between two fires due to intelligence activity and intense repression, including the harassment of government death squads, plus the confrontation with another terrorist group that emerged in 1982, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, on the extreme left, with the name of the last Inca.
The mother of a hiker recruited by a Guzmán collaborator, nicknamed Isa, offered the authorities the thread that ended up undoing the skein. He provided some names and addresses, in search of their own son, which led to the dismantling of the Isa and led to the final clue about the leader.
The force of events then brings us to the moment when Guzmán is humiliated before the cameras of the international press. With him caught, Fujimori’s prediction was indeed fulfilled and the organization quickly collapsed.
Later, Fujimori himself would end up paying for his own excesses in jail, after the self-coup. And there it continues, in the Barbadillo prison.
Life imprisonment
Abimael Guzmán was tried twice. In 1992 he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. That ruling was overturned in 2003 by the Constitutional Court, after full democracy was restored in Peru in 2001.
The annulment, which reached another 1,800 Sendero Luminoso inmates, was considered unconstitutional the procedure of the military trials. But in 2004 a Guzmán’s second trial, who sentenced him two years later, again to life imprisonment.
With the prison suit charade in 1992, the comrade Gonzalo he rendered his last utterances. He returned his personality to Abimael Guzmán Reinoso who, imprisoned in the Callao Naval BaseHe has outlived himself for almost 30 years, reduced to a remote memory of times when the most radical activism weighed like lead.
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Reference-www.elespanol.com