He was nicknamed the “Pol Pot of the Andes”. Abimaël Guzman, the historic leader of the Peruvian Maoist Guerrilla Shining Path, died on Saturday September 11 at the age of 86 in the prison where he was serving his life sentence, told Agence France-Presse ( AFP) his lawyer. “Doctor Abimaël Guzman is dead. His wife was informed and requested his remains from the authorities ”said Me Alfredo Crespo.
The former Maoist leader, imprisoned since 1992, was serving his sentence following two convictions in 2006 and 2018. He was hospitalized on July 20.
His death, linked to “A worsening of his state of health”, occurred at the high security penitentiary center of the Callao naval base, near Lima.
The guerrilla and his lieutenants were arrested in Lima in 1992 under the presidency of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who launched a fierce repression against the movement.
The former university professor carried the heavy burden of one of the bloodiest conflicts in Latin America, which rocked Peru between 1980 and 2000. In 2003, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had estimated at some 70 000 dead or missing from the conflict between the army and the Shining Path guerrillas.
Abimaël Guzman had forged the image of a tough and ruthless revolutionary. The executions of peasants and the burning of villages refusing to support the guerrillas had brought him to be compared to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader of Cambodia. Among his bloodiest actions: the murder in 1984 of 117 peasants in Soras, in the Ayacucho region.
” Red sun “
The academic, born December 3, 1934 in Mollendo (south), had embarked on the revolutionary struggle in the early 1960s by abandoning his chair of philosophy at San Cristobal de Huamanga University, in Ayacucho, one of the poorer regions of Peru. Shortly after, he launched a political movement, the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (dissident faction of the PC), whose mission was to “Building communism by following the luminous path of José Carlos Mariategui”, founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party.
He called himself “Puka Inti” (“red sun” in the Quechua language) and cultivated a cult of his personality among the supporters of his movement. His followers called his ideas “Fourth sword” of Marxism, alongside those of Marx, Lenin and Mao.
Its movement had developed on the ground of the indigenous revolt, the forgotten ones of the agrarian reform of 1969 and the students leaving the university with unusable diplomas due to racial and linguistic segregation. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s strengthened his desire to establish a similar system in Peru. In 1979, he went underground with the project of carrying the revolution from the countryside to the cities and to overthrow the state through armed struggle. On May 17, 1980, the Path inaugurated the guerrilla war with a symbolic act: the burning of the ballot boxes in an Andean village on the eve of the first election organized after twelve years of military dictatorship.
Very organized, the guerrillas were initially well received by the population to whom they distributed land. But the situation had degenerated with the assassinations of peasants and community leaders. The Maoist organization became more and more totalitarian, not hesitating, in particular, to enlist children from the age of 5 in its militias or for the cultivation of coca, and to massacre the recalcitrant.
The arrest in 1992 in the suburbs of Lima of the rebel leader – shown to the press in a cage – had led to a rapid and marked decrease in the actions of his movement.
In 2010, he married in prison Elena Iparraguirre, number two of the movement, arrested with him in Lima and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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