INTRODUCTION

On May 17th, 1980 a small group of young men raided the polling  place and burned the ballots in the rural town of Chuschi  high in the Peruvian Andes. It was the first national election after  12 years of military rule. The people of Peru had no idea that  this small incident would curse the country’s return to democracy  for the next decade and a half. The Communist Party of Peru  by the Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariátegui, better known as  Sendero Luminoso or the Shining Path, had thus launched its  armed fight. Its birth, however, began long before in the  classrooms of Abimael Guzmán, a charismatic professor at the  Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, who was  nicknamed "Shampoo" for his ability to convince his students  of almost anything.

Within a few years Sendero Luminoso had shrewdly turned a critical national situation to their advantage by exacerbating class consciousness and social resentment among the indigenous people of the highlands. Although considered a legitimate insurrection by some and a repressive, reactionary movement by others, no one can deny the violence and bloodshed directly and indirectly attributed to the emergence of Sendero Luminoso. With the beginning of the urban strategy in the late 1980s and the involvement in the coca trade in the Upper Huallaga Valley soon after, it seemed all of Peru was a war zone. Flagrant human rights abuses by the military and its U.S.-trained counter-guerrilla forces (Sinchis) and the numerous killings of independent grass roots organizers, local politicians and unsympathetic civilians by Sendero Luminoso left the people of Peru caught in the middle.

Then on September 12, 1992 Presidente Gonzalo (Guzmán’s nom de guerre) was captured during a raid of a safe house in Lima. Considerably weakened, Sendero has lost much of its role in determining the future of Peru. But although it no longer holds the country captive, it still remains a force to be reckoned with.
   

Speech from the cage.  

Table of Contents