Mollendo (Peru), 1934

By Heraclio Bonilla

Leader of the Shining Path, Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso is known as “President Gonzalo” or also as the “Fourth Sword of Communism,” after Marx, Lenin, and Mao. He was born on December 3, 1934, in Mollendo, a port on the South Pacific. The illegitimate son of a wealthy merchant, his mother, Berenice, died when he was five years old. After completing secondary studies at a private Catholic school in Arequipa, he pursued philosophy and law at the Universidad Nacional San Agustín in the same city, graduating with a thesis on “The Kantian Theory of Space” and “The Democratic Bourgeois Space.” In 1962, he was appointed professor of philosophy at the Universidad San Cristóbal de Huamanga, a position he held until 1972, when he went underground, leading to his arrest in September 1992.

His work as a teacher in Huamanga, one of the most isolated and underdeveloped areas of the country, was decisive in shaping the first members of Shining Path, composed of people linked to the university and with strong ties to the surrounding rural region. In 1965, 1969, and 1975, he visited China, where he attended lectures at the Political-Military School of Shanghai for Latin American communists, directed by Mao Zedong.

In El Diario, Shining Path’s main mouthpiece, in January 1988, Guzmán wrote that the popular republic of the new democracy could not only be the result of a violent revolutionary war led by the people’s guerrilla army, and that this process comprised three stages: the first would be the enemy’s strategic offensive and the guerrilla’s strategic defense. The second would be the period of the enemy’s strategic consolidation and the preparation for the offensive. The third, the period of the guerrilla’s strategic counteroffensive and the enemy’s strategic withdrawal. His capture in 1992 interrupted the execution of this program and, since 1993, to the astonishment of some of his followers, he requested peace from the government of Alberto Fujimori. He was tried in three days by a military court and sentenced to life imprisonment, but this sentence was declared unconstitutional in 2003, and a new trial was ordered by a civil court.

The trial took place in 2006, and Abimael was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of terrorism, as was Elena Iparraguirre, his partner and vice-commander of Shining Path.