Shining Path (redirected from People's Guerrilla Army)

Shining Path, Span. Sendero Luminoso, Peruvian Communist guerrilla force, officially the Communist party of Peru. Founded in 1970 by Abimael Guzmán Reynoso as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the Peruvian Communist party, the Shining Path turned to terrorism in 1980. By the mid-1980s it had several thousand guerrillas, largely in rural Peru. The group began urban terrorism in the late 1980s. In 1992 President Fujimori instituted martial law, and the subsequent capture and life sentence of Guzmán and the jailing of most the organization's central committee diminished their guerrilla raids and largely ended any serious threat to the government. The group persists, however, and has continued its attacks on a smaller scale. In 20 years of fighting as many as 69,000 people, most of them civilians, died. In 2003, Guzmán's conviction was overturned, but a new proceeding in 2004 ended in a mistrial. Guzmán was retried a second time beginning in 2005, and was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison.

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Shining Path

 Spanish Sendero Luminoso

Maoist movement in Peru dedicated to violent revolution. It was founded in 1970 by a philosophy professor, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (b. 1934), as a result of a split in the Peruvian Communist Party. The senderistas began their campaign among the impoverished Indians of the high Andes, attracting sympathizers by their emphasis on the empowerment of Indians at the expense of Peru's traditional elite. They gained control of large areas of Peru through violence and intimidation. By 1992, when Guzmán was captured and their influence began to wane, they had caused an estimated 25,000 deaths and seriously disrupted the Peruvian economy. Their new leader, Oscar Ramirez Durand, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1999.