Shining Path

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 persisted, however, continuing its attacks on a smaller scale, and has experienced a resurgence in growth since 2007, when it became involved in protecting the illegal cocaine trade. 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.

Shining Path (Spanish, Sendero Luminoso) Peruvian left-wing terrorist group, active from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. The Shining Path gained notoriety for the violence of its campaign against the Peruvian government, which claimed some 28,000 lives. Founded in 1970 by a philosophy professor, Abimael Guzmán, the movement adopted the revolutionary principles of Mao Zedong; its many recruits came both from universities and from the disadvantaged Amerindian peoples of the Andes. From 1980 it attacked projects established by foreign aid agencies in rural areas, but later moved to the major cities. The emergency powers taken by President Alberto Fujimori in 1992, in an attempt to stem political violence, led in the first place to increased guerrilla activity, especially against local politicians, but resulted in the capture and sentencing of Guzmán to life imprisonment in September of that year. Following the arrest of their leader, who called for a cessation of fighting, some 6000 Shining Path members took advantage of a government amnesty and surrendered. Isolated pockets of resistance remain in more remote areas (where the group has murdered Amazonian Indians opposed to their campaign).