Abimael Guzmán

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (3 December 1934 − 11 September 2021 ), also known by his nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo (Presidente Gonzalo), was a Peruvian Maoist guerrilla leader and terrorist.

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso was born on 3 December 1934 in Mollendo, a port town in the province of Islay, in the region of Arequipa, about 1000 km south of Lima.

He was the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant, who had eight children by five different women.

Guzmán's mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when he was five.

At Arequipa, Guzmán completed bachelor's degrees in philosophy and law.

His dissertations were titled The Kantian Theory of Space and The Bourgeois Democratic State.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Guzmán was a professor of philosophy active in far-left politics strongly influenced by Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism.

He developed an ideology of armed struggle stressing the empowerment of the Indigenous people.

In the 1960s, the Peruvian Communist Party had splintered over ideological and personal disputes.

Guzmán, who had taken a pro-Chinese rather than pro-Soviet line, emerged as the leader of the faction which came to be known as the "Shining Path" (Mariátegui wrote once: "Marxism–Leninism is the shining path of the future").

Guzmán adopted the nom de guerre Presidente or Comrade Gonzalo and began advocating a peasant-led revolution on the Maoist model.

His followers declared Guzmán, who cultivated anonymity, to be the "Fourth Sword of Communism" (after Marx, Lenin, and Mao).

In his political declarations, Guzmán praised Mao's development of Lenin's thesis regarding "the role of imperialism" in propping up the "bourgeois capitalist system".

He claimed that imperialism ultimately "creates disruption and is unsuccessful, and it will end up in ruins in the next 50 to 100 years".

Guzmán applied this criticism not only to U.S. imperialism, but also Soviet imperialism, to what he termed as "social-imperialism" (in accordance with the Chinese stance after the Sino-Soviet split).

In 1962, Guzmán was recruited as a professor of philosophy by the rector of San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a city in the central Peruvian Andes.

The rector was Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist who some believe later became the true intellectual leader of the "Shining Path movement."

Encouraged by Morote, Guzmán studied Quechua, the language spoken by Peru's Indigenous population, and became increasingly active in left-wing political circles.

In February 1964, he married Augusta La Torre, who was instrumental in founding Shining Path.

In 1965, Guzman attended a cadre training course in China, returning to Lima and taking a leave of absence from his professorship to focus on party activism.

He visited the People's Republic of China with his then-wife Augusta La Torre for the first time in 1965.

In April 1967, Guzman led his fraction of the PCP to an international meeting in Albania, and would return to China between August and September of that same year.

This placed him in China during the Cultural Revolution, which made a large impression on him.

He attracted several like-minded young academics committed to bringing about revolution in Peru.

Guzmán was arrested twice during the 1970s because of his participation in violent riots in the city of Arequipa against the government of presidents Velasco Alvarado and Belaunde Terry.

After serving as the head of personnel for San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, Guzmán left the institution in the mid-1970s and went underground.

In the late 1970s, however, the movement developed into a guerrilla group centered around Ayacucho.

He went underground in the mid-1970s to become the leader of the Shining Path, which began "The People's War" or the "Armed Struggle" on 17 May 1980.

In May 1980, the group launched its war against the government of Peru by burning the ballot boxes in Chuschi, a village near Ayacucho, in an effort to disrupt the first democratic elections in the country since 1964.

Shining Path eventually grew to control vast rural territories in central and southern Peru and achieved a presence even in the outskirts of Lima, where it staged numerous attacks.

She died under unclear circumstances in 1988.

Guzmán and Elena Iparraguirre, a long-time lieutenant of Guzmán's and his lover, have both refused to talk about La Torre's fate since their imprisonments.

He founded the organization Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (PCP-SL) in 1969 and led a rebellion against the Peruvian government until his capture by authorities in 12 September 1992.

He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism and treason.

In the fall of 2006, while in prison, Guzmán proposed to Iparraguirre, who is also serving a life sentence in a separate prison.

After fighting for the permission to marry with a hunger strike, the couple wed in late August 2010.

Guzmán had long identified with atheism.

He agreed with Karl Marx about religion as the "opium of the people", and viewed it as a "social phenomena product of the exploitation and that will extinguish while exploitation finishes to be swept and a new society arise".

However, he pleaded respect for religious diversity and claimed religion would not be an obstacle for the armed struggle.

The Shining Path movement was at first largely confined to academic circles in Peruvian universities.