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 <named-content
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Peruvian Communist party, the Shining Path turned to terrorism in 1980. By the mid-1980s it
had several thousand guerrillas, largely in rural central and S 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 experienced a minor
resurgence from 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. In 2012 the government claimed to have defeated a remnant
group operating in central Peru; other remnants remained in S
Peru.
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