Abimael Guzman

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reinoso (Mollendo, Arequipa, December 3, 1934-Callao, September 11, 2021), also known by the nom de guerre «comrade or President Gonzalo", was a Peruvian philosophy professor and terrorist, founder and top leader of the Communist Party of Peru-Sendero Luminoso, a revolutionary anti-revisionist communist party and armed group of Maoist ideology founded in 1970 and active in Peru, which gave rise to the "internal armed conflict" unleashed in the country between 1980 and 2000.

Denounced on terrorism charges, Guzmán was captured on September 12, 1992 in a residence in the Surquillo district in the city of Lima, through an operation carried out by the Special Intelligence Group (GEIN) of the National Directorate against Terrorism (DIRCOTE) commanded by General Ketín Vidal, of the Peruvian National Police. Guzmán was sentenced for terrorism crimes by a faceless military court to life imprisonment. Said sentence was annulled in 2003 by the Peruvian Constitutional Court, which considered unconstitutional several presidential decrees that authorized the execution of secret trials.

When Guzmán, along with other members of the Shining Path high command, was being held at the Peruvian Navy naval base in Callao, he was subjected to a new judicial process. This took place between September 2005 and October 2006, which ended with the sentencing of Abimael Guzmán to life imprisonment. Guzmán and Sendero Luminoso used violence against peasants, union leaders, and officials they considered collaborators with the Peruvian state. Sendero Luminoso is considered a terrorist organization by the United States government, the Canadian government, and the European Union. The first two also prohibit the provision of funds or other financial support to this group by the citizens of these countries. countries.

His death occurred while he was serving a sentence in the Maximum Security Detention Center of the Callao Naval Base.

Childhood and youth

She was born in Mollendo, a port city in the province of Islay, in the Peruvian region of Arequipa. He was the natural son of Abimael Guzmán Silva, an accountant who had 10 children with different women, and Berenice Reinoso Cervantes. Born from an occasional relationship, his father recognized him twelve days after he was born Guzmán studied at a school in the port of Mollendo where he learned to read and write. In 1940, he embarked with his mother to Sicuani due to the relationship that Berenice began with a Palestinian merchant. However, the Palestinian merchant did not accept Abimael, so in 1942 his mother left Sicuani with Abimael for Arequipa and in Arequipa they took a bus to Chimbote. In Chimbote, Abimael's mother left him in the care of his grandfather, leaving her to return to Sicuani. In Chimbote, Abimael would join a watchmaking workshop as an assistant. Due to a request from his mother, Abimael was transferred to Callao to that he could resume his studies. In 1944, Abimael would restart his studies at the Alberto Secada Sotomayor school living in the house of his mother's brother. In 1948, he would enter the Dos de Mayo National College. The following year, he underwent emergency surgery for peritonitis at the Daniel Alcides Carrión Hospital.

In 1949, under pressure from a cousin of his father, Abimael left Callao for Arequipa, where he helped his father with accounting tasks. He lived there with his father and his wife Laura Lorquera Gómez de Guzmán. He studied high school at Colegio La Salle. After finishing school, Abimael decided to apply to the Army Infantry School, but, at the age of 19, he began his higher studies in Law and Philosophy at the National University of San Agustín (UNSA), in Arequipa, where he would be student representative of the Faculty of Letters. His classmates would later describe him as shy, disciplined, obsessive and ascetic. Attracted by Marxism, his political thought was influenced by the book Seven essays on the interpretation of Peruvian reality by José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, at the same time that he defended Joseph Stalin in ideological disputes.. In addition, he read the "Communist Manifesto" (from Marx and Engels), "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" (from Lenin), "The State and the Revolution" (from Lenin), "What to do" (from Lenin), "The Foundations of Leninism" (of Stalin), "The New Democracy" (from Mao), "Anti-Dühring" (from Engels), "Capital" (by Marx), among other Marxist books. He applied for affiliation to the Arequipa Communist Party, driven mainly by the Arequipa uprising he witnessed, but was not accepted. On the other hand, he was part of the cultural group & #34;Man and World".

He had a relationship with a young widow and later with a young woman from Arequipa, however, the young woman's father broke off the relationship. Abimael would see her again a few months later at a party but the reunion between the two would end abruptly. In 1958, he helped his teacher Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Rivas in the inventory of damage after the earthquake in Arequipa that year. Rodríguez Rivas would be the in charge of introducing Abimael Guzmán to philosophy and reading Marxist books.

In Arequipa, Guzmán completed bachelor's degrees in Law and Philosophy at the National University of San Agustín. His theses were titled The Bourgeois Democratic State and On Kant's Theory of Space . The juries for his thesis in Philosophy were Manuel Zevallos Vera, Gustavo Quintanilla Paulet, Antero Peralta, Walter Garaycochea and Enrique Azálgara Ballón. Guzmán would dedicate his thesis to Rodríguez Rivas and it would be based on Marxist postulates for its elaboration. Upon finishing his studies, was a clerk in a law firm. He participated in disputes within the UNSA to remove professors of non-Marxist ideology from the university and incorporate Marxist professors. He also participated in the formation of the National Liberation Front (FLN), although he opposed the use of that name for the elections in 1962.

Teacher

Illustration of the Shining Path in which Abimael Guzman is seen as the "fourth sword of communism."

In 1962 Guzmán was hired as a professor of philosophy by the rector of the San Cristóbal de Huamanga National University (UNSCH), in Ayacucho, a city located in the center of the Peruvian Andes. At that time he was known as "Comrade Álvaro". The rector of the UNSCH was Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist who some consider the true intellectual leader of Sendero Luminoso Álvaro Villavicencio). At Morote's initiative, Guzmán studied Quechua, a language spoken by most of the Andean population prior to Spanish colonization; at the same time he became active in left-wing political circles. Morote also promoted the entry of politicized professors from the Enrique Guzmán y Valle University "La Cantuta" to UNSCH. Under the impulse of the "cantuteros" The Guamán Poma de Ayala Application Schools would be created in 1964, where Guzmán would come to indoctrinate various students, highlighting the future terrorist Edith Lagos. In addition, Guzmán would be Director of the Basic Cycle of General Studies and would manage to have influence in the Faculty of Education and in the Revolutionary Student Front (FER). He was also a member of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party and organizer of the Ayacucho Communist Youth. As part of his activities in student circles, he would make the UNSCH host the IX Congress of Students of the Peru, held in 1963, as well as leading the expulsion of the Peace Corps, an American organization, from the UNSCH. It attracted other like-minded academics committed to making the Marxist revolution in Peru. He visited the People's Republic of China for the first time in 1965, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, requesting leave from the UNSCH citing illness. On the trip to Maoist China he would pass through Switzerland, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union. While in China, he would receive ideological training at the Peking School and at the Nanking School he would receive military training. After serving as chief of staff at the San Cristóbal de Huamanga University, Guzmán left the institution in the mid-1960s and spent to the clandestine

In the 1960s the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP) split over ideological and personal disputes. Guzmán, who had taken a Maoist position, emerged as the leader of the faction known as the "Peruvian Communist Party: for the Shining Path of Mariátegui," named after Mariátegui's phrase: "Marxism- Leninism is the bright path of the future». He adopted the alias comrade Gonzalo and began advocating for a peasant-led Maoist revolution. His Peruvian followers declared that Guzmán was the "fourth sword of communism" after Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. In his political pronouncements, Guzmán praised the way in which the Chinese communist leader had developed the Leninist theses about the role of imperialism in the development of the bourgeois capitalist system. He maintained that imperialism “lately creates disturbances and fails, only to generate them again and fail again; and so on until its final ruin, which will take place in the next 50 or 100 years». In his conception, Mao applied this law not only to US imperialism, but also to "Soviet social imperialism."

As for religion, he did not profess any and always considered himself an atheist and a materialist. Like Marx, he saw religion as the opium of the people, and understood it as "a social phenomenon that is the product of exploitation and that will gradually become extinct." as exploitation is swept away and a new society emerges."

In January 1979, during a strike called by the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) against the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, Guzmán was arrested in Lima at the home of his father-in-law Carlos La Torre for supposedly to be a participant in the strike. At that moment, non-commissioned officer Pablo Aguirre, belonging to the State Security Directorate, appeared to speak with Guzmán. Guzmán told him that "you know very well that I am not involved in these things. What are we going to get out of the strikes?" and that although they were on their way to start the armed struggle "it depends on the masses when we are going to start. Guzmán's relatives and some members of Sendero Luminoso met with attorney Laura Caller, and she recommended a lawyer named Horacio Alvarado. Through various contacts and legal actions, Guzmán obtained his release a few days later.

Activity in Sendero Luminoso (1979-1992)

Shining Path Cartel celebrating five years People's War, you can appreciate the image of Abimael Guzmán holding the banner adopted by the revolutionary group.

In its beginnings, Sendero Luminoso was limited to academic circles in Peruvian universities. However, in the late 1970s, the movement became a subversive group centered in Ayacucho. On May 17, 1980, the group proclaimed the beginning of the armed struggle against the Peruvian State. His first action was the burning of electoral ballots in Chuschi, a town near Ayacucho, with the purpose of breaking into the first elections held in Peru since 1963 due to the interruption of democracy by the military government. Subsequently, Sendero Luminoso grew to control vast rural territories in the center and south of the country, even having a presence in areas near Lima where they perpetrated numerous terrorist attacks. The purpose of Sendero's armed campaign was to demoralize and undermine the Peruvian government and people in order to create a situation conducive to a coup that would bring the terrorists to power.

Shining Path not only attacked the Peruvian Armed Forces and police, but also civilians from all social classes, government employees at all levels, and other leftist militants such as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), workers who They did not participate in the strikes and armed stoppages organized by the subversive group and peasants who collaborated with the Peruvian Government in any way (including voting in the elections). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that the internal armed conflict in Peru claimed the lives of more than 77,000 people, 54% at the hands of Sendero Luminoso, 1% by the MRTA and 45% by the Armed Forces, the police forces, or the government-supported armed rondas of peasants. A 2019 study questioned the figures of victims of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, estimating instead "a total of 48,000 murders, substantially less than CVR estimation" and concluding that "the Peruvian State has a significantly greater participation than Sendero Luminoso."

Sendero Luminoso promoted the ideas and writings of Abimael Guzmán under the name "Gonzalo Thought", a development of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the aim of achieving their application in Peru. In 1989 "Gonzalo" He declared that Sendero Luminoso had progressed from being a guerrilla to waging a "war of movements." He added that this was the next step to achieve a "strategic balance in the near future." Guzmán claimed that this balance would be manifested by ungovernability under the "old regime." At that point, Guzmán believed that the Shining Path would be ready to continue its "offensive strategy" and eventually seize power.

Capture

On September 12, 1992, the GEIN carried out Operation Victoria, breaking into a house in the Surquillo district and trapping Guzmán, Elena Iparraguirre and two other women: Laura Zambrano Padilla, in charge of collecting the dollars collected from drug traffickers for protection and María Pantoja, the third in command within the Sendero structure. The dancer Maritza Garrido-Lecca was found on the first floor of the house with her partner and some of her friends. Garrido-Lecca was taken to the headquarters of the Directorate against Terrorism (DIRCOTE) and after 15 days to a military base in La Joya, Arequipa. After her capture, the command of the organization was taken over by Óscar Ramírez Durand, captured in 1999 during Operation Siege 99.

Trial and imprisonment

Shining Path Cartel demanding its release along with Comrade Miriam of 2000.

Guzmán was tried by a military court of faceless judges (hooded so that they could not be recognized, threatened and intimidated by the terrorists) under the provisions adopted by the government of Alberto Fujimori. After a three-day trial, Guzmán was sentenced to life in prison and incarcerated at the naval base prison in Callao, near Lima, where he remained incarcerated until his death. After his arrest, Guzmán negotiated with presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos with a view to receiving certain benefits in exchange for ending the terrorist activities of Sendero Luminoso. Guzmán appeared several times on Peruvian television and in 1993 publicly declared the peace agreement with the Peruvian government. This statement divided the Senderista movement and raised questions about the future of the organization. Some accepted it as a sign of defeat, others did not accept reality and maintained that it was a false argument made under duress.

In 2003, after the fall of the Fujimorato, more than 5,000 Senderista sympathizers filed an appeal to Peru's Constitutional Court asking that the verdicts against Guzmán and 1,800 other prisoners convicted of terrorist activities be annulled. The court agreed, declared the military trial unconstitutional, and ordered a new trial to be held in civilian courts. Guzmán would be tried again the following year.

The new trial of Abimael Guzmán began on November 5, 2004. After the three judges, Dante Terrel, Carlos Manrique and José de Vinatea, failed to prevent Guzmán from turning the preliminary hearing into a rally by shouting political slogans and gesturing defiantly at onlookers, many politicians and members of the press accused them of being too lenient towards the terrorist leader. Two of them withdrew. The third trial began in September 2005, with a sentence being handed down on October 13, 2006 and Guzmán being sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of "terrorism against the State".

The political ideas of Abimael Guzmán are compiled in his book People's War in Peru. Gonzalo thought.

Guzmán served his sentence in the Callao naval base prison, as did his wife Elena Iparraguirre ("Comrade Marián"), his second-in-command in the organization Comrade Artemio; in addition to other important and dangerous prisoners such as Víctor Polay Campos, founder of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and Vladimiro Montesinos (former presidential adviser to Alberto Fujimori). Abimael Guzmán did not ask for forgiveness or public apologies to the victims of the terrorism that he initiated in Peru.

Posts

Books

• About the Kantian Space Theory1961.
• Democratic state - bourgeois1961.
• For the New Flag1981.
• Poems: Time of War1989.
• Interview with President Gonzalo1989. Translated into English in 1989 and 1991.
• People's War in Peru: Gonzalo Thought1989.
• President Gonzalo breaks the silence: a historic necessity at the service of the people1989.
• About the rectification campaign with the document "Elecciones, no! Popular war, yes!"1994
• Punch and lyrics2009.
• Memories from Némesis, in co-authorship with Elena Yparraguirre Revoredo, published in 2014.

Death

Cartel in Porto Alegre, Brazil in honor of Abimael Guzmán on October 14, 2021. He says in Portuguese "Honor and eternal glory to President Gonzalo."

On July 13, 2021, he was treated by the Ministry of Health since he did not want to eat. An ultrasound and blood tests were performed. A few days later, on July 17, he was transferred to a hospital to be monitored.

He died on Saturday, September 11, 2021 at the age of 86 in the Maximum Security Detention Center of the Callao Naval Base, at approximately 6:40 local time (01:40 UTC) due to " complications in his state of health", according to a statement issued by the detention center itself and released by the National Penitentiary Institute. His death occurred one day before commemorating 29 years of his capture in the so-called Operation Victoria.

According to the record of the removal of the body, his body was found in a supine position on the clinical bed of his cell. The autopsy, carried out in the Morgue of Callao, determined that he died due to bilateral pneumonia caused by an agent pathological. DNA, dactyloscopic and anthropological tests were carried out to confirm his identity. There were even congressmen who went to the morgue to confirm whether or not it was him.

On September 17, 2021, Law No. 31352 was published in the official newspaper El Peruano, which modifies the General Health Law of Peru in order to cremate his body and disperse his remains in an unknown location.

His remains were secretly cremated at dawn on September 24, 2021, in the crematorium of the Callao Naval Hospital.

Reactions

The then Peruvian President Pedro Castillo spoke through his social networks confirming the death of Guzmán and ratifying his government's "firm position condemning terrorism". Hours later, and through his Twitter account, the Minister of Labor, Iber Maraví, commented that he supported the president's pronouncement. The Minister of Health, Hernando Cevallos, told the local press that he regretted the death of Guzmán "like that of any person in the country" and said that "No one can applaud the death of someone regardless of their past." The Minister of the Interior, Juan Carrasco, told the press that "today the greatest genocide in the entire history of Peru has died" and affirmed that the Government will be " incisive against those remnants of terrorism that remain in the country". The Minister of Defense, Walter Ayala, stated that the Government will continue with the "frontal fight against terrorism". The head of Justice, Aníbal Torres, reminded the population that "paying tribute to him, holding mobilizations in memory of Abimael, is an apology for terrorism and that they can be prosecuted for this reason." The Minister of Economy, Pedro Francke, expressed through his Twitter that Guzmán's death "will not erase their crimes."

The former president of Congress, Maricarmen Alva, stated that she thinks of the victims of terrorism and the debt that the State owes them. Along the same lines, the vice president, Lady Camones, said that "the greatest genocidal terrorist in the history of our country. Today, [...] we say out loud again: terrorism never again!". Peru Libre issued a statement stating that they condemn "terrorist actions in all their dimensions, especially those of Sendero Luminoso" and that Guzmán's death should serve as a to "initiate a stage of national reconciliation". Congressman Jorge Montoya highlighted that Guzmán's human rights were respected, while he violated those of thousands of Peruvians. Days later, he stated that he would promote a bill so that "the dead terrorists are cremated and their ashes sent to the bottom of the sea".

The leader of Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, said that "Abimael and Sendero Luminoso will not die as long as the State does not take definitive measures." On the other hand, the general secretary of Peru Libre, Vladimir Cerrón, considered that the The country must reflect on "whether the causes of subversive and State terrorism have disappeared or are maintained." Former President Francisco Sagasti indicated through his social networks that Guzmán had represented the darkest chapter of horror and blood in history. from Peru.

In popular culture

The 1995 novel The Dancer Upstairs and the 2002 film of the same title are loosely based on the capture of Guzmán living in the house of dance teacher Maritza Garrido Lecca in Lima. The character of "President Ezequiel" It is based on Guzman.

Max Collini and Arturo Bertoldi, members of the Italian band "Spartiti," wrote a song called "Sendero Luminoso" that satirically transcribes a document written in the mid-1980s by dissidents of the group youth of the Italian Communist Party. In this document, Guzmán is described as the new political leader of a rising internationalist movement.