Abimael Guzman, founder and leader of the Shining Path rebels who nearly toppled the Peruvian state in a bloody Maoist revolution, died in prison at the age of 86
Guzman was captured in 1992 in Lima and jailed for the rest of his life after being convicted as a terrorist. He died one day before the anniversary of his capture, when he was paraded in front of the press in a striped white and black uniform that is not normally used in Peru.
A former philosophy professor, Guzman was a lifelong communist who traveled to China in the late 1960s and was awed by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. He resolved to bring Mao's brand of communism to Peru through a class war that he launched in 1980 on the day that Peru held its first democratic elections following over a decade of military dictatorship.
In 1980, after years of preparation, Guzman, a former university professor, led a band of supporters into the Andes Mountains outside the town of Ayacucho. People in the capital city of Lima got their first taste of the Shining Path in 1981 when guerrillas hung dozens of dead dogs from lampposts - "the dogs of capitalism," said signs pinned to the animals.
Shining Path propaganda posters showed the bespectacled Guzman towering over peasant masses and guerrilla armies, pointing with one hand and holding Mao's revolutionary "Little Red Book" in the other.
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