Abimael Guzmán’s death leaves several questions for Peru

FOR A DOZEN years from 1980 a malign, invisible presence haunted Peru, acquiring ever greater menace. Abimael Guzmán, a Marxist philosopher who created a shadowy terrorist army called Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), ordered massacres, murders, car bombs and the destruction of police stations. Yet he never appeared in public. His capture in 1992, through old-fashioned detective work, meant he spent the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. By the time he died, on September 11th, aged 86, many Peruvians had little memory of him. His death leaves several unanswered questions.

Sendero was unlike any other guerrilla movement in Latin America. Mr Guzmán was inspired by Maoist China, which he visited twice during the Cultural Revolution, rather than Cuba. He founded Sendero as a splinter of a splinter of the Peruvian Communist Party in Ayacucho, the capital of an impoverished region in the Andes where he taught at the university. He recruited his students, most of them women; many became teachers who, once qualified, fanned out to schools in towns and villages. Just as Peru was returning to democracy, he launched his Maoist “protracted people’s war to surround the cities from the countryside”. To avoid dependence on outsiders, Sendero’s weapons were machetes, stones and dynamite, until they stole guns from the security forces....