A year has passed since Abimael Guzmán, the aging leader of the Shining Path terror group, died in prison, yet the trauma he inflicted on the Andean nation continues to haunt its people and his legacy still poisons Peru’s fraught politics.
The professor-turned-messianic leader, who died aged 86, unleashed an internecine conflict that killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and 1990s. Most victims were peasants trapped between fanatical fighters bent on creating a proletarian utopia and the Peruvian armed forces’ brutal counter-attack.
