Nicholas Shakespeare

The thoughts of Chairman Gonzalo

When Nicholas Shakespeare wrote his Shining Path novel, he attributed characteristics to its leader which no member of the public knew. They proved spot-on

issue 01 June 2019

Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a wrecked country. Modern Lima, by and large, is a thriving city of five-star restaurants, shopping malls and newish Toyotas. Yet between 1980 and 1992 it was a vile and violent place, under siege from a revolutionary movement that modelled itself on Mao, Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha, and which venerated its leader as these men’s planetary heir. If anything, Sendero Luminoso was a precursor of Isis, with its child-suicide bombs, its rigid code of secrecy and its cultish devotion to a short, bearded, chubby figurehead who believed that ‘violence is a universal law’.

About this ‘maximum leader’ — the Fourth Sword of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism — tantalisingly little was known. Private, dogmatic, self-serious to a clownish degree, Abimael Guzmán was the illegitimate son of a womanising sugar-plantation manager. He had written his dissertation on Kant, and was a philosophy professor at San Cristóbal University in the remote Andean city of Ayacucho when, in 1980, he fell off the radar.

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