Abimael Guzmán
Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (; 3 December 1934 − 11 September 2021), also known by his nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo (), was a Peruvian Maoist guerrilla leader, considered a terrorist by various governments during his lifetime. He founded the organization Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (PCP-SL) in 1969 and led a rebellion against the Peruvian government until his capture by authorities in 12 September 1992. He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism and treason. In the 1960s and 1970s, Guzmán was a professor of philosophy active in far-left politics strongly influenced by Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism. He developed an ideology of armed struggle stressing the empowerment of the Indigenous people. He went underground in the mid-1970s to become the leader of the Shining Path, which began "The People's War" or the "Armed Struggle" on 17 May 1980. Early life Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso was born on 3 December 1934 in Mollendo, a port town in the province of Islay, in the region of Arequipa, about south of Lima. He was the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant, who had eight children by five different women. Guzmán's mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when he was five. At Arequipa, Guzmán completed bachelor's degrees in philosophy and law. His dissertations were titled The Kantian Theory of Space and The Bourgeois Democratic State. In 1962, Guzmán was recruited as a professor of philosophy by the rector of San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a city in the central Peruvian Andes. The rector was Dr. Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist who some believe later became the true intellectual leader of the "Shining Path movement." Encouraged by Morote, Guzmán studied Quechua, the language spoken by Peru's Indigenous population, and became increasingly active in left-wing political circles. In 1965, Guzman attended a cadre training course in China, returning to Lima and taking a leave of absence from his professorship to focus on party activism. In April 1967, Guzman led his fraction of the PCP to an international meeting in Albania, and would return to China between August and September of that same year. This placed him in China during the Cultural Revolution, which made a large impression on him. He attracted several like-minded young academics committed to bringing about revolution in Peru. Guzmán was arrested twice during the 1970s because of his participation in violent riots in the city of Arequipa against the government of presidents Velasco Alvarado and Belaunde Terry. He visited the People's Republic of China with his then-wife Augusta La Torre for the first time in 1965. After serving as the head of personnel for San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, Guzmán left the institution in the mid-1970s and went underground. In the 1960s, the Peruvian Communist Party had splintered over ideological and personal disputes. Guzmán, who had taken a pro-Chinese rather than pro-Soviet line, emerged as the leader of the faction which came to be known as the "Shining Path" (Mariátegui wrote once: "Marxism–Leninism is the shining