PERU: Peru sentences Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman to life in prison for terrorism

A Peruvian court sentenced Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman to life in a maximum security prison after finding him guilty of aggravated terrorism on Friday (October 13). Official figures say the group was responsible for the deaths of 31,331 people between 1980 and 2000. The 71-year-old looked calm during the 7-hour sentencing hearing and made no public comments after hearing the verdict of his retrial. Before the trial got underway, a small group of protesters gathered outside the courthouse chanting anti-Guzman slogans and holding up banners. "Life imprisonment is abolished. However, they can apply it. For us, the problem isn't what penalty they will apply because my sponsors are willing to accept whatever comes. They are planting a political solution to the problems that come from the war," said Guzman's lawyer Manuel Fajarado. In 1992, Guzman was sentenced to life in prison but, after the draconian anti-terror laws that sent him to jail were repealed, Peru's top court annulled his previous life sentence and ordered this civil trial. His lover and Shining Path Number Two, Elena Iparraguirre, was also sentenced to life in prison on Friday. Guzman founded the Maoist group that sought to install a communist regime in Peru through a "popular war." The revolution began on the eve of Peru's return to democracy after 12 years of military dictatorship, when the Shining Path burnt election ballot boxes in the Andean town of Chuschi. Guzman called on his followers to cross a "river of blood" in the name of revolution, and kill 10 percent of the population. The group's worst atrocities included the massacre of 69 people, including 22 children, in the village of Lucanamarca in 1983, and the 1992 van bombing of an apartment block in a Lima suburb, which killed 25. Guzman was in hiding for years during the height of the violence, but two months after the fatal van bomb attack in Lima police received a tip on his whereabouts and arrested him with Iparraguirre. After his arrest, Guzman was paraded by the authorities like a beast in a cage, before being sentenced to jail for life in 1992 by a hooded military judge at a secret trial. The face of the short, steely-eyed former professor eventually disappeared from the public eye for over a decade, and the strength of his following whittled into insignificance. The Shining Path still remains on the U.S. government's list of terrorist groups, and several hundred die-hard members are holed up in Andean and jungle areas. But police and drug experts say most members of the Shining Path are now linked with the increasingly lucrative drugs trade in what is the world's second largest cocaine producer after Colombia. Guzman was born in Mollendo, a port town some 1000 km south of Lima, the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant, who had six children by three different women. Guzman's mother died when he was only five years old. He studied at a private Catholic secondary school, and became interested in communism and Marxism while studying philosophy at the San Agustín National University. He befriended several like-minded young academics committed to bringing about revolution in Peru, and visited the People's Republic of China for the first time in 1965. Guzman rejects charges of terrorism, saying all those killed by the Shining Path were the victims of a legitimate war. In 2003, the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the number dead or missing from the violence between the government and the Shining Path was 70,000. Former President Alberto Fujimori, whose administration captured Guzman and led the government efforts against his group, is also sought by the justice system on charges of human rights violations related to his crackdown. Fujimori, who is currently in Chile, said the crackdown was a necessary response to the Shining Path violence. PROFILES BACKGROUND FEATURES

ITN Source | October 14, 2006

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