LIMA, Peru (AP) — Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness. Even so, Castillo has faced criticism over alleged links of some of his Cabinet ministers to the Shining Path. Last week, a media outlet made public police records from the 1980s that describe Labor Minister Iber Maraví as a Shining Path member and a fugitive. “Unlike other leftwing insurgent groups in the region, (the Shining Path) targeted civilians and actively sought to terrorize them, both in the cities and in the countryside,” Noam Lupu, associate director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, said in an email about Shining Path. In its songs and slogans, the Shining Path celebrated bloodletting, describing death as necessary to “irrigate” the revolution.

Source: thestar September 11, 2021 15:22 UTC