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PERU-POLITICS-REBELS
Shining Path leader gets second life sentence in Peru
LIMA, Sept 12, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Peru’s Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman, already serving a life sentence, was sentenced to a second life term on Tuesday, for a 1992 car bombing in Lima that killed 25 people.
Three judges on the National Criminal Court issued life sentences for Guzman as well as nine other leaders of the Maoist insurgency.
The trial for the case — famous for alarming people in the capital who were not used it it being so close to home — took 20 months. The sentencing, a six-hour hearing, was broadcast on live television.
When the terrorist group launched its campaign in 1980, its goal was to overthrow the government in Lima and installing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” on the way to global communism.
Since authorities captured Guzman in 1992, the group’s activities declined sharply. Former president Alberto Fujimori took a famously tough line against them.
The Peruvian army was at the time notorious for human rights violations, and some rural farmers thought there might be more peace with the rebels.
In the end Fujimori allowed local self-defense groups to take aim at the Shining Path.
A 2003 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that 69,280 people were killed in two decades of armed conflict — 1980 to 2000. It found the insurgency responsible for just under half the killings, 31,331.
A third were killed by govrenment security forces and local militias. The rest were not attributed.
BSS/AFP/AU/07:15 hrs