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Peruvian Rebel Group Finds New Life

Shining Path kinder, gentler and more ideologically muddled, but still deadly

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Nov 12, 2008 2:38 PM CST

(Newser) – All but forgotten, Peru's Shining Path guerrilla group has again become a force to be reckoned with, killing more people in October than it had in any month since the 1990s, the Washington Post reports in a look at its secretive ranks. Today’s drug-financed Path leans more liberal narcoterrorist than fire-breathing Maoist, having shed some of the brutal ways of founder Abimael Guzmán, who believed the path to power required killing 10% of the country's people.

Since his 1992 imprisonment, Shining Path has instead protected villages, targeting mainly military and anti-drug authorities; its dogma has become pro-worker liberalism. “The Shining Path is working as if it were a company,” said Peru’s vice-president. “They have been contaminated with the capitalism of drug trafficking.”

[Images (3)]

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Peruvian soldiers, survivors of Shining Path ambush, rest at a military hospital in Lima, Oct. 11, 2008. (AP Photo)

Peru's Minister of Interior Luis Alva Castro, second from right, shows a weapons seized to Shining Path rebels, Nov. 27, 2007. (AP Photo)

Police officers patrol after clashing with Shining Path rebels in the jungle of Huanuco, Peru, Nov. 27, 2007. (AP Photo)

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I would say that the Shining Path of today has something of an ideology, because they have not lost it, but they have been contaminated with the capitalism of drug trafficking. - Luis Giampetri Rojas,
vice president of Peru

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Peruvian Rebel Group Finds New Life