Sendero Luminoso

The Communist Party of Peru (Spanish: Partido Comunista del Perú), more commonly known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), is a Maoist guerrilla organization in Peru that launched the internal conflict in Peru in 1980. The more familiar name distinguishes the group from several other Peruvian communist parties with similar names (see Communism in Peru). It originates from a maxim of José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the original Peruvian Communist Party in the 1920s: "El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución" (“Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”).[1] This maxim was featured in the masthead of the newspaper of a Shining Path front group, and Peruvian communist groups are often distinguished by the names of their publications. The followers of the group are generally called senderistas. All documents, periodicals and other materials produced by the organization are signed by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP). Academics refer to them as PCP-SL. Shining Path's stated goal is to replace Peruvian bourgeois institutions with a communist peasant revolutionary regime, presumably passing first through the Maoist developmental stage of New Democracy. They claimed to understand the reality of the Peruvian society. The Inca society, which was destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores, contained the pre-Conquest Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyo which, according to Mariátegui, contained a kind of primitive communist society. The senderistas hoped that the future would combine revolutionary Marxism with the society of the Incas. ‘A new path of arms’ was expected to lead Peru towards a transformed society that served its people. Since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992, it has only been sporadically active.[2] Shining Path's ideology and tactics have been influential on other Maoist insurgent groups, notably the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations. Widely condemned for its brutality,[3][4] including violence deployed against peasants, trade UNIОN organizers, popularly elected officials and the general civilian population,[5] Shining Path is regarded by Peru as a terrorist organization. The group is on the U.S. Department of State's "Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations" list,[6] and the European UNIОN[7] and Canada[8] likewise regard them as a terrorist organization and prohibit providing funding or other financial support.