#pcpsl

Comrade Abimael Guzmán (Chairman Gonzalo), presente!

It's reported that the former leader of the Maoist insurgency led by the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso) has died after 29 years as a political prisoner held under torturous conditions.

A lot can be said about the grave errors of the Shining Path, both theoretical and practical. But it was a powerful movement rooted in the Indigenous Andean communities and especially women. And it boldly raised the red flag at a time when the world Communist movement was in disarray during the destruction of the USSR and its socialist allies.

The U.S. backed far-right dictator Alberto Fujimori to the hilt with money, weapons and CIA advisors to destroy the Shining Path insurgency, along with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).

Today U.S. imperialism is still scheming with the Peruvian oligarchy and state to undermine the reformist Pedro Castillo administration. Their deep fear of a revolutionary resurgence is what drives the imperialists and their Peruvian agents, no matter how much the current movement tries to distance itself from Peru's past struggles.

Working-class history will ultimately judge Abimael Guzmán's legacy. I think it will be more positive than negative.

By Greg Butterfield

From 1980 until the mid-1990s, the Maoist PCP-SL, better known as the Shining Path in the U.S., waged a revolutionary guerrilla war against the Peruvian capitalist oligarchy and its imperialist masters in Washington and Wall Street. A parallel guerrilla struggle was fought by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a pro-Cuba Marxist-Leninist movement.