Abimael Guzmán, in a 2004 image Mariana Bazo / Reuters
Exactly 29 years ago, I was riding in a taxi to a bar in the center of Lima when the radio broadcast the news: the Peruvian police had captured Abimael Guzmán.
I will never forget that moment.
The taxi driver and I were so happy that we hugged.
We laugh like old friends.
He even gave me a discount.
We were united as a family bond with the hope of a country without car bombs, without blackouts due to the explosion of electrical towers, without knife massacres, without dynamited corpses, without dogs hanging from poles.
Under Guzmán's leadership, the identity of the Shining Path terrorist group was chilling.
Their attacks not only pursued the destruction of their objectives, but the panic of all of us who were left alive.
More than 30,000 people were killed with these methods.
Whenever they could, the killers left posters on the bodies specifying the reasons for their deaths.
So that no one would think of repeating them.
Incredible as it may seem, Guzmán was not physically capable of performing any of these actions.
He did not participate in military confrontations.
In the house where he was captured, there were not even weapons.
His work was completely intellectual.
He started the day by reading the newspapers and watching the news.
Based on that information, he calculated where he could find outbreaks of popular discontent.
He asked his hosts for reports on the ground, which he processed with his team, like an office of terror.
He then planned campaigns to capture those disaffected and take control of their communities, unions, or student federations.
Generally, to achieve this, it was necessary to eliminate the leaders, mayors or any type of authority.
With this system, adapted from Mao's strategy in China, Guzmán came to control a third of the national territory.
He did not give speeches or appear on television.
In fact, for years, he was believed dead.
But it was the only power, the true government in much of the Peruvian Sierra.
If he wasn't a gunman, he wasn't poor either.
Or not exactly.
Guzmán was the son of a class abuse.
Of a right of pernada.
His father was a prosperous Arequipa farmer.
His mother, a woman without resources, perhaps a peasant woman, or a street vendor, who could not take care of the child and abandoned him.
Luckily for him - not ours - Guzmán was welcomed into his father's home, along with many of his other illegitimate children.
As a member of a wealthy family, he attended a religious college and studied two majors.
But he had no right to inherit anything, and therefore could not root in the social class around him.
The resulting cocktail was lethal: the rage of the poor coupled with the academic training of the rich.
Naturally, his strategy was to spread that condition around him. During the 1960s, he became chief of staff of the Department of Education at the San Cristóbal de Huamanga University, Ayacucho. From there, he radiated Maoist teachers to schools throughout the Sierra Sur. By the time the armed struggle began, in 1980, it had trained an entire generation of young people.
Guzmán's students were ready to kill. But his boss refused to buy weapons, so as not to depend on other guerrillas or States. So sometimes, they killed melee, with stones or knives, which pushed them beyond the threshold of savagery. Besides, those boys believed at all costs that they would succeed. And therefore, they were not afraid of dying. Abimael had told them of the "quota of blood" they had to offer to change history. In their opinion, death only made them heroes.
The Sendero organization system strengthened this aspect. If an attack went wrong, it couldn't be the fault of the police, logistics or bad luck. The members of the command organized an assembly and blamed the comrade in charge, for having allowed his fear, his incapacity or his
individualism to
spoil the plan.
From a strategic point of view - assuming the goal is to blow the state to pieces - Guzmán was clever. It overcame the failures of the Cuban guerrilla, which had failed over and over again in the Andean region, gained independence from any external interference, and put Peru in check in a way that no other guerrilla on the continent outside of Cuba or Nicaragua did. But that same coldness made him insensitive to the intolerable levels of suffering he was producing, no longer in the powerful elite of the capital, but in the peasants themselves whom he claimed to defend. The defeat of the Shining Path was not only due to the fall of its leader, but also to the abandonment of its rural bases, peasants and indigenous people fed up with their extreme violence and fanaticism.
Now, the biggest retaining wall against Guzmán was not the police or the army, but the public services. In reality, Sendero only managed to grow where the State did not exist. What happens is that that space was very wide. I have already said that he put teachers where there were none, even if they were fanatical teachers, because there was nothing to compare them with. He also held trials where there were no judges, to prosecute rapists and cattle rustlers. And he offered a militia to the population. Where the Armed Forces confused the peasants with communists and indiscriminately repressed them, they unwittingly legitimized that militia.
For the inhabitants of the coast, or of the Sierra Norte, for the Peruvians of 40 years later, for myself, the Senderista order would be a hellish nightmare, a mixture of authoritarianism, prudery and pure cruelty.
For many rural Peruvians in the 1980s, he was the only one.
The alternative was the law of the fittest.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to talk with students from a public school in Ayacucho, a few streets from where Abimael had begun to form his troop.
The children there greeted me in Spanish, Quechua and a little English.
They taught me songs and pictures about the history of our country.
Those who were over eleven years old asked me questions about my books, and about others by Peruvian authors who spoke about their history.
Some discovered texts that I myself did not know.
That day was as exciting for me as that other, in the taxi in 1992. Because if a school like that had existed long before, Sendero would never have been able to grow.
He would have died of suffocation.
Guzmán knew how to take advantage of all the spaces that the state left empty, and in particular, that of the minds of young people.
If we want to defeat people like him, that is where we must fight.
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