Abimael Guzmán, Leader of Guerrilla Group That Terrorized Peru, Dies at 86

Abimael Guzmán, the founder and leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, which spread terror across much of Peru in the 1980s and ’90s, died on Saturday in Peru. He was 86.

Mr. Guzmán died in a maximum-security prison in the Callao naval base in Peru, where he was serving a life sentence, prison officials said. They said he died of health complications but did not specify an exact cause.

An estimated 70,000 Peruvians were killed during the decade-long peak of the Shining Path insurgency, at least one-third at the hands of guerrillas. Shining Path advocated a violent reordering of society away from the vices of urban life. Its leaders echoed Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge with warnings that “rivers of blood” would flow after their victory, and that as many as one million Peruvians might be put to death.

Shining Path was almost entirely Mr. Guzmán’s conception, and for a time he seemed poised to seize power in one of Latin America’s most important countries. His avowedly Maoist movement was one of the most violently radical in the hemisphere’s modern history, and his fertile mind and extraordinary powers of persuasion laid the basis for an intense personality cult.

Like many of his generation in Latin America, Mr. Guzmán was thrilled with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary victory in Cuba in 1959. Later, however, he came to scorn Castro, the Soviet Union and even moderate factions in China.

Mr. Guzmán visited China several times. He came away with the vision of a Peru without money, banks, industry or foreign trade, where everyone would be a landholder and live from barter.

Both of Peru’s main Communist parties expelled him, but he developed a devoted coterie of students and professors.

“He was a very charismatic teacher, with a florid rhetorical style that really attracted students,” the political scientist David Scott Palmer said in 2013. “He became so strong partly because of 17 years of preparation, and partly because government missteps created conditions favorable to revolution.”

(Professor Palmer was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s and shared an office at San Cristóbal of Huamanga National University in Ayacucho, Peru, with Mr. Guzmán, who was then a faculty member. Professor Palmer died in 2018.)

Shining Path carried out its first violent actions in 1980, including the bombing of polling places and the takeover of town halls in remote villages. One morning in December, people in Lima, the capital, awoke to the sight of dead dogs hanging from dozens of lampposts. Around the neck of each was a placard with a slogan referring to factional struggle within the Chinese Communist Party.

This was the first sign of the phantasmagorical savagery that was about to descend on Peru. Mr. Guzmán, calling himself President Gonzalo, proclaimed himself the “Fourth Sword of Communism,” after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He preached “Gonzalo Thought,” which he said would bring the world to a “higher stage of Marxism.”

“When the Shining Path took up arms, the attempt seemed a doomed effort to graft the Chinese experience onto the entirely different Peruvian culture,” the Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti wrote. “To most…