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http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s06100096.htm

ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 609, Lake Forest, CA 92609-0609 USA
Visit our web site at: www.assistnews.net -- E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com

Monday, October 16, 2006

Peru’s Shining Path head gets life
Many Christians died in the violence

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

CALLAO, PERU (ANS) -- The founder of Peru's Shining Path Maoist guerrillas has been found guilty of terrorism at a retrial and been sentenced to life imprisonment. The former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman led a 12-year rebellion in which around 70,000 people died.

Abimael Guzman (Picture from BBC website)
Abimael Guzman, famously known as “Presidente Gonzalo,” was sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism on Friday, October 13, by a Peruvian civil tribunal in the city of Callao near Lima.

After years of searching, Abimael Guzman and his partner Elena Iparraguirre were arrested in a house in the capital of Peru, Lima in 1992. After the arrest, a secret military court found both of them guilty but the verdict and life sentence were thrown out in 2003.

Television reports affirmed that many relatives of victims of the Shining Path were also present to hear the verdict in Callao.

According to sources in the Christian community in Peru, the savage killings included those of 30,000 Quechua Christians in the Ayachucho area of the Andes including 800 pastors who were murdered. The violence also has left behind more than 5,000 widows and nearly 14,000 orphaned children.

According to the BBC, the verdicts took several hours to read, and Guzman stood motionless with his arms folded as the court gave its judgment.

Ten other co-defendants were given sentences of between 24 and 35 years.

"Machetes"

Children of the Ayacucho region of Peru (Picture obtained with the help of Ayacucho Plaza Hotel)

The BBC report said, “The Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group, waged a violent campaign to overthrow the Peruvian state… Survivors from a Shining Path massacre in the Andean village of Lucanamarca, where 69 peasants were shot and hacked to death as a reprisal, gathered outside the court to demand maximum sentences for the defendants.

Ignacio Tacas, a 35-year-old farmer from the village, told the Associated Press news agency, “They killed them with machetes, stones, axes - and for those who did not die in agony in this way, they even put them into a vat of boiling water.”

The Shining Path founder said the massacre had been a response to “reactionary military action.”
The BBC report went on to say, “The insurgency provoked a state backlash by the government of former president Alberto Fujimori which was blamed for tens of thousands more deaths.

“Fujimori is currently in exile in Chile facing extradition to Peru, where prosecutors have been pursuing him on charges relating to corruption in office and human rights violation during the Shining Path crackdown.

Communist slogans

“Guzman's first trial, by a secret military court, was ruled unfair by Peru's constitutional court in 2003. His first re-trial in 2004 ended in chaos after he shouted communist slogans in his defense in front of live television cameras.

“To avoid a repeat performance, tape recorders and cameras were banned from the courtroom for this trial. However, television stations were allowed to use footage from the court's closed-circuit television cameras to broadcast Guzman's sentence live on Friday.

“The year-long hearing was held at the high-security naval base where Guzman has been held since 1993.”

At the start of the trial, Guzman had described himself as a “revolutionary combatant” and not a terrorist.

His lawyer Manuel Fajardo had argued his client should be granted an amnesty because of violations against his right to due process.

He told the Associated Press that the verdict had been based not “strictly on the law, but rather on politics”, and said that the deaths had been an inevitable result of the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian government.

Mr. Fajardo said they would be appealing against the verdict.

A few hundred Shining Path rebels are still operative in the country's south and south-east, but a BBC correspondent in Lima says they now pose little threat.

Help for some of the victims

The many scars left behind from a decade of violence and terror in Ayacucho, Peru, by the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla group are still visible amongst the survivors of the killing fields of Ayacucho.

Now a ministry called Latin American Indian Ministries (LAIM), has launched a project to help these widows and orphans.

Dr. Dale W. Kietzman, president of LAIM, explained that there is now the “possibility of doing something very positive for the widows and orphans among the Quechuas of the highlands of Peru.”

He continued, “God has graciously provided an ample location for the beginning of what we envision as a self-supporting community that will, at the same time, provide training for living to the orphans created by the guerilla activities of the Shining Path.

Alma Guillermoprieto wrote in “Letter from Lima: Down the Shining Path,” The New Yorker, 8 February 1993, that Shining Path “has bombed police headquarters and municipal offices, gas stations and middle-class apartment buildings, think tanks and public schools. It has paralyzed the country with so-called armed strikes, and set fire to bus drivers who defied its orders to stay at home on strike days. It has murdered peasant families and leftist leaders. Most often, victims are killed in full view of their family or community. Sometimes they are hanged and sometimes shot, but often an execution-squad member — in many cases a woman — delivers the coup de grace with a knife.”

Dr. Kietzman continued, “Some thought the Shining Path was dead after its top leadership was arrested in 1992. But it is alive and well, still carrying on its nefarious activities in the Eastern Andes, with financial backing now from the drug trade.

“One of the leadership groups targeted has been that of pastors and elders of rural churches. Thousands of pastors and elders were killed. One of the many scars left behind from a decade of violence and terror, in Ayacucho province alone, are more than 5,000 widows and nearly 14,000 orphaned children. These children have no real chance at a future.

For more information on how to help with this project, go to www.laim.org/People%20groups/Ayacucho/index.htm.

Dan Wooding is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. Wooding is the author of some 42 books, the latest of which is his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com. danjuma1@aol.com.

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