After the guerrilla leader’s death: Peru argues over Guzmán’s body

The guerrilla struggle “Shining Path” claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Peruvians in the 1980s. After the death of the guerrilla leader Guzmán, the country is now discussing what to do with the body.

Tumults in an otherwise rather quiet place: protests are made in front of the morgue in the Peruvian port city of Callao, near Lima. And against a dead person. The protester Marlene Zárate López angrily says: “A genocide who has bled our country to death does not deserve a cult. He deserves to be flushed down the toilet and who knows where.”

It’s about Abimael Guzmán, the founder of the Peruvian guerrilla “Sendero Luminoso” (“Shining Path”). He is responsible for terrorism and thousands of murders. He died last Saturday in the cell of a maximum security prison.

What happens to Guzmán’s body?

Now Peru is discussing what to do with his body. Because his widow, who is in life imprisonment herself, is demanding that it be surrendered. A judge refused. The public prosecutor’s office is checking that the legal situation is confused. But victims’ associations are on the alert.

“This man has to be cremated and his remains exposed, far out at sea. So that we can be certain that he will not get a grave or a mausoleum here – or worse, a museum,” says Benjamin Capelletti Jáuregui, who is also demonstrating.

A supporter of Mao and Pol Pot

Guzmán stands for one of the darkest chapters in recent Peruvian history. The former philosophy professor adhered to the ideas of Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. He preached the people’s war against the political and economic elites – and went underground.

His Maoist guerrilla “Shining Path”, a split from the Communist Party, covered Peru with unprecedented terror from the 1980s onwards. The guerrillas devastated, raped and murdered tens of thousands, including Benjamin Capalletti Jáuregui’s father.

I lost my father when I was four and a half years old. He was murdered at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho. They viciously murdered him in his classroom in front of his students during an exam. To set an example in front of the young people: Those who don’t follow us will be murdered like this. With my father’s blood they wrote on the walls: This is how traitors die of the communist party.

Neither side showed consideration

The then government and the army fought the terrorist organization with extreme severity. In addition, they committed brutal crimes themselves, especially against the indigenous rural population, who they accused of cooperating with the guerrillas. Peru sank into a civil war that killed 70,000 people. In 1992 Guzman was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

“Our condemnation of terrorism is firm and irrevocable. Only in a democracy will we build a Peru of justice and development for our people,” wrote Peru’s current President Pedro Castillo on Twitter after Guzmán’s death.

The Marxist, who has just been elected to office with a wafer-thin margin, was repeatedly brought into the vicinity of terror by his right-wing populist opponent Keiko Fujimori. She herself is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, the autocrat who fought the guerrillas in the 1990s – and is now imprisoned for human rights crimes.

A rumor is making the rounds

Now the rumor is being fired on social media that Guzmán was not dead at all, but was freed by the left. But it is also a fact that the left has repeatedly trivialized the Shining Path, and members of the Castillo cabinet are suspected of having had connections with the guerrillas.

The legacy of the dark past divides the country to this day, historian Cecilia Mendez told the newspaper “El País”: “Guzmán died without apologizing for his actions. Fujimori never showed regrets for his crimes. Instead of coming to terms with the trauma of the past If it is used politically, fear is fueled from one government to the next. “