The Shining Path

Descripción

On 17 May 1980, on the eve of Peru's presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and how brave police investigators and journalists brought it to justice, may be the most compelling chapter in modern Latin American history but the full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as "cold-blooded and bestial", Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations and massacres across the cities, countryside and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzman, who launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre and the formidable Elena Iparraguirre, who married Guzman soon after Augusta's mysterious death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic ideology, and the military's bloody response, led to the death of nearly 7(más...)