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The Marxist, Leninist, Maoist Abimael Guzman has died at the age of 86; the imprisoned to life imprisonment and founder of the terrorist group Shining Path in Peru.
Millions of Peruvians who rejected and firmly reject Shining Path and its heirs and apologists, are paying heartfelt tributes to the thousands murdered by the communist terror —which began aggressions in 1980— for political and totalitarian purposes. It is the right thing to do.
The Shining Path was not a project in “favor of the people” or of “social justice.” False. What drove its calculating leaders was the fanatical will and the strategic and tactical measurement of initiating an “armed struggle” to achieve political power and implant an ideological and criminal dictatorship. It was the politicized narcissism that together with the thirst for power and their particular benefits what moved them in the background, what gave them irrational traction.
These calculating actors took advantage of the real dispossessed actors, of the circumstances of the peasantry, the indigenous people and the popular sectors -whom they claimed to “represent” but at the same time murdered- to promote an insane power plan that bled the country dry.
Many, inside and outside the territory, are pronouncing themselves in favor of the event that occurred curiously one day before celebrating one more year of the police capture of the Maoist comrade “Gonzalo”, as Guzman called himself, on September 12, 1992. Pedro Castillo, the leader of the “Peru Libre” party (and former leader of Conare-Movadef, a teachers’ union considered the political arm of the Shining Path) in the capital, also did his own thing.
“The terrorist leader Abimael Guzman, responsible for the loss of countless lives of our compatriots, passed away. Our position condemning terrorism is firm and unwavering. Only in democracy will we build a Peru of justice and development for our people,” Castillo wrote on Twitter.
However, many Peruvians question the contradiction of the statement by having at his side characters that seem to show his own government obviously trying to vindicate the false “social struggle” of the early Shining Path. (Police and judicial investigations are so serious that they even involve accusations of their links with the remnants of the Shining Path based in the Valley of the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro rivers, VRAEM; a group still in operation and with the possibility of consolidating and expanding its relationship with the networks of terrorism and international drug trafficking).
What the country is witnessing in the face of the silence of those who -through complicity or naive vote- brought these undeniable extreme anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces to the government palace; forces that, by the way, are striving to accumulate more and more uncontrolled powers.
Recently, the pro-Prosenderist premier of Castillo and Cerrón was seen asking for a “vote of confidence” in Parliament, speaking in Quechua and proudly claiming to be another “representative of the people”.
Can the pro-Senderistas and the Senderistas “represent” the people that the same Maoist group assassinated with kicks, knives, machetes, gunpowder and dynamite?
Castillo now claims to mark a distance and pronounces himself on Guzman’s death by calling him a “terrorist”, but seems to have paid him a previous and indirect homage by placing the vindicators of the Shining Path in the Executive and Legislative powers.
The question is repeated: will the public tolerate, in addition to the serious current health and economic problems, the audacity that insults the memory of the thousands of people murdered —civilians and security forces— by communist terrorism, by the most savage Marxist and Maoist sect in South America?
Political analyst and columnist focused on issues of risk and political conflict, radicalization and violent political extremism // Analista político y columnista enfocado en temas de riesgo y conflictos políticos, radicalización y extremismo político violento