Abimael Guzman founded and led Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian movement whose campaign of violence began in the department of Ayacucho in May 1980 and continued for more than a decade. A former university professor of philosophy, he spent most of the conflict in Lima, directing the organization from a distance, and was arrested there on September 12, 1992. Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission later estimated that the conflict between 1980 and 2000 cost 69,280 lives and attributed 54 percent of the deaths it recorded to the movement he led.
Two courts convicted him in two different periods. A military court gave him a life sentence in October 1992, but that proceeding was set aside after the Constitutional Tribunal struck down the legal framework behind it. In a civilian retrial, the Sala Penal Nacional convicted him on October 13, 2006 of aggravated terrorism and, as author of the killings at Lucanamarca in April 1983, of aggravated homicide. It sentenced him to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 2007. On September 11, 2018 the same court gave him a second life sentence as an indirect perpetrator of the attack in the Miraflores district of Lima in July 1992 that killed 25 people. He appealed, and he died in custody on September 11, 2021, aged 86, before the Supreme Court ruled on that appeal.
Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reinoso was born on December 3, 1934 in Mollendo, in the Arequipa region of southern Peru, and grew up moving between Arequipa, Chimbote and Callao.
At 19 he began studying law and philosophy at a university in Arequipa, where he became interested in Marxism and in the writings of José Carlos Mariátegui. He joined the Peruvian Communist Party in the late 1950s. After graduating in 1962 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the national university in Ayacucho, a department in the central Andes with a large rural and Quechua-speaking population.
There he held regular political discussions that grew into a faction of the party by the end of the 1960s. A visit to China in the mid-1960s turned him toward Maoism. He left the university, worked underground and, through the 1970s, turned the faction into the organization that Peruvian courts call Sendero Luminoso. He went underground fully in 1979, and under his direction the organization began its campaign in Ayacucho on May 17, 1980, the eve of the first general election after twelve years of military rule, in the town of Chuschi.
Sendero Luminoso grew through the 1980s to a force estimated at 10,000 fighters. Its campaign spread from the countryside of the central Andes to the cities. The conflict displaced at least 600,000 people and caused damage estimated at 22 billion dollars.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which delivered its final report on August 28, 2003 under its chairman Salomón Lerner, put the number of dead and disappeared at about 69,280, roughly double earlier official estimates. It found that the movement was responsible for 54 percent of the deaths reported to it, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement for 1.5 percent, and state forces and government-backed peasant militias for most of the remainder. Of all the victims of the conflict, 79 percent lived in rural areas, 56 percent worked in farming or livestock, and 75 percent spoke Quechua or another indigenous language as their first language. More than 40 percent of the deaths and disappearances occurred in Ayacucho.
On Guzman himself, the commission stated that he founded and led the organization and that members of its leadership, especially its national directors, bore direct responsibility for crimes against humanity. It noted that he remained in Lima for practically the whole conflict while militants fought and died. These are findings of a truth commission, not a criminal court, and the criminal cases against him were tried on narrower charges.
On April 3, 1983, 69 residents of Santiago de Lucanamarca, a town in Huancasancos province, Ayacucho, were killed. Nearly two dozen of them were children. The killings were charged as murder, with other charges against the leadership, and a Peruvian court later held Guzman responsible for them.
In the 2003 to 2006 trial the charge for these killings was worded "delito contra la vida, el cuerpo y la salud - homicidio calificado", brought on behalf of the Lucanamarca victims. The court's judgment held Guzman responsible for these killings as "autor mediato por dominio en organización", an indirect author who controls an organization, not as someone who took part in them himself.
On July 16, 1992 an attack in the Miraflores district of Lima killed 25 people and injured 155. It was the deadliest attack of the group and was part of an urban offensive in the first half of that year. It caused more than three million dollars in losses and affected about 380 families. Prosecutors later treated Guzman and the rest of the Central Committee as perpetrators-by-means, charging that the committee he led ordered and approved the attack.
Police arrested Guzman in Lima on September 12, 1992. The arrest was carried out by the counter-terrorism police unit known by its acronym GEIN. Elena Yparraguirre Revoredo, later convicted with him, was arrested in the same operation. Fourteen other senior commanders were also taken that month.
He was tried within weeks by a military court in which the judges were hidden from view. In October 1992 it sentenced him to life imprisonment for treason. He was held in custody from 1993. A year after his arrest he called for peace talks, a step the Truth and Reconciliation Commission notes and that coincided with the decline of the organization.
On January 3, 2003 Peru's Constitutional Tribunal struck down parts of the anti-terrorism decree laws issued under President Alberto Fujimori and ruled that trying civilians before military courts was unconstitutional. The ruling opened the way for civilian retrials of people convicted by military courts, among them Guzman. The 1992 proceeding was annulled.
The retrial began in 2004 and collapsed in disorder in the courtroom, and two of the three judges stepped down over conflicts of interest. A new trial opened in September 2005 before the Sala Penal Nacional, presided over by judge Pablo Talavera Elguera, in case 560-03. Talavera banned cameras and recording equipment from the room. The proceedings lasted about a year and covered about two dozen defendants, some of them absent.
The accusation in case 560-03 listed terrorism, aggravated terrorism and membership of a terrorist organization, incitement and apology of terrorism, and the homicide charge for Lucanamarca. The prosecution's theory against Guzman was authorship by means: that as head of the organization he ordered the crimes that its structure carried out.
The court delivered its verdict on October 13, 2006, in a closed session lasting about seven hours. Guzman was 71. The Sala Penal Nacional convicted him of "Terrorismo Agravado" against the State and of "Homicidio Calificado" as author of the Lucanamarca killings. It acquitted him of the affiliation, incitement and apology modalities of terrorism and of the base offense under article 2 of Decree Law 25475.
The sentence was life imprisonment ("cadena perpetua"), subject to review at 35 years under Legislative Decree 921, with a fine of 365 day-fines at four new soles a day. He was held jointly liable with the other convicted defendants for civil reparation to the State of 3,700 million new soles, and ordered personally to pay 250,000 new soles to each legal heir of the Lucanamarca victims.
Elena Yparraguirre Revoredo, then 59, was also sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated terrorism. María Guadalupe Pantoja Sánchez and Laura Eugenia Zambrano Padilla received 35 years, seven others received 25 years and Oscar Alberto Ramírez Durand received 24 years. Two defendants were acquitted, and the cases of nine absent defendants were deferred to a later trial. Guzman's lawyer, Manuel Fajardo, said the ruling was political and not legal and that he would appeal.
The defense appealed on grounds of nullity, case R.N. 5385-2006. At the hearing before the Supreme Court on November 26, 2007 its lawyers argued that indirect authorship does not exist in criminal law, that the conflict after May 1980 could not be classed as terrorism, and that the Sala Penal Nacional lacked competence. The State's attorney asked the court to raise the civil reparation from 3,700 million to 65,600 million soles, and a representative of the Lucanamarca victims addressed the court.
The Segunda Sala Penal Transitoria of the Supreme Court, with Vocal Supremo Javier Villa Stein as rapporteur, decided the appeal in December 2007. It upheld the life sentences of Guzman and Yparraguirre, raised the sentences of some co-defendants to as much as 35 years and confirmed the rest. The court also rejected the defense request to set aside the terrorism provisions on the ground that they amounted to a criminal law of the enemy, finding that departing from the notion of the citizen was inadmissible in a state governed by the rule of law. The 2006 conviction became final.
The conviction of 2006 did not cover the Miraflores attack, which was charged separately. The oral trial of Guzman and eleven others for the 1992 attack began before Colegiado A of the Sala Penal Nacional and lasted about 20 months. Guzman was removed from the courtroom at one point for disruptive conduct, and the hearings continued in his absence before he was brought back.
The prosecution sought life imprisonment on the basis that the defendants were perpetrators-by-means. The court's verdict was read in a hearing on September 11, 2018 that was broadcast live on television. Guzman was 83.
The court found that the accused belonged to the Central Committee of Sendero Luminoso, the body that ordered and approved the attack, and convicted ten of the twelve defendants as indirect perpetrators. They were Guzman, Elena Yparraguirre, Oscar Ramírez Durand, Osmán Morote Barrionuevo, María Pantoja Sánchez, Laura Zambrano Padilla, Florindo Flores Hala, Margot Liendo Gil, Edmundo Cox Beuzeville and Florentino Cerrón Cardoso. All received life imprisonment. For Guzman, Yparraguirre, Pantoja, Zambrano and Flores Hala it was a second life sentence. One defendant was acquitted, and the case of another, who had not been captured, was set aside. All defendants were acquitted of an additional charge of illicit drug trafficking. The court ordered the convicted to pay reparation to the victims.
Guzman denied any involvement in the attack.
The defense appealed the verdict, and in November 2018 Colegiado A admitted the nullity appeals and sent the case to the Supreme Court. Guzman and Yparraguirre sought acquittal, arguing that they were indirect authors only, and the state's counsel for terrorism cases appealed the amount of the reparation and the drug-trafficking acquittal. The Supreme Court was expected to hear the appeals the following year.
Guzman died before the Supreme Court ruled. On February 23, 2022 the Permanent Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court ratified the life sentences of Yparraguirre, Ramírez, Pantoja, Zambrano, Cerrón, Flores, Cox, Morote and Liendo for aggravated terrorism, and held that the attack had not been an isolated event but had been ordered by the Central Committee. It annulled the acquittal on the drug-trafficking charge and ordered a new oral trial on that charge. Guzman was not among the convicted named in that decision.
From 1993 Guzman was held in custody in Peru. He died on Saturday, September 11, 2021, aged 86, in custody.
The offenses Guzman was convicted of were set by a body of decree laws issued under President Alberto Fujimori. Decree Law 25475 defined terrorism, with aggravated forms in article 3 that carried the heaviest penalties. In its January 2003 ruling the Constitutional Tribunal reviewed four of these decrees and the use of military courts to try civilians, and found the latter unconstitutional. The ruling made possible the retrial of Guzman, Yparraguirre and others before the Sala Penal Nacional, the national court that hears terrorism and human rights cases.
Under the doctrine applied in both of Guzman's civilian trials, a person can be convicted as an indirect author when he controls an organization that carries out the acts, even without taking part in them. The 2006 judgment applied this to the Lucanamarca killings and the 2018 judgment to the Miraflores attack. Life imprisonment in Peru is reviewable after 35 years under Legislative Decree 921, which the 2006 judgment applied to him.
Guzman denied any involvement in the Miraflores attack of 1992. The Sala Penal Nacional rejected that denial in September 2018, but the conviction was under nullity appeal when he died in 2021 and was never confirmed by the Supreme Court as to him.
The defense maintained throughout that indirect authorship is not a recognized form of liability in Peruvian criminal law and that the conflict after May 1980 could not be punished as terrorism. The Supreme Court upheld the 2006 sentence in 2007.
No court convicted Guzman of genocide, and no genocide charge appears in either case. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission described crimes against humanity by the movement's leadership, but that is a commission finding and not a criminal judgment.
December 3, 1934: Born in Mollendo, Arequipa region.
1962: Appointed professor of philosophy in Ayacucho.
May 17, 1980: Sendero Luminoso begins its campaign in Chuschi, Ayacucho.
April 3, 1983: 69 residents of Santiago de Lucanamarca, Ayacucho, are killed, nearly two dozen of them children.
July 16, 1992: 25 people are killed and 155 injured in an attack in Miraflores, Lima.
September 12, 1992: Guzman is arrested in Lima.
October 1992: A military court sentences him to life imprisonment for treason.
January 3, 2003: The Constitutional Tribunal rules military trials of civilians unconstitutional.
August 28, 2003: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivers its final report.
2004: The first civilian retrial collapses.
September 2005: A new civilian trial opens.
October 13, 2006: The Sala Penal Nacional convicts Guzman of aggravated terrorism and aggravated homicide and sentences him to life.
2007: The Supreme Court upholds the life sentences.
September 11, 2018: Guzman receives a second life sentence for the 1992 attack in Miraflores.
November 2018: Nullity appeals are admitted and sent to the Supreme Court.
September 11, 2021: Guzman dies in custody, aged 86.
February 23, 2022: The Supreme Court ratifies the 2018 life sentences of nine co-defendants.