From Lima
A controversial law that allows the cremation of his body without the family’s authorization and to keep the fate of the ashes a secret, has put an end to the uncertainty about the fate of the body of the Shining Path leader, Abimael Guzmán, who died a week ago. pneumonia at age 86 while serving a life sentence in a military prison. Guzmán’s corpse, defeated many years before he died, was turned into a dangerous ghost, a feared object that had to be disappeared. With 70 votes in favor, 32 against and 14 abstentions, the right-wing unicameral Congress passed the law on Thursday night to eliminate Guzmán’s body. The law was promulgated this Friday by the left-wing Executive, in the midst of strong political and media pressure, so that the remains of the Senderista leader are disappeared and prevent him from having a grave. A pressure that has reached levels of hysteria, speaking of Sendero, inactive as an armed group for more than twenty years, as if it were militarily operational.
Although the ruling caucus opposed the rule, President Pedro Castillo quickly promulgated it. In the government, indicated by his opponents of being close to Sendero’s political heirs, they did not want to give arguments, opposing this law, so that these attacks are reinforced. The law establishes that the body of an inmate who died in prison serving a sentence for “treason or terrorism, in his capacity as leader, ringleader or part of the leadership of terrorist organizations”, whose delivery to his relatives and burial is considered “Put national security or internal order at risk”, he must be cremated and order “the dispersal of the cremated remains in a time and place of a reserved nature.” A prosecutor will be the one who decides in which cases this law applies and his decision will be final, must be executed in 24 hours. The rule will take effect this Saturday, immediately Guzmán’s body, who has been in the morgue for a week, will be cremated and all vestige of the remains of the Senderista leader will be erased.
The argument for denying the delivery of the corpse to the family, as established by the law in force at the time of the death of the founder of Sendero, has been the fear that his grave will become a place of pilgrimage for his followers. It is spoken as if it were a mass of followers who threaten the security of the country. But actually Guzmán’s remaining followers are few and many years ago they have renounced the armed struggle.
Abimael Guzmán, who called himself “Chairman Gonzalo,” a lawyer and philosopher, founded the Shining Path in 1970 when he was a university professor in the Andean region of Ayacucho. In 1980, when the country was going to elections to emerge from a twelve-year military dictatorship and the left participated in that new democratic stage, the Maoist group went into armed struggle in Ayacucho. It began its operations in the field. The violence escalated rapidly and spread to the rest of the country. The civil governments handed over control of the response to Sendero to the military and the state violence, with kidnappings, disappearances, assassinations and massacres of peasant communities, it was the response to the senderista violence, which was executed by authorities and also popular and peasant leaders who did not they folded their actions. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the internal war left about 70,000 dead.
In September 1992, Guzmán was captured in Lima, along with a good part of his party leadership, which included his wife Elena Iparraguirre, today in prison and who has unsuccessfully claimed Guzmán’s body. A year after his arrest, “Chairman Gonzalo” publicly declared his surrender from prison and called on his followers to stop the armed struggle. With the fall and surrender of their leader, whom they revered with an obsessive cult of personality, hiking was struck to death. Guzmán’s successor, Oscar Ramírez Durando, alias “Feliciano”, decided to continue with the armed actions, but already very weakened. In 1999, “Feliciano” was captured and Sendero, as such, defeated.
Of what was Sendero as an armed group, only a small active column has remained in a mountainous coca-growing area, a column that years ago broke with Guzmán, whom it described as a traitor for renouncing the armed struggle. This column allied itself with the drug trafficking that operates in that area. Their actions have nothing to do with Guzmán and Sendero, but a good part of the political class and the media continue to speak of both groups as if they were the same, and use the isolated attacks of this column, which take place in the context of the clashes between drug traffickers and security forces, to keep the fear of Sendero alive. A fear used to promote authoritarian policies and attack the left, and now the Castillo government, awarding them supposed senderista sympathies and thus pretending to discredit them.
After giving up the armed struggle, The senderistas decided to participate in legal political life through the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef), but for claiming the figure of Guzmán they have not been allowed to appear in the electoral processes. It is this small and marginal group that is said to be feared to justify denying the founder of Sendero a grave. A refusal that is a way of prolonging Guzmán’s sentence after his death. The right connects Castillo and his government with Movadef leaders, which the president denies, to discredit him with the intention of destabilizing him.
El Movadef, Guzmán’s political heir, has as visible spokespersons the lawyers of the late Senderista leader, Alfredo Crespo and Manuel Fajardo, that coordinated with Guzmán. With the death of “Chairman Gonzalo”, it is stated that Elena Iparraguirre, his 74-year-old widow, would be his political heir, but in prison and without that mythical aurea that Guzmán had for his followers, her role would not have the same weight as her husband. And the Movadef has lost its main reason for being in these years: to ask for amnesty for Guzmán, now dead.
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