Abimael Guzmán: Encyclopedia II - Abimael Guzmán - Early life

Abimael Guzmán - Early life

Guzmán was born in Mollendo, a port town in the province of Islay, in the Peruvian region of Arequipa, about 1000 km south of Lima. He was the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant, the winner of the national lottery who had six children by three different women. Guzmán's mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when her son was only five years old.

From 1939 to 1946 Guzmán lived with his mother's family. After 1947 he lived with his father and his father's wife in the city of Arequipa, where he studied at a private Catholic secondary school. At the age of 19 he became a student at the Social Studies department of San Agustín National University, in Arequipa. His classmates at the university later described him as shy, disciplined, obsessive, and ascetic. Increasingly attracted by Marxism, his political thinking was influenced by the book Seven Essays on the Interpretation of the Peruvian Reality of José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the Communist Party of Peru.

At Arequipa, Guzmán completed bachelor degrees in philosophy and law. His dissertations were entitled "The Kantian Theory of Space" and "The Bourgeois Democratic State." In 1962, Guzmán was recruited as a professor of philosophy by the rector of San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a city in the central Andes of Peru. The rector was Dr. Efraín Morote Best, an anthropologist who some believe later became the true intellectual leader of the Shining Path movement. Encouraged by Morote, Guzmán studied Quechua, the language spoken by Peru's indigenous population, and became increasingly active in left-wing political circles. He attracted several like-minded young academics committed to bringing about revolution in Peru. He visited the People's Republic of China for the first time in 1965. After serving as the head of personnel for San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, Guzmán left the institution in the mid-1970s and went underground.

In the 1960s, the Peruvian Communist Party splintered over ideological and personal disputes. Guzmán, who had taken a pro-Chinese rather than pro-Soviet line, emerged as the leader of the faction known as the "Shining Path" (Mariátegui's wrote once: "Marxism-Leninism is the shining path of the future"). He adopted the nom de guerre President Gonzalo and began advocating a peasant-led revolution on the Maoist model. His followers declared Guzmán, who cultivated anonymity, to be the "Fourth Sword of Communism" (after Marx, Lenin, and Mao). In his political declarations, Guzmán praised Mao's development of Lenin's theses regarding the role of imperialism in propping up the bourgeois capitalist system. He claimed that imperialism ultimately "creates disruption and is unsuccessful, and it will end up in ruins in the next 50 to 100 years". Guzmán applied this criticism not only to North American imperialism, but also to what he termed the "social imperialism" of the Soviet Union.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki