On Saturday, September 11, Abimael Guzmán, leader of the once-feared Shining Path guerrilla group, passed away while serving a life sentence in prison. Although the eighty-six-year-old convalescent had been captured almost twenty-nine years earlier to the day and had since been living in solitary confinement in a maximum security naval prison, no single figure has had as great and sustained an impact on Peruvian society and politics for the past forty years.

From 1980 until his 1992 arrest, Guzmán headed a vicious guerrilla campaign to topple the Peruvian state and replace it with a Communist government built in his image. Of course, a guerrilla army fighting for a more just society was nothing new in Latin America in the 1980s. Throughout the region, young leftists took up arms against oppressive dictatorships and US imperialism. What distinguished Shining Path from these other groups was its extreme penchant for violence.

According to an official report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, CVR), the war claimed 69,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous Peruvians. Yet, in a departure from Latin America’s other Cold War conflicts, where state security forces were responsible for the overwhelming majority of the atrocities, the CVR found Guzmán’s group responsible for more bloodshed than the state, other guerrilla groups, or paramilitaries, with a death count of around 30,000.