The Communist Party of Peru (Spanish: Partido Comunista del Perú), more commonly known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), is a Maoist guerrilla organization in Peru that launched the internal conflict in Peru in 1980. Its more familiar name originates from a maxim of José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the original Peruvian Communist Party in the 1920s: "El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución" (“Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”). The followers of the group are generally called senderistas.
Shining Path's stated goal is to replace Peruvian bourgeois institutions with a communist peasant revolutionary regime, presumably passing first through the Maoist developmental stage of New Democracy. They claimed to understand the reality of the Peruvian society. The Inca society, which was destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors, was, according to Mariátegui, a kind of primitive communist society. The senderistas hoped that the future would combine revolutionary Marxism with the society of the Incas. "A new path of arms" was expected to lead Peru towards a transformed society that served its people. Since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán in 1992, it has only been sporadically active. Shining Path's ideology and tactics have been influential on other Maoist insurgent groups, notably the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and other Revolutionary Internationalist Movement-affiliated organizations. (more...)