Free Republic

Aucayacu - Peru's brutal rebel movement, the Shining Path, long thought to be all but extinct, is on the warpath again, boosted by an alliance with drug traffickers. Its Maoist guerrillas almost vanished after the capture of their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, in 1993, with only a few hundred left sheltering in remote highlands. But those mountains are now the setting for a dramatic growth in cultivating coca to produce cocaine, and veteran fighters are now serving new masters, the drug barons. The Shining Path once forced the whole country to its knees in a war that claimed 70,000...

Lima, Oct 18 (EFE).- Peru's Abimael Guzman, the founder of a Maoist guerrilla movement-cum-death cult that sometimes dynamited the bodies of just-murdered functionaries and hanged canines from lamposts as warnings to "capitalist dogs," also had his soft, sappy and romantically poetic side. The man known by his fanatic followers as "President Gonzalo" revealed some of his secrets in a hand-written ode dedicated to his wife, who died in 1988 under mysterious circumstances. A video seized in 1992 by the security forces, after Guzman's arrest, shows the wake of Augusta La Torre, better known as "Comrade Norah" and the Shining Path's...