He erected a personality cult around himself: he styled himself President Gonzalo, the “fourth sword of Marxism”
Sendero was unlike any other guerrilla movement in Latin America. Mr Guzmán was inspired by Maoist China, which he visited twice during the Cultural Revolution, rather than Cuba. He founded Sendero as a splinter of a splinter of the Peruvian Communist Party in Ayacucho, the capital of an impoverished region in the Andes where he taught at the university. He recruited his students, most of them women; many became teachers who, once qualified, fanned out to schools in towns and villages.
He erected a preposterous personality cult around himself: he styled himself President Gonzalo, the “fourth sword of Marxism”. Sendero’s ideology became “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought”. When operations went wrong, those responsible were subject to long, humiliating sessions of self-criticism at party meetings. He told his followers that their deaths were glorious, playing on Andean millenarianism.
This psychotic narcissism went hand in hand with extraordinary powers of persuasion. Psychiatrists might point to a complicated childhood to explain what turned a theoretician into an indirect mass murderer. Mr Guzmán was the illegitimate son of an estate administrator and a poor mother who later abandoned him. Thanks to his stepmother he acquired a university education—and an uncertain place in the social order.
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