La Cuarta Espada: La Historia De Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso
(The Fourth Sword: The Story Of Abimael Guzmán and the Shining Path)
By Santiago Roncagliolo
286 pages, Barcelona: Random House Mondadori S.A., 2007
(in Spanish)
So, after all these years, it turns out that the rise and fall of the Shining Path—the brutal, Maoist-inspired terrorist movement whose war with the Peruvian state in the 1980s and 1990s left nearly 70,000 dead—was all just a love story.
A love story that went really, really sour.
Or so one discovers reading La Cuarta Espada: La Historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso (The Fourth Sword: The Story of Abimael Guzmán and the Shining Path), Santiago Roncagliolo’s improbably entertaining biography of Abimael Guzmán, the near mythical founder of the Shining Path. An award-winning Peruvian novelist living in Spain, Roncagliolo returned to his native soil to explore how a small-town philosophy professor took up the writings of Chairman Mao, launched a 12-year armed struggle, and brought Peru to the brink of implosion, all until his stunning capture and incarceration in September 1992.
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