MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Guerrilla leader killed in Peru

Peruvian police killed the military leader of the Shining Path guerrilla group in an operation over the weekend, reported officials. Victor Aponte Sinalagua, or “Comrade Clay,” was killed in the hamlet of Alto Pacae, in Tingo Maria, some 558 kilometers northeast of Lima.

Interior Minister Romulo Pizarro said two other suspected members of the guerrilla group were arrested during the operation.

Aponte's killing was the biggest blow to the guerrilla group in the past 10 years, according to Pizarro.

The Interior minister said the 45-year-old Aponte was responsible for the killings last December of eight police officers in Huanuco province, among other attacks. Police intelligence officers worked eight months to infiltrate the Shining Path in an area where nearly 50 members of the security forces and 42 civilians died last year.

The Shining Path members operating in the inhospitable jungle region of Peru, who number about 200 and call themselves Proseguir, have strayed away from the group's Maoist ideology, surviving by providing security for drug traffickers and growing coca.

On May 17, 1980, the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group, led by former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, launched its uprising with an attack in Chuschi, a small town in Ayacucho province.

Guzman was captured with his top lieutenants on September 1992, and most of the insurgent group's other leaders were killed or captured in the early nineties.

Shining Path was considered practically defeated by the time of Guzman's arrest, though "remnant" isolated bands have continued to mount sporadic operations in recent years.

Guzman, known to his fanatic followers as "President Gonzalo," once predicted that one million Peruvians would probably have to die to help create the new order envisioned by Shining Path. In August 2003, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a report that shocked Peruvians with a detailed accounting of the violence that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in fifteen years of fighting.

The commission began its work to tabulate the social cost of the armed conflict in 2001 and concluded 22 months later that half of the 69,000 people who died between 1980 and 2000 were killed by Shining Path.

The guerrilla group also caused an estimated 25 billion US dollars in economic losses, according to the commission estimates.