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Shining Path, Span. Sendero Luminoso, Peruvian Communist guerrilla force, officially the Communist party of Peru. Founded in 1970 by Abimael GuzmAn Reynoso as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the Peruvian Communist party, the Shining Path turned to terrorism in 1980. By the mid-1980s it had several thousand guerrillas, largely in rural Peru. The group began urban terrorism in the late 1980s. In 1992 President Fujimori instituted martial law, and the subsequent capture and life sentence of GuzmAn and the jailing of most the organization's central committee diminished their guerrilla raids, but the group persists and has continued its attacks on a smaller scale. In 15 years of fighting more than 25,000 people, most of them civilians, died.
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