Shining Path rebel leader dies in Peru

Abimael Guzman, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness, authorities said.

Guzman, 86, a former philosophy professor, began an insurgency against the state in 1980 and presided over scores of car bombings and assassinations in the years that followed. He was captured in 1992 and sentenced in life in prison for terrorism and other crimes.

The Shining Path “murdered thousands of innocents and undermined the peace of the country. We do not forget the horror of that time, and his death will not erase his crimes,” Economy Minister Pedro Francke said. Guzman preached a messianic vision of a classless Maoist utopia based on pure communism, considering himself the “Fourth Sword of Marxism” after Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong. By the time Guzman called for peace talks a year after his arrest, guerrilla violence had claimed tens of thousands of lives in Peru, displaced at least 600,000 people and caused an estimated $22 billion in damage. The Shining Path was severely weakened after Guzman’s capture and his later calls for peace talks. Small bands of rebels have nevertheless remained active in remote valleys, producing cocaine and protecting drug runners.

Ginnette Riquelme / Associated Press Security forces guard the site of a landslide in Tlalnepantla on the outskirts of Mexico City that unleashed tons of boulders into a densely populated hillside neighborhood. Rescuers searched for missing residents.