Abimael Guzmán, Messianic Leader of Ruthless Peruvian Insurgency, Dies at 86
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LIMA, Peru—Abimael Guzmán, who turned Peru into one of the world’s most brutal Cold War battlegrounds as the messianic leader of a ruthless communist insurgency in the 1980s and early 1990s, has died. He was 86 years old.
Mr. Guzmán, a stocky former philosophy professor known to his zealous followers as Chairman Gonzalo, launched one of Latin America’s most violent civil wars in 1980 to install a totalitarian state just as Peru returned to democracy after military rule. His rigid ideology and brutal tactics once led a top U.S. State Department official to warn of a “third genocide of the 20th century.”
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