The thoughts of Chairman Gonzalo

Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a wrecked country. Modern Lima, by and large, is a thriving city of five-star restaurants, shopping malls and newish Toyotas. Yet between 1980 and 1992 it was a vile and violent place, under siege from a revolutionary movement that modelled itself on Mao, Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha, and which venerated its leader as these men’s planetary heir. If anything, Sendero Luminoso was a precursor of Isis, with its child-suicide bombs, its rigid code of secrecy and its cultish devotion to a short, bearded, chubby figurehead who believed that ‘violence is a universal law’.

About this ‘maximum leader’ — the Fourth Sword of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism — tantalisingly little was known. Private, dogmatic, self-serious to a clownish degree, Abimael Guzmán was the illegitimate son of a womanising sugar-plantation manager. He had written his dissertation on Kant, and was a philosophy professor at San Cristóbal University in the remote Andean city of Ayacucho when, in 1980, he fell off the radar. Among the few biographical scraps attached to him were that he disliked the music of Porgy and Bess and drank mineral water on his honeymoon.

Living in Lima at that time, and intrigued by his ongoing absence from the record, I wrote an investigative report about Guzmán for Granta, and then a novel, published in 1989, which proved a vindication of the fictional process, illustrating that if the available facts are absorbed, perhaps anything you anticipate is likely to be close to the truth. I gave him psoriasis, plus a taste for American cigarettes and the music of Frank Sinatra, and when, three years later, on 12 September 1992, he was captured above a ballet studio in Lima, just as his movement seemed poised to take over the capital, I was more than astonished to learn that he had been tracked down precisely because of the Winston Light cigarette butts found in the studio’s rubbish bags, along with pills for his psoriasis.