Another guerrilla group that also emerged simultaneously was the National Liberation Army (ELN) led by Juan Pablo Chang Navarro and trained by Cuba.
[citation needed] During the governments of Velasco and Morales, the Shining Path had been organized as a Maoist political group formed in 1970 by Abimael Guzmán, a communist professor of philosophy at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University.
[47] A few days later, on 13 June, a group of young people belonging to the "generated organization" Movement of Labourers y Workers Clasistas (MOTC) carried out an attack on the Municipality of San Martín de Porres in Lima with Molotov cocktails commemorating the Chuschi incident.
[51] President Fernando Belaúnde began the authoritarian trend of consolidating power within the executive to combat guerrilla groups, using his support in Congress to enact legislation and limit civil liberties.
[33] Gradually, the Shining Path committed more and more violent attacks on the National Police of Peru until bombings near Lima increased the gravity of the conflict.
[52] In December 1982, President Belaúnde declared a state of emergency and ordered that the Peruvian Armed Forces fight Shining Path, granting them extraordinary power.
[52] Military leadership adopted practices used by Argentina during the Dirty War, committing many human rights violations in the area where it had political control, with entire villages being massacred by the Peruvian armed forces while hundreds of civilians were forcibly disappeared by troops.
[54] The Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path's reaction to the Peruvian government's use of the military in the conflict was to increase violent warfare in the countryside.
Shining Path attacked police officers, soldiers, and civilians that it considered being "class enemies", often using gruesome methods[citation needed] of killing their victims.
[55] Shining Path responded by entering the province of Huancasancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, Muylacruz, and Lucanamarca, where they killed 69 people.
The government began to use death squads in order to combat and eliminate suspected communist sympathizers, including the Grupo Colina and Rodrigo Franco Command.
On 12 September 1992, Peruvian police captured Guzmán and several Shining Path leaders in an apartment above a dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima.
[64]: 2–3 On 27 July 1993, Shining Path militants drove a car bomb into the US Embassy in Lima, which left extensive damage on the complex (worth some US$250,000) and nearby buildings.
In 1996, an armed commando of 14 members of the MRTA, led by Néstor Cerpa Cartolini, stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Peru, beginning the crisis of 72 hostages that lasted 126 days.
The crisis ended when the Peruvian armed forces recaptured the embassy in a military action called Operation Chavín de Huántar, which allowed the release of the hostages with the exception of Carlos Giusti Acuña, a member of the Supreme Court, who died in the exchange of shots with the subversive group.
[66] Military historian Sara Blake, writing in the Small War's journal analysed the "Peruvian government effectively decapitated the Shining Path, but failed to address the root causes of the insurgency".
These group relieved central military forces from garrison requirements, which both enabled their coordination against insurgents but also prevented friction between local and soldiers directly.
Military and police atrocities became less common as the conflict progressed and community groups such as the rondas campesinas took a greater role in security policy in the highland area.
Blake notes that “the massive expansion of the organizations in 1990 and 1991 corresponded to a 30 percent decline in recorded casualties and deaths in the departments of Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Junín".
[67] President Fujimori passed a national law in 1992 giving the rondas campesina the right to bear arms, this was a highly symbolic gesture as it repealed colonial era legislation which forbade native indians from possessing modern military technologies.
[67] A second successful adoption of the Peruvian government in the latter period of the conflict was the passage of Repentance laws that allowed lower level supporters of Shining Path to receive amnesties or only short sentences.
Even though Peru was until 1980 ruled by a military junta there was not a complete absence of popular influence on policy especially at a local level, rural cooperatives and federations allowed the pursuit of development and expression of left wing positions without insurgency.
The expanding allowance for democratic participation for all citizens including those of left wing perspectives undercut Shining Path increasingly as the conflict wore on.
Carlos Iván Degregori described Andean peasant society a society "with a precarious economy that establishes intricate networks of kinship and complex strategies of reproduction, one had to take great care to protect the labor force", this economic interest ran counter to the massacres employed by Shining Path and provided incentive for many fighters to take up offers of amnesty and for others to join local defence forces.
[67] Shining Path further failed to attract any external support, a difficult position to square with its political ideology which was "revisionist" and not compatible with any contemporaneous communist states.
[67] Colby argues that the rapid decline of shining path was not simply a result of its lack of leadership in the aftermath of Guzmán's capture but that the organisation had been precipitously weakened by successful counterinsurgency strategy by the Peruvian government.
He rescinded Fujimori's announcement that Peru would leave the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) to investigate the conflict.
[69] According to a summary of the report by Human Rights Watch, "Shining Path ... killed about half the victims, and roughly one-third died at the hands of government security forces ...
It was criticized by almost all political parties[70][71] (including former Presidents Fujimori,[72] García[73] and Paniagua[74]), the military and the Catholic Church,[75] which claimed that many of the Commission members were former members of extreme leftists movements and that the final report wrongfully portrayed Shining Path and the MRTA as "political parties" rather than as terrorist organizations,[76] even though, for example, Shining Path has been clearly designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Canada.
[78] On 9 June 2003, a Shining Path group attacked a camp in Ayacucho, and took 68 employees of the Argentine company Techint and three police guards hostage.