Ayacucho’s lunar-lit cathedral square now lies quiet, but it earned an infamous place in Peru’s modern memory. In 1980, shortly after Peru’s return to democracy, a small band of Maoist guerrillas led by philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán launched a brutal campaign from the Andean highlands. The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) rebellion began by burning ballot boxes in rural Ayacucho on election day and quickly spread south and north. The movement aimed at a full-scale peasant revolution, drawing on Guzmán’s veneration of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Over the next two decades it grew into “Latin America’s most stubborn guerrilla force,” exacting a terrible toll: an estimated 69,000 Peruvians were killed between 1980 and 2000, mostly villagers and indigenous Quechua speakers in the Andes.
The Shining Path’s early attacks were marked by exceptional cruelty. In 1983, for example, guerrillas descended on the remote Quechua farming community of Lucanamarca. They murdered 69 men, women, and children with machetes, axes, and even boiling water. (Witnesses later recalled that Guzmán ordered the massacre to terrorize those who had earlier executed a local rebel commander.) Such killings, alongside mass shootings, bombings of towns and transit, and vicious punishments of “collaborators,” quickly became emblematic of Peru’s civil war. In cities, Shining Path left ominous messages: in 1981 its cadres hung dozens of strung-up dogs in Lima’s streets with signs decrying them as “dogs of capitalism.” Throughout the 1980s the guerrillas grew bolder; by the late 1980s two-thirds of Peru lived under emergency rule, and whole districts were effectively under rebel control.
The state’s response was initially chaotic. Peru’s weak presidencies of the 1980s shuffled troops and declared emergencies, but violence only deepened. In 1990, voters chose Alberto Fujimori, a charismatic outsider who promised to “defeat terrorism.” Fujimori soon mounted a harsh counterinsurgency. In 1992, he staged an “autogolpe” (self‑coup), dissolving Congress and the courts to seize near-dictatorial powers to crush both the Shining Path and leftist urban guerrillas. Special police units (backed by Fujimori’s right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos) conducted aggressive campaigns across the Andes. “At the time, Peru was ripe for a radical turn,” notes one analyst, and Fujimori’s shock tactics, forced disappearances, army patrols, and rural vigilante squads imposed a brutal calm. The 1990s saw not only the assassination of suspected insurgents but also atrocities by the security forces. A later truth commission found the Shining Path responsible for the majority of wartime killings. Still, it also held the army accountable for roughly one-third of the carnage. Ultimately, Fujimori’s crackdown ended large-scale attacks: Abimael Guzmán was captured in 1992, and by the decade’s end, the rebel high command had been broken. Fujimori nonetheless left a grievously mixed legacy; he rewrote the constitution. He modernized the economy, but he also oversaw paramilitary death squads and pervasive human-rights abuses. By 2009 a Peruvian court would convict him of murder in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, documenting how his security forces had kidnapped or executed innocents; he was branded Peru’s first democratically elected president to be jailed by the courts.
The Peruvian Catholic Church emerged as a chorus of moral witness throughout this catastrophe. Church leaders were frequent targets of Shining Path’s terror; clergy who spoke for justice or sided with poor villagers were often branded as “enemies of the revolution.” Yet bishops and priests worked among rural communities, offering shelter and speaking out. In 1991, for instance, two young Polish Franciscan friars (Fathers Michele Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzałkowski) who ran a rural mission for peasants were beaten and shot dead by Shining Path cadres, a killing later deemed martyrdom by the Vatican. After Fujimori’s heavy, handed victory over the insurgency, many in Peru’s Church also warned against replacing one terror with another. In 2021, when remnants of Sendero Luminoso massacred innocents yet again, Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos of Trujillo publicly expressed “my most profound condemnation of the cruel murders,” emphatically adding, “no one has the right to take the life of any person. Life is sacred.” He invoked Peru’s “dark era of barbarism and terror,” more than 20 years that left over 70,000 dead, and pleaded, “never again terrorism, never again violence in Peru from whatever quarter.” In other words, the Church insisted on peace and human dignity above all, whether victims of leftist guerrillas or right-wing death squads. For many ordinary Peruvians at the time, these clerical voices were among the few calls for sanity in a maelstrom of violence.
A U.S. native who became a Peruvian citizen in 2015, he spent decades serving remote and impoverished communities and emerged as a quiet champion of the poor. Among those clergy was Robert Prevost, a Chicago-born Augustinian who arrived in Peru in 1985. He first rose to leadership in Chiclayo (in northwestern Peru), where he learned Spanish and lived among the people, and later became Bishop there (2015–2023). Colleagues say Prevost became known for his warmth and humility, “always friendly and warm,” a “voice of common sense and practical concern for the Church’s outreach to the poor,” as one longtime friend put it. His years in Peru coincided with the insurgency’s later phase and its aftermath. His pastoral mission often took him into neglected Andean villages that were still scarred by those conflicts. He made clear that violence must not be the answer. As Bishop, Prevost publicly urged truth and reconciliation. In 2017, after President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski controversially pardoned a terminally ill Fujimori, Prevost called on the ex-president to apologize “personally to each one of the victims” of his regime to achieve genuine healing. Two days after that pardon, he told reporters that Fujimori’s half‑hearted general apology was insufficient, instead, “Tal vez…sería más eficaz” (“Maybe it would be more effective”), he said, “que pidiera perdón en persona por algunas de las grandes injusticias (to ask for forgiveness in person for some of the great injustices).” This insistence was echoed immediately by international observers: when Prevost became Pope Leo XIV in 2025, news reports noted that he had bluntly urged Fujimori to seek forgiveness from each victim, calling for “a process of reconciliation.” By framing reconciliation in this personal way, Prevost aligned himself with Peru’s wounded conscience, unwilling to forget suffering, yet urging compassion.
Prevost’s moral stance was not reserved only for political leaders. He condemned all forms of bloodshed in Peru. When Peru faced new political turmoil in 2022–23, he expressed “sadness and pain” over the deaths of protesters in clashes with security forces. And in statements since his election as pope, he has continued to speak “from [his] beloved diocese” of Chiclayo and the values it taught him. The Guardian reports that during his first address, he greeted the faithful in Spanish and prayed for “construct[ing] bridges of peace” without fear, echoing Bishop Prevost’s past calls for unity. In short, the new Pope Leo XIV has consistently positioned himself alongside the poor and the peace‑seekers, condemning both Maoist violence and authoritarian abuses alike. As he told Peruvians: God loves everyone, “Dios nos ama a todos incondicionalmente.”
Peru’s scars remain deep, but the arc of recent history has bent toward justice. The Shining Path insurrection was broken, and its leaders imprisoned (Guzmán died in jail in 2021). The nation’s courts later held Fujimori accountable: by 2009 he had been convicted of murder for his regime’s death squads (earning him a landmark prison sentence). Truth commissions and trials have documented the full scope of the violence: one study notes that over 54% of the 69,000 conflict deaths were attributed to Shining Path fighters, with the rest caused by state forces. In both the Spanish and English press today, it is commonly noted that “the era of barbarism and terror” wrought such havoc that Peru demanded never again to repeat it.
Throughout this difficult chapter, figures like Pope Leo XIV (then Bishop Prevost) urged Peru to confront its past honestly and compassionately. He worked in parishes and barrios scarred by violence, always emphasizing dialogue and forgiveness grounded in justice. In many remote clinics and churches, he lived out a commitment to the poor that inevitably overlapped with the war’s legacy. Communities devastated by rebel attacks also suffered under army abuses and neglect. His call for “peace” in Chiclayo and beyond reflects the Church’s broader message: a future for Peru “que beneficie a todos,” a future that truly benefits all, must remember victims and reject extremism on every side. As Pope Leo XIV, Prevost continues to speak with the authority of one who lived at the crossroads of Peru’s darkness and its dawn, insisting on accountability and mercy as his homeland rebuilds.
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