Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (born 3 December 1934), a former professor of philosophy, was the leader of the Maoist insurgency Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso in Spanish) which has been active in Peru from the late 1970s. Wanted on charges of terrorism, Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment, but a retrial began in September 2005.

The Shining Path movement was at first largely circumscribed to academic circles in Peruvian universities. In the late 1970s, however, the movement developed into a guerrilla group centered around Ayacucho. In May of 1980, the group launched its war against the government of Perú by burning the ballot boxes in Chuschi, a village near Ayacucho, in an effort to disrupt the first democratic elections in the country since 1964. Shining Path eventually grew to control vast rural territories in central and southern Perú and achieved a presence even in the outskirts of Lima, where it staged numerous attacks. The purpose of Shining Path's campaign was to demoralize and undermine the government of Perú in order to create a situation conducive to a violent coup which would put its leaders in power. The Shining Path targeted not only the Peruvian army and police, but also government employees at all levels, other leftist militants such as members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), workers who did not participate in the strikes organized by the group, peasants who cooperated with the government in any way (including by voting in democratic elections), and ordinary middle-class inhabitants of Perú's main cities. The Peruvian Commission of Truth & Reconciliation later estimated that the resulting civil war led to the deaths of some seventy thousand people, approximately half of them at the hands of the Shining Path and a third at the hands of the Peruvian state.

The movement promoted the writings of Abimael Guzmán as Gonzalo Thought, a new theoretical understanding that built upon Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism. In 1989, Guzmán declared that the Shining Path had progressed from waging a guerrilla war to waging a "war of movements." He further argued that this was a step towards achieving "strategic equilibrium" in the near future. Guzmán claimed that such an equilibrium would manifest itself by ungovernability under the "old order." When that moment arrived, Guzmán believed that the Shining Path would be ready to move on to its "strategic offensive"