The Shining Path is long gone, but its specter continues to hover over Peruvian politics

Abimael Guzmán was held in a maximum-security prison for three decades before his death last month, having had very little contact with the outside world. His Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path almost fully disbanded shortly after his arrest in 1992. Yet his name and organization are still constantly discussed in Peruvian society — especially so since the return of the left to government in Peru earlier this year.

“Debates in Congress have shown that the people who need the ghost of terrorism the most are the country’s right-wingers,” government ally Guillermo Bermejo argued recently, after the opposition pushed through a special law allowing the Peruvian state to dispose of Mr. Guzmán’s remains instead of handing them to his family.

But the Shining Path was once more than just a right-wing bogeyman.

The group terrorized Peru’s nascent democracy from 1980 onwards, when it staged spectacles such as hanging dead dogs from lampposts on some of the most iconic corners of Lima, the country’s capital. The dog’s bodies displayed banners featuring impenetrable slogans attacking Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in China.

The Shining Path was responsible for a majority of the nearly 70,000 deaths registered by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights abuses by guerrillas and the military during the years of armed conflict — an anomaly in a region where the military’s crimes predominated. The violence left scars across society, which may take generations to heal. It also helped open the door to Alberto Fujimori’s right-wing autocracy in the 1990s.

The Shining Path is still on the minds of many. A look at their history is therefore essential to understand the Peru of today.

“Doctor Shampoo”

The Shining Path (“Sendero Luminoso” in Spanish, a reference to a phrase from Peruvian leftist José Mariátegui) grew out of the University of Huamanga, in the Andean region of Ayacucho, one of the poorest areas in the country.

Largely ignored by authorities in Lima, the university became home to Marxist intellectuals who eventually took control of much of its courses and direction. Mr. Guzmán and his closest allies held key positions, zealously guarding decisions over personnel, research, and scholarships, to the point of punishing professors over the tiniest ideological differences.

In his biography of Mr. Guzmán, writer Santiago Roncagliolo recalls how the death of Che Guevara in 1967 prompted a spontaneous homage by a local university teacher, Carlos Tapia. After his class ended, one of Mr. Guzmán’s followers invited...