LIMA, Peru — Abimael Guzman, patriarch of the ruthless Sendero Luminoso revolutionary movement, lost his last chance Wednesday to overturn a life sentence for "treason against the fatherland."
In rejecting his second and final appeal, Peru's Supreme Council of Military Justice sealed Guzman's transformation from a mastermind of terror to a prisoner without prospects. He is to be confined for life to a cell on a navy base off the coast of Lima.
Anti-terrorist police captured Guzman, 57, and some of his key aides Sept. 12 in a carefully prepared raid on a guerrilla safehouse in Lima. After a short and secret trial at the navy base where Guzman is imprisoned, a military judge convicted and sentenced him Oct. 7.
An official announcement of the sentence called the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a "genocidal group"--referring to 12 years of bloody warfare that has included terrorist bombings and massacres of peasants by the Maoist guerrillas.
