Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

SENDERO LUMINOSO • 621to the United Nations Charter renounce the right to initiate warfare,under Article 51 they retain the right to use military force to defendthemselves against foreign military attacks, to repel invasions, or todefend other signatory nations that are being attacked by an aggressor.The United States invoked this doctrine to justify its militaryattacks on Libya on 15 April 1986 in retaliation for the bombing ofa West Berlin discothèque on 5 April 1986. This doctrine was also invokedto justify the 20 August 1998 U.S. retaliation against the basesin Afghanistan used by Osama bin Laden following the 7 August1998 East African U.S. embassy attacks involving mass-casualtybombings by bin Laden’s followers. A more controversial notion isthat of preemptive or anticipatory self-defense, in which military actionis initiated against another nation, or subnational group or entity,on the grounds that the nation or party being attacked poses a clearand present danger to the nation initiating the attack. The 19 March2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was rationalized by the administrationof George W. Bush as an exercise in preemptive national self-defenseowing to the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction supposedlybeing wielded by the regime of Saddam Hussein. This positionis presented and defended in John Yoo’s “International Law andthe War in Iraq,” in the American Journal of International Law 97,no. 3 (July 2003), 563–76.SENDERO LUMINOSO (SL). The Partido Comunista del Perú, orCommunist Party of Peru, better known as the Sendero Luminoso,or Shining Path, was a Maoist guerrilla movement that sought tocreate a total Marxist-Leninist revolution within Peru. It differedfrom other leftist insurgencies in Latin America in neither havingaccepted assistance from other leftist Latin American states, suchas Cuba or Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, nor associating itselffraternally with Marxist regimes or movements elsewhere. In partthis was due to the extremely dogmatic and authoritarian nature ofthe Senderista leadership, which precluded much collaboration withother leftist groups. While there was some evidence of former limitedcontacts with the Colombian M-19 and the now-defunct Alfaro ViveCarajo group of Ecuador, the Sendero Luminoso was preeminentlya homegrown, inward-looking, and highly xenophobic phenomenon.It attacked Soviet, Cuban, Chinese, and North Korean targets alongwith U.S. and other Western targets.