The capture of its leader was a staggering blow to Shinin Path Sendero Luminoso), the bloodiest and most self-sufficient revolutionary movement in Latin America. It was a triumph for President Alberto Fujimori, who imposed a dictablanda (soft dictatorship) last April, as rebel guerrillas were closing in on Lima. In manic isolation, Shining Path had been immune to the collapse of Soviet communism, which crippled revolutions in countries like El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala. Guzman’s inspiration came from within, and his money flowed not from foreign sponsors but from the Upper Huallaga Valley, a prime coca-producing area. But his organization-formally known as the Communist Party of Peru–was as much a cult of personality as the regimes of Stalin or Mao. Although the fighting was sure to go on, Shining Path had been stripped of its guiding spirit.

As much as anything else, Guzman was done in by carelessness-and his skin condition. He began his revolutionary career as a Marxist philosophy professor in the Andean town of Ayacucho. But his chronic psoriasis was aggravated by dry mountain air, and eventually it drove him to lower ground around Lima. In recent years, Guzman had a couple of close calls with security forces, barely avoiding arrest. Later, rumors put him here, there and everywhere, like some Scarlet Pimpernel; others said he was dead. But hours before the arrest, a top Peruvian official insisted: “Abimael is alive and in Lima.”

He had settled into a rented house at 459 First Street in the capital’s quiet Surquillo neighborhood. Agents of Dincote, the anti-terrorist police, were led there by two separate investigations of suspected Shining Path guerrillas. Soon Surquillo was flooded by undercover agents, posing as street sweepers, meter readers and even smooching lovers. They noticed that a slender young ballerina who had rented the house seemed to be eating a lot of bread and smoking Winston cigarettes, Guzman’s brand. One night a detective thought he saw the shadow of Guzman’s bearded profile on the curtains. Finally, when friends of Guzman knocked on the door, agents barged in behind them, firing their guns in the air. They found Guzman with his companion and second-in-command, Elena Iparraguirre. " Bingo!" an officer shouted into his radio. “We Got Big Cheeks.” Dincote’s Gen. Antonio Vidal Herrera, an intelligence officer trained in both Russia and the United States, rushed to the house. “There are times in life when you win and times you lose,” he told Guzman. “This time it’s your turn to lose.”

Tapping his head, Guzman replied: “You can take eve away from a man but this. If one dies, this stays with the rest and will never be erased.” His ideas may endure, but his organization is in trouble. Two other top lieutenants were arrested with Guzmaan and Iparraguirre, and in the days that followed, about 200 suspected Senderistas were rounded up. In the house on First Street, police found papers and computer discs containing plans for a huge October offensive against Lima. “This is the beginning of the end for Sendero,” said Isabel Coral, a community organizer who knew Guzman years ago in Ayacucho. “Their ideas will be around for years, but we will return them to their origins, when we all laughed at them.”

Peruvians stopped laughing years ago, when a coterie of Marxist intellectuals turned into an army of mindless killers. In the early 1960s, Guzman’s students called him " Shampoo": he could wash your brain and make everything crystal clear. As he built a guerrilla organization, he ruthlessly stamped out all dissenting opinion. Senderistas were compelled to memorize his “Gonzalo Thought” (named after his nom de guerre) and to learn a Maoist hymn in Chinese, syllable by syllable. " It is a kind of engineering of the soul," says Father Hubert Lanssiers, a Belgian priest who has ministered to Shining Path cadres in prison and saw similar indoctrination as a missionary in Southeast Asia. “Guzman tried to create a collective brain, like insects,” he says. “The individual becomes an instrument and nothing more.” Guzman’s objective was simple: to destroy capitalist society through violence-“crossing a river of blood,” he called it-and then to build a new, communist “democracy.”

Unless his followers can break him out of jail, the struggle will go on without Guzman. The poverty that made his revolution possible still exists; the gap between rich and poor has actually widened in the past decade. “What unites the party is ideology,” a Shining Path member told NEWSWEEK in the shantytown of Villa El Salvador, south of Lima. " We admire Gonzalo, but it is Gonzalo Thought that guides us." Although that is the movement’s holy writ, unity may be a thing of the past. None of Guzman’s potential successors-including rural leader Julio Cesar Mezzich and military commander 0scar Alberto Ram6n Durand– can hope to inherit his full authority. " In the medium term, Shining Path has lost something that was central: its monolithic character," says Peruvian sociologist Nelson Manrique. “One person could decide what was right, what was wrong. This gave Shining Path an image of great efficiency in a country where nothing seemed to work right.”

Guzman is scheduled to remain in a cell at Dincote headquarters in Lima until Sept. 27, when he will be transferred to a maximum-security facility for trial. He will face a military tribunal. Last July, after dismantling the Congress and judiciary, Fujimori decreed that suspected terrorists would be tried on charges of treason, for which the maximum penalty is life in prison. If he can hang onto Guzman, Fujimori will reap enormous political rewards. His supporters are expected to win handily in the Nov. 22 election for a new constituent assembly, enabling him to impose his own conditions for a return to democracy next year. Already the president has one major achievement to his credit: the submissive picture of prisoner Guzman has begun to destroy the myth of the invincible Gonzalo.