Peru captured the leader of Shining Path yesterday, and President Alberto Fujimori called it "the beginning of the end" for one of Latin America's bloodiest rebel groups, a movement that has fought for 19 years to impose a Maoist state.
A 1,500-strong military sweep in Peru's central jungle highlands surrounded and finally caught Mr Oscar Ramirez, alias Feliciano, at dawn in a village hut with three women guards.
President Fujimori oversaw the manhunt from Jauja, about 300km east of Lima.
Feliciano had headed the severely weakened Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, since the 1992 capture of its founder, Abimael Guzman.
His head hooded and bowed, Feliciano was wearing dark-coloured trousers and jacket and worn black sneakers as he was escorted aboard a military plane at Jauja bound for Lima, witnesses said. He was due to be imprisoned with Guzman at a maximum security navy base jail in the capital's port of Callao. Mr Fujimori followed him in his presidential jet.
Feliciano's arrest was a boost to the President's popularity ahead of an expected re-election bid next year. Mr Fujimori's hardline stance against rebels, with whom he refuses to negotiate, has won widespread approval among Peruvians.
"This is a major blow for Shining Path but not the end of the road," an expert on Peru, Dr John Crabtree, said in Oxford.
No gunfire was exchanged when soldiers caught Feliciano in rugged highlands where the Amazon jungle merges with the eastern slopes of the Andes only a few kilometres from the town of Huancayo, Mr Fujimori said.
With orders from the President to capture the guerrilla alive, security forces closed in on him by conducting hut-by-hut searches.
Mr Ramirez, the son of a retired army general, had frequently eluded capture since he took command. While the founder was known as an ideologue, Feliciano has been seen as first a military leader.
At the height of its powers, Sendero Luminoso was thought to have more than 10,000 fighters, but the number is believed to have dwindled to fewer than 1,000.