Shining Path Domingo García Rada, the president of the Peruvian National Electoral Council, severely injuring him and mortally wounding his driver. In 1988, Constantin (Gus) Gregory, an American citizen working for the United States Agency for International Development, was assassinated. Two French aid workers were killed on December 4 that same year. In August 1991, the group killed one Italian and two Polish priests in the Ancash Region. The following February, it assassinated María Elena Moyano, a well-known community organizer in Villa El Salvador, a vast shantytown in Lima. By 1991, the Shining Path had gained control of much of the countryside
Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Purges of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (, "", "cleansing of the party ranks") were a Soviet ritual in which periodic reviews of members of the Communist Party were conducted by other members and the security organs to get rid of "undesirables". In her book "Everyday Stalinism", Sheila Fitzpatrick says that such purges took place especially during the 1920s, a period of the young Soviet Union that she calls its "cultural revolution" (echoing the name of the similar later period in China), "bringing excitement into the workday bureaucratic routine".