Does Targeted Capture Reduce Terrorism?

Abstract

From January 1979 to December 2009, the Maoist insurgent Shining Path committed a total of 9,034 violent acts in a concerted attempt to topple the Peruvian government. These acts of violence included bombings, armed assaults, and assassinations. The Shining Path's leader Abimael Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government on 12 September 1992. Using quarterly data and an interrupted times-series AutoRegressive Integrative Moving Average (ARIMA) study design, we investigated the effect of Abimael Guzmán's capture on the ability of the Shining Path to wage its war against the Peruvian government. Maximum-likelihood results revealed that the frequency of terrorist acts committed by the Shining Path dropped by 143 incidents per quarter a short time after Guzmán was captured. The analysis also evinced a positive relationship between the lethality of attacks and the frequency of the Shining Path's terrorist activity. We conclude that targeted capture shows some promise as an effective counterterrorism strategy, at least for terrorist groups such as the Shining Path that have a top-down type of organizational structure.