Maoist rebels want election boycott

Press, 13 April 1985, Page 10

Maoist rebels want election boycott

NZPA-Reuter-AP Ayacucho Maoist guerrillas have amputated peasants’ fingers and seized a university building in their latest bid to force a boycott of the General Election tomorrow, officials and onlookers said. The Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebels yesterday chopped fingers off two youths in Chunqui, about 270 km from Ayacucho, to warn villagers not to vote, military officials said. Rebels also briefly occupied the dining hall of the State university and urged

students to boycott the poll. They said participation would endorse human rights violations allegedly committed by the Army. Sendero commandos, who denounce the poll as a farce, have for the last two weeks been threatening to kill peasants in the southeastern Andean region if they vote. Tomorrow, 8.3 million Peruvians will go to the polls to elect a new President and Congress for a five-year term. The new leader faces the

nation’s worst economic crisis in decades and must try to stem the violence that has taken almost 6000 lives in five years. Some 2000 other Peruvians have been reported by their families as “disappeared persons” during the fighting. Colonel Adolfo Artardi, a spokesman for the joint military command, said that the Intelligence services say the guerrillas would try to disrupt the vote, especially in the 25 Andean and Amazon jungle provinces that have been under a state of emergency for months to help the Government forces stationed in the area fight the insurgency.

President Fernando Belaunde Terry, aged 72, who' is banned by the constitution from seeking re-elec-tion, predicted in a speech on Wednesday that the election “will be the defeat of the guerrillas ... not on the battlefield but at the ballot box.”

Alan Garcia, aged 35, the charismatic leader of the Social Democratic Apra Party, is heavily favoured to win the election. Opinion polls predict that he will get about 40 per cent of the vote, compared with 19 per cent to Alfonso Barrantes, aged 58, the Marxist Mayor of Lima, who is the candidate of a loose coalition of Leftist groups called United Left.