Guerrilla uprising turns Peru into bloody battleground

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 31

Guerrilla uprising turns Peru into bloody battleground

By

PAUL IREDALE

NZPA-Reuter Lima When Leftists exploded bombs and stole ballot boxes in the mountain hamlet of Chucchin on May 17, 1980, the incidents went almost unnoticed in the excitement of Peru’s first democratic elections for 12 years. But today they are as important as the elections themselves. They mark the beginning of a guerrilla war that has cost almost 10,000 lives and turned Peru into one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in Latin America. In the run up to the seventh anniversary of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency, an upsurge in violence has highlighted the most serious problem faced by the Social Democratic Government of President Alan Garcia. Six people have died in more than a score of bomb and machine-gun attacks on Ministries, banks and police stations in Lima this month.

The Peruvian capital was hit by two blackouts

within a week, one of which cut power over more than 1000 km, the most serious rebel strike yet on the electricity system.

From 1980 to 1985 the Sendero insurgency was concentrated in the southern mountain province of Ayacucho. Now its focus is in Lima, home to almost a third of Peru’s 20 million people. Every bombing or assassination reverberates through the capital, announced in gruesome detail by more than a dozen newspapers. The attacks have increased pressure on Garcia to allow the military a free hand in combating the insurgency.

"Who rules here?” the Right-wing daily “Actualidad” demanded last week in a headline over pictures of Garcia and Sendero leader, Abimael Guzman. “How long will it continue, Mr President?” it asked.

Few could blame Garcia for feeling a sense of frustration at the progress of the guerrilla war.

As he has sought to pump more money into the impoverished heartlands of Peru, offered an amnesty to the guerrillas and tried to clamp down on human rights abuses, even firing a regional military commander, so the insurgency has spread. Sendero, whose numbers are estimated to be around 3000, have infiltrated large areas of the under-populated Peruvian interior, giving revolutionary classes and living alongside the peasants who provide them with shelter.

During the first years of the insurgency, most Sendero attacks were on the security forces, informers and members of peasant self-defence groups set up by the military in Ayacucho and the neighbouring

provinces to combat the guerrillas.

But over the last two years, the violence has spread throughout Peru, from Tumbes on the northern border with Ecuador to Tacna in the far south. Sendero’s founder and mentor was Abimael Guzman, a mild-mannered philosophy professor who took to Maoism in his 30s and espoused it with fanaticism.

Guzman, who visited China three times during the 19705, formed a revolutionary organisation dedicated to the destruction of all existing establishment structures in Peru and their replacement by a new society, built along classic Maoist lines.

Sendero built up a personality cult around Guzman, known in the movement as “President Gonzalo,” but after seven years in hiding it is not known whether he remains inside Peru or even

if he is still alive. Diplomats and independent analysts believe Sendero’s aim is to try to provoke the armed forces into staging a coup, which would increase repression and give the guerrillas wider appeal. Garcia has disowned the single important victory against Sendero during his term in Goverment: the elimination of guerrilla cadres organising the insurgency from inside Lima prisons. The killing of about 300 Sendero inmates by security forces after rebellions in three Lima prisons last June is widely seen as the insurgency’s most serious setback, depriving it of organisational ability in a military operation that received widespread public support. Garcia, pressed by delegates to a Socialist International conference then taking place in Lima, denounced security force excesses at the prisons and promised to bring

those involved to justice. Almost a year later, noone has been tried. Garcia’s gesture alienated sectors of the armed forces, traditional foes of his A.P.R.A. party. The Government recently announced an increase in the number of guerrillas it was capturing, but its declarations were followed by a new wave of attacks and Western diplomats say there is little evidence to suggest any successful infiltration of Sendero ranks by the authorities.

Western diplomats forecast widespread attacks during the coming weeks, which cover a number of important dates in the Sendero calendar, but they believe Garcia will try to resist a fundamental shift in policy for as long as he is able. “You would have to calculate how fast the terrorists want' this to go,” one diplomat said. “To a certain extent Sendero is calling the shots.”