Death and troops prowl in Lima’s ‘toque de queda’

Press, 17 August 1987, Page 19

Death and troops prowl in Lima’s ‘toque de queda’

By

ANNE-MARIE

O'CONNOR NZPA-Reuter Lima The depth of tensions buildding in Peru is most visible by night, when the capital is transformed into a phantom city by a curfew that gives the military sole domain of the empty streets.

Driving from the airport through Lima late at night, one new arrival glimpsed armoured personnel carriers roaming dark avenues and soldiers peering from behind machine-guns. Police cars prowl long boulevards on the lookout for suspicious people who might be “terroristas,” and safe conduct passes are no guarantee since jittery soldiers have been known to shoot into the foggy night before asking questions or consulting their watches.

"The night before last, they killed a woman going home in a microbus, more than an hour before curfew," said a cab driver as be anxiously scanned the side of the boulevard for an army foot patrol that might be waving for him to stop.

“Look, there’s a corpse,” he said suddenly, pointing to the side of the road.

The body of a man, portly, middle-aged and wearing a grey suit, was lying with his arms outstretched near the dusty kerb. He appeared to be dead. The driver refused to stop to see if the man

could be helped: “It is too dangerous. He is dead. They’ll pick him up in the morning.” The curfew, first put into effect by President Alan Garcia in February, 1986, seems an ominous sign to many Peruvians of their fears that the troubled political situation, accompanied by corruption, financial woes and labour unrest, will probably get worse before getting any better. The curfew, called "toque de queda,” also seems to highlight complaints about the Government’s management of the crisis, and one newspaper editorial recently called it the “toque de la muerte,” or “touch of death.”

It does have a lighter side: all-night parties are "de toque a toque,” a risque play on words loosely meaning “from touch to touch.” Recently, guests at a diplomat's party in full swing looked at their watches and realised they would be spending the nigbt together. Some people from Peru’s most affluent social classes gave the impression the curfew, nightly bombings, and strikes were simply dangerous nuisances that belonged to the disquieting “other Peru” of slums, highlands warfare and Quechua Indians. "You don’t know, because you are a foreigner, but here in Peru 20 per cent of the people are cultured, educated, nice,”

said a well-to-do real estate agent who revealed proudly that her daughter was about to many an American.

"The other 80 per cent are ignorant, backwards, illiterate,” she told a visitor.

She did not understand why President Garcia bothered to appeal to the poverty-stricken majority with man-of-the-people balcony speeches and grand populist gestures, like a suggestion to turn the exclusive Lima golf club into a public library. “Just imagine the kind of people who will come to El Golf when it is a library and anyone can go there,” she said. The elusive Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, Peru’s largest Insurgent group, seem to loom like phantoms in the national imagination with their Maoist ideology and hermetic cells, but their bombing attacks lead observers to ask if support is more widespread than appears.

Some 10,000 people have died in Sendero’s seven-year anti-Govem-ment insurgency.

“What does the Sendero want? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows who they are,” said one woman, who added that many of her friends hope the authorities continue the curfew because “it keeps the men home at night.” It is hard to find agreement on what mixture of pressures could generate

support for the Sendero — a guerrilla group that calls Fidel Castro “a puppet of social imperialism” and the Soviet Union “filthy revisionists,” that views the Left Sandinista Government in Nicaragua as hopelessly bourgeois and hangs dead dogs on lamp-posts to represent the Chinese Government “dogs who betrayed the Cultural Revolution.”

One Quechua-speaking cab driver said he thought racism and repression made many from the Indian and mixed-blood underclass prey to any movement promising a better deal.

"If you were my wife in the mountains and a military man wanted you, I would just have to put up with it and do nothing,” he said. “Hie people are naturally rebellious because they are hungry, repressed.” Another working-class man from one of Lima’s poorer neighbourhoods said he thought the Sendero terrorised peasants into joining them and that no matter how disillusioned he became with the Garcia government and its “false promises,” he did not see the Sendero as a viable alternative.

“Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and his men — now those were guerrillas,” he said. “These Senderistas, throwing bombs without knowing who they will hurt, they are lust adventurers, terroristas.”