Date: Sun, 10 Feb 91 18: 53: 03 SET
From: JAVIER SOLANO <CSOLAN%CERNVM. BITNET@mitvma. mit. edu>
Subject: PERU'S WAR
To: PERU@ATHENA. MIT. EDU !HOLA AMIGOS DEL PERU!ME HE PERMITIDO ENVIARLES DOS MAIL CON LA COPIA DE ESTE ARTICULO, QUE CONSIDERO UNO DE LOS MAS COMPLETOS E IMPARCIALES, SOBRE LA GUERRILLA EN EL PERU. LES RUEGO SE DEN EL TRABAJO DE LEERLO PORQUE HAY MUCHO QUE IGNORAMOS ACERCA DE LA REALIDAD DE NUESTRO PAIS.

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ESTE ARTICULO DE RAYMOND BONNER FUE PUBLICADO EN "THE NEW YORKER" EN ENERO 1988

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PERU'S WAR

The quiet, backward city of Ayacucho, Peru, might seem to be rather unlikely place for the birth of a revolution, but it was there that Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, which is one of the most ruthless and secretive movements in Latin American history, came into being. When Amada Gutierrez Pajares, who is professor of English language and literature at the National University of San Cristobal of Huamanga, and also its public-relations director, moved from Lima to Ayacucho, in 1974, there was only one flight a week between the two cities; there were only a few cars in Ayacucho; the telephone at the Hotel Turistas was cranked by hand, and it was the only phone in town you could use to call Lima; and students studied by candlelight. Within a few years, however, spray-painted slogans began to appear on the adobe walls of the city: "Death to the Gang of Four", "Long Live the Cultural Revolution", "Death to the Revisionists", "Long Live Jiang Qing."  Professor Gutierrez remembers thinking, How is it that here in this town lost in the mountains the battle over what happened in China is being waged?

Seventy-five years ago, Ayacucho, which residents often call Hua-Huamanga, its Inca name, was described by a Peruvian writer as "a backwater of nature and time." That feeling remains. Even today, there seem to be more donkeys than cars in the city, and the air a mile and a half above sea level is brisk and pristine, the sky most days a pure blue. Girls in gray jumpers and white blouses, boys in gray slacks and white shirts scurry through the dusty streets with satchels and volleyballs. The Plaza de Armas, the central square, is a veritable museum of the Spanish colonial period. Two-story stone edifices with red tile roofs line its sides. Balconies shelter long arcades with symmetrical archways. On one side of the square is a stone mansion that was built in 1735 for the Spanish viceroy's representative; opposite is a cathedral that was begun in 1615, with twin bell towers that still rise above all the other buildings in town. In the center of the square, amid tall palm trees, is an equestrian statue of General Jose de Sucre, who, in 1824, led troops in the battle that won Peru its independence from Spain.

The capital of the Inca Empire, which at its height extended from modern Ecuador down through about half of Chile and included most of Bolivia, was in the Andes, at Cuzco. In 1533, Francisco Pizarro occupied Cuzco (today it is a stopping-off point for the trip to the Inca ruins at Macchu Picchu) , and in 1535 he moved the capital to the more favorable coastal climate of Lima. Peruvians often remark that the Incas encouraged Pizarro to found Lima as their revenge. From May to September, the sun rarely appears through a constant gray haze; there is an seldom a cleansing rainfall. For almost three centuries, Lima was the headquarters of Spain's vast South American empire, and the Spanish viceroy knew little about what was happening to his subjects beyond the city.

This insular attitude has scarcely changed, and, in fact, has probably been exacerbated in the last few decades. Though Peru, with four hundred and ninety-six thousand square miles, is larger than Oregon, California, Washington, and Nevada combined, nearly a third of its population--six million out of twenty million--lives in Lima. (The second largest city, Arequipa, in southern Peru, has some six hundred thousand inhabitants.) Three-quarters of the country's doctors are in Lima, and so are seventy-six per cent of the telephones, eighty percent of the banking offices, and ninety per cent of the private investment. In Lima, sixty per cent of the families have clean water sewerage systems, and electricity. In the rural areas, only one of every seven persons has potable water, and only one of out of forty-three indoor plumbing. Peru is one of the most underdeveloped countries in South America, but while the nation's infant-mortality rate is a hundred and twenty-seven per thousand (the Latin-American average is seventy-three per thousand) , the rate in Lima is fifty-six per thousand. In the Department of Huancavelica, which is contiguous to the Department of Ayacucho, the rate is two hundred and seventy-five. Government is Peru's largest employer, and the government employees are concentrated in Lima; of twenty-five thousand in the Ministry of Agriculture, for example, more than half work in the capital, a city of high rises and slums few farms.

One way to comprehend Lima is to picture a series of demographic ripples, starting from the ocean and moving indeed across what were once sand dunes to the craggy, barren foothills of the Andes. The well-to-do live in the first half circle, along the beach, in modern high-rise apartments that march along the brown cliffs, and in cool, thick-walled Spanish-style homes on tree-lined boulevards. In the wealthy enclaves of Miraflores and San Isidro are automatic banking machines, computer stores, men's tailors, movie theatres, record shops, which also sell videocassettes, and bookstores. It is a cafe society, heavily Italian. An expressway runs from the beach to an oblong plaza six miles inland, on one side of which is the squat, gray Palace of Justice; across from the palace is the thirty-three-story Civic Center, the tallest building in Lima. This is downtown Lima. A pedestrian mall connects the Plaza San Martin and the Plaza de Armas, which was laid out by the Spanish in 1535. Along the mall, traces of the charm from that era and heavy, vaulted buildings from earlier in this century are hidden under grime and decay, and now many businesses and professionals are moving out, to office buildings that are going up closer to the beach.

Beyond the city center, where racks of magazines and paperbacks crowd the sidewalks, the city sprawls in a jangle of residences, storefronts, and open-air markets, where vegetables are stacked on the street or sold from square baskets on the fronts of bicycles. Along the Pan-American Highway, which cuts through the city on its often laborious grind from Canada to Chile, there are sections of town where steel reinforcing rods stick up among red bricks. These sections, where there are huge holes in the streets, look as if they are being built up very slowly.

The slums--a crescent enveloping the capital--are Lima's final demographic wave. Some two million people, or about a third of Lima's population, live in the slums-shantytowns called "pueblos jovenes" or young towns. A "pueblo joven" rises on abandoned land or on a sand dune or a rocky hillside when groups of families in effect invade and quickly put up their "houses"--boxes of woven straw mats for the sides and cardboard or corrugated tin or plastic for the roof. Sometimes the invading families have come from the Andes, to escape the poverty and, in more recent years, the violence that has broken out between Sendero and the government. But many of the invasions have been caused by internal pressures: areas that were previously invaded become so inhumanely congested that families strike out for the open sand dunes.

The schism between Lima and the rest of the country is not merely geographic but also economic and political. "From Lima, we see the rest of the country as Biafra", says Cesar Rodriguez Rabanal, director of the Lima-based Center for Psychoanalysis and Society, a nonprofit research organization, financed principally by German foundations. "On television, you hear the speech of Reagan by satellite, but you hear a report from a journalist in Ayacucho by telephone." It's not far from Lima to Ayacucho--only forty minutes by air--but "from Lima to Ayacucho you pass through a hundred years of evolution", a businessman remarked on a flight between the cities. The one-way airfare is roughly the equivalent of twenty-five dollars, but over and over again, when I mentioned in Lima that I was going to Ayacucho, which is both a department and the name of the departmental capital, I was told that a Limeņo going to Ayacucho would find it as foreign as I would. Indeed, Limeņos--or those in the ruling class, at least--probably have more in common culturally, with New York, or, certainly, with Miami, than with Ayacucho.

"Ayacucho isn't worth anything, and Ayacuchanos are worth less", said a nurse who was disgusted that the flight to Ayacucho had been canceled--a frequent occurrence, she explained, noting that there had already been four flights to Cuzco that day. The disparity in treatment between the coast and the mountains is manifest in Ayacucho, which might seem to be one city that would have received special attention from the nation. With a population of a hundred and fifty thousand--swollen in recent years by refugees from the war--not only is it well situated, midway between Lima and Cuzco, but is also occupies a special niche in Peruvian history: the battle that ended Spanish rule in Peru--and South America--was fought on the Plain of the Quinua, eighteen miles northeast of Ayacucho. There are still only a thousand telephones in Ayacucho, and water and electricity are rationed--available only during certain hours the day. Television didn't appear until 1975, and though today there are seven TV channels in Lima, only the government station reaches Ayacucho with any clarity. In the entire Department of Ayacucho--its seventeen thousand square miles (twice the size of Massachusetts) include an eastward stretch of jungle--there are just fifty miles of paved roads, nearly half of them leading only to a commemorative obelisk on the Plain of Quinua. There are no paved roads connecting the city of Ayacucho with the second-largest city, Huanta, is paved only about half of its thirty miles.

While the government was neglecting Ayacucho, Sendero Luminoso, beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, was steadily taking over the capital and the department. The movement started at the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga, an institution that was founded in 1677. After being closed for seventy years, when it was reopened, in 1959, it was to be a university that would serve the region and the Indian communities. It would educate the children of the Indians, not for careers that would draw them to Lima-it had no law school or medical school-but in fields that would allow them to contribute to the development of the Andean region. The emphasis was on teaching, nursing, rural engineering. Students were required to learn Quechua, the principal Indian language. They were also encouraged to spend time working in the isolated Indian villages from which many of them had come, the hope being that they would return to them after graduation. The university and its programs became a magnet for the enthusiastic and idealistic, attracting Peace Corps workers, Fulbright scholars, and volunteers from European-funded development projects.

Within a few years, however, the government was cutting back on its financing, and at the same time the university-like most such institutions in Latin America, and, indeed, like many in the United States, Europe, and Japan in that era-became a cradle for leftists. The would-be revolutionaries in Ayacucho were inspired by Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba, in 1959, and in 1966 Castro's compatriot Ernesto (Che) Guevara arrived in Bolivia to start what he hoped would be a continent wide Indian and peasant revolution. But what had the greatest impact on Peruvian revolutionaries was the Chino-Soviet split, in 1964-a geopolitical divorce that rent Communist unity throughout the world. Peru's Communist Party, which had been founded in the nineteen-twenties, went through several years of internal squabbling and purges. Eventually, several factions emerged-pro Soviet, pro-Albanian, pro-Chinese. In Ayacucho, the pro-Chinese faction was headed by Abimael Guzman Reynoso, a sombre, intellectually disciplined philosophy professor at the university.

In 1970, Guzman and his faction took the name Communist Party of Peru for the Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariategui. They claimed to be the legitimate political heirs of Mariategui, the founder of Peru's first Communist Party. While Mariategui was one of Peru's earliest and most influential Communist thinkers-just about every leftist political party in Peru today claims to be the heir to his thinking-Guzman, known by his nom de guerre, Gonzalo, is presumptively proclaimed by his followers to be the fourth sword of World Communist Revolution, along with Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

In 1934, four years after Mariategui's death, Abimael Guzman was born, in the southern coastal city of Mollendo, the offspring of an unmarried woman's liaison with a married man. When Guzman was fourteen, he was sent to Arequipa to attend the Catholic high school. Considered smart and studious, he consistently received top marks for comportment. "He was a priest's dream, a mother's dream", a former classmate recalled a few years ago in an interview with the Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who is writing a book about Sendero. At the National University of St. Augustine, in Arequipa, Guzman studied philosophy and law simultaneously, earning degrees in both disciplines; his thesis in philosophy was "About Kant's Theory of Space", and in law "The Democratic Bourgeois State."

"He was serious and sparing", Dr. Miguel Angel Rodriguez Rivas, Guzman's philosophy professor and intellectual mentor, told Gorriti. Guzman's stern demeanor is reinforced by his physical appearance: of slightly less than average height, he has a squarish face with heavy eyebrows. Describing Guzman as a person of "great will and tenacity", Rodriguez Rivas added that "he was one of the best students in an era characterized for having brilliant ones." His nonacademic interests ran to classical music and modern literature, principally Joyce and Hemingway. As for his politics, he was a member of the Communist Party. "But he was not an organizer, much less an agitator", Rodriguez Rivas said. "He was a theorist of the highest level."

Guzman arrived at the university in 1962, as an assistant professor of philosophy. Though he continued his political activities, conducting sessions with students and professors at his simple mid-brick house, on a street near the university, "he was always very careful to protect his professional image", a fellow-professor told me. The university leftists engaged in heated exchanges, arguing about the correct interpretations of Marx, Lenin, and Mao; debated the nature of Peruvian society (was it incipient and dependent capitalism or semi-feudal and colonial?) ; and claimed to represent the true path to Communism in Peru. Then they would go off to a coffeehouse to drink and sing together. "We called them cafe revolutionaries", Guzman's colleague recalled.

By 1968, Guzman and his followers had gained control of the university through elections; Guzman, who had spent some time in China in the mid-nineteen-sixties, eventually became the director of personnel, and brought his political influence to bear on the university's hiring and firing policies. It was said that even the night watchman was a Senderista. During the decade that followed, however, control of the university went back and forth between Sendero and other leftist organizations, which sometimes formed uneasy alliances to defeat it. Finally, in 1978, Sendero went underground. In 1979 and 1980, graffiti began to appear around Ayacucho declaring that it was time to launch an armed struggle. "No one took it seriously", Amada Gutierrez said. "We thought it was a joke--Luminosos were crazy." But on May 17, 1980, Sendero, in clear expression of its contempt for democracy, attacked a polling station in Chuschi, a tiny Andean village thirty miles southwest of Ayacucho, and burned the ballot boxes; the election marked the return of civilian rule twelve years of military dictatorship. (It is sometimes reported that this happened on May 18th, but Sendero, which painstakingly records, analyzes, and classifies every event it is involved in, has written that the army struggle began on May 17th--"not the 18th, as the reactionaries say.") Six months later, in December, Lima residents got a look at Sendero when they awoke to find dogs hanging from lampposts (the running dogs of capitalism), and posters denouncing Deng Xiaoping and praising the Gang of Four. (Sendero appears to want establish a state along the lines of Mao's finest hour.)

The basis for the armed revolution had been solidly laid by the Senderistas at the university. For several years, most first-year courses were taught by professors who were Senderistas: they taught Marxism and dialectical materialism without identifying themselves as Senderistas. In addition, nearly all the professors in the School of Education were Senderistas. Consequently, when the graduating students returned to the countryside to teach they sowed Senderista ideology.

"Sendero utilized education as has never been done before in the world by revolutions", says Manuel Jesus Granados Aponte, who was a student at the university in the nineteen-seventies, and whose bachelor's thesis, completed in 1980, was the first thorough study of Sendero. "Sendero didn't send out cadres--it sent teachers. They were sent back where they came from, teaching Marxism with the Sendero line. Sendero used the university completely. Lenin used the workers. Mao used the peasants."

Studying Sendero has now become a cottage industry, with "Senderologists" finding a broad need for their knowledge, because Sendero, which appears to be unconcerned about world opinion, is possibly the most secretive revolution in modern history. Unlike other revolutionary movements--in the Philippines, in Afghanistan, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua--Sendero hasn't opened itself to journalists: there have been clandestine interviews with leaders, no conducted tours of areas under Sendero control; Sendero hasn't even issued many proclamations.

Manuel Granados, soft of voice and with the features of his Quechuan ancestry, has one advantage over most of the other Senderologists: he was, to borrow a phrase, present at the creation. Because of that, he is often suspected of being a Senderista. "I am an Indian", he says, "but I have had access to books, to an education, so I could be a Senderista leader-there are many like me who are."

Granados' bachelor's thesis almost went unpublished. The thesis is based in part on his personal friendships with Senderistas (Granados and a friend who later became a Sendero military commander are among the authors in a short-story collection published in 1978) and in part on a study of some six hundred leaflets and pamphlets--at times, the battles of the left seemed to be paper wars--that the Senderistas disseminated during the university years. Sendero didn't want Granados going public with his knowledge about the movement, which at the time he wrote the thesis was about to launch its armed phase. Because of pressure from Sendero, many professors declined to read it. Eventually, two foreign professors-a Belgian and a Pole-and a professor from Huanta, Granados' hometown, did read and approve it, after Granados removed all individual names, including Guzman's. Granados submitted three copies of the thesis to the university. It was in the days before copying machines in Ayacucho, and he could afford only enough paper for three, each of which he typed himself-a hundred and seventy-eight pages per copy. Sendero quickly took one of the copies, warning Granados that the movement would use it "for the day of adjusting accounts." In 1983, a commission, headed by the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, that was investigating the deaths of eight journalists in the mountain village of Uchuraccay borrowed a copy of Granados' thesis from the university library and never returned it. Granados says it is now in the possession of the military commander in Ayacucho.

Granados received his bachelor's degree in 1981 and went to Huaras, a departmental capital set among snowcapped mountain peaks, which had been partly destroyed by an earthquake in 1970. There he became another of the country's ubiquitous street vendors of newspapers, magazines, and books. His search for better work was futile, because he was 'from' the University of Sendero'"and because of his "physical features", he said recently, putting his hands to his smooth face. "An Indian who graduated from Huamanga must be Sendero", he added, with a touch of bitterness about the prevalent stereotype. Eventually, he drifted to Lima and managed to find work as a low-level assistant in the anthropology department of Catholic University, which enabled him to study for a master's degree. That degree mitigated the effects of his Huamanga background, but Sendero has continued to haunt him. Sendero has infiltrated the government to a modest extent, and that, one military Intelligence officer told me, includes the military. At a few government agencies where Granados has sought work, he has been turned down, he says, because of Senderista influence. Granados' wife, Marta Peralta, who has a degree in chemical engineering from Huamanga, says that she, too, has been denied employment in government agencies for that reason.

Granados' knowledge about Sendero reached a wider audience than for his college thesis last March, when an article he wrote was published in quarterly "SOCIALISM & PARTICIPATION." The journal has a limited circulation, but Granados' words had a profound impact. The office of Peru's President, Alan Garcia Perez, ordered thirty copies of the article; at dinner parties in San Isidro and Miraflores, it was discussed with alarm. "It really shocked me friends, too", said a European-educated psychologist, who lives, with her husband and small children, in a wealthy seaside neighborhood. She had read other writings by Senderologists, she said, but none had affected her and her friends as Granados' had.

The article compares a Peru under Sendero with Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, then asks, "If Sendero triumphs, how many Peruvians will remain to tell the history? One million? Half a million?." It is little wonder that the article caused alarm in a nation with a population of more than twenty million. Granados also rattled upper-crust complacency when he addressed the question of who become Senderistas. They have been stereotyped, he noted: "Serrano, cholo, mal vestido igual a senderista"--a badly dressed cholo from the sierras is a Senderista. Both serrano and cholo, meaning an Indian who has entered the Spanish culture sufficiently to speak some of the cultural norms, are often used in derogatory ways. The reality, however, according to Granados, is that Sendero has recruited successfully among the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes as well.

Sendero has focussed its recruiting on boys and girls of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, one reason being that young minds are malleable. Besides, the younger the revolutionary army, the more difficult it will be for the government to infiltrate it: governments soldiers are at least seventeen years old. Finally, by the time Sendero gets ready to take on the armed forces in direct battles, which might not be for many more years, the young recruits will have grown into men and women with many years' experience.

"Terrorists" and "delinquents" are the words used by the government, the mainstream media, and most Peruvians to describe the Senderistas. Such pejorative terminology is an element of counter-insurgency, in Peru as elsewhere. It's part of a strategy to portray acts of violence as somehow mindless and without direction. But a government that adopts these labels may be making a serious error. They disguise the nature of the enemy--and how can the enemy--and how can the enemy be defeated unless the government understands what it is fighting? "It's not terrorism", Granados has written about Sendero. "Terrorism is a type of action by groups that suffer from an absence of ideological conception, being inclined to expressions of uncontrolled and blind wrath."

Sendero is ideologically driven and highly controlled. "Sendero has faith--a conviction-that it will triumph", Granados said during one of our discussions. "They say there is nothing in the world that can defeat them: 'We are condemned to triumph'." For Sendero , ideology--"the correct line"--is everything. In this, as in so much else, it is guided by Mao: "When the Party line is correct, we have everything. If we don't have men, we will have them; if we don't have weapons, we will get them; and if we don't have power, we will take it. If the line is not correct, we will lose everything."

Though Sendero looks to Mao for ideological guidance, it is an indigenous movement, with Senderistas having as much contempt for the "social imperialists" (the Soviet Union) as they do for "Yankee imperialists." Sendero has not received any outside help, American and Peruvian Intelligence officials agree. (It has begun, however, to set up front organizations in Europe and the United States to raise funds) . Not from the Soviet Union (which supplies the Peruvian government), not from Cuba, not from China, which has explicitly disavowed Sendero, not from Vietnam, not from North Korea (which recently sold the government automatic rifles). Unlike other Latin-American movements, Sendero has not bought arms on the international black market. In part this is because sophisticated arms are not consistent with its philosophy of a guerrilla war in a backward country. Dynamite, which is plentiful in the mountains of this mining country, is one of Sendero's principal weapons. Using rope slings the way their ancestors did in hunting for generations, men hurl it with deadly accuracy at police posts. It has been used in attacks on stores and embassies, Soviet and American, thrown by young boys and girls; some youngsters have been badly mutilated when dynamite charges exploded in their hands. Sticks of dynamite are secreted in automobiles and are detonated in front of banks; they are packed on burros that are driven toward military posts. As for more for modern weapons, the militant is expected to acquire his own, usually by assassinating a policeman and taking his rifle. Sendero teaches the militant that the weapon rightfully belongs to him, not to the state, and the seizing of it also tests the loyalty and courage of the young Senderista; it is also a political action that reinforces his conviction that Sendero is going to triumph.

Many Peruvians, especially in the government, believe that the revolution could be defeated if only Guzman could be killed or captured. Guzman has been positively spotted only once since 1978 (PARECE QUE HACE POCO SE ENCONTRO UNA PELICULA DEL 88 EN LA QUE EL APARECE) , when he went underground. That sighting was in 1979, when he was picked up by the police in Lima; he was detained only briefly and released, in part through the ineptitude of Peruvian Intelligence. The police do have a photograph that they say shows Guzman at a baptism in 1983. Authorities disagree on whether Guzman is alive or dead: a Peruvian Intelligence official told me in August that Guzman had recently been seen in London; an American Intelligence officer declared with equal certainty that Guzman had died. Even if Guzman is dead, the revolution might continue-might have acquired a life of its own. "It's like Mao", Granados says. "He has died. He's buried. But there are thirty or forty groups in the world that continue fighting for the ideas of Mao."

More important than Guzman in the flesh, according to some Senderologists, is the "subjective myth"that has grown up around him. Cadres and militants declare that they are fighting for the guiding thought of Gonzalo. "They speak not of a triumph in life but of the death necessary in order that the Guiding Thought of Gonzalo will live triumph", Granados has written. Al of life is for the revolution. As is death. For the Senderista, life is on the fingertips, to be blown away at any moment. Indeed, there is a need to die, to create martyrs. Thus, when the government killed at least two hundred and sixty people, most of them Senderistas, during prison uprisings in June of 1986, the deaths served Sendero's purposes: a Day of Heroism was declared, to be celebrated each year.

How many are willing to die for the cause? How many militants and cadres does the movement have? How much support does it enjoy among the rural peasants and the urban poor? Those are the perennial questions about revolutionary movements, but the path to their answer is slippery and obscured by false rhetoric. Government figures are not necessarily reliable: governments facing insurgencies tend either to understate the number, so as not to alarm the citizenry and to give the appearance of a government in control, or to exaggerate the insurgents' strength, so as to get more money for the military. (The Peruvian government says there are three thousand to five thousand Sendero militants, and maybe twenty thousand active supporters. ) Nor is there any reason to give more credence to the claims of the revolutionaries: they understate their numbers when they don't want to alarm the government, overstate them when they want to give the impression that they represent the popular will.

There can be little doubt, however, that Sendero has steadily gained adherents. No guerrilla movement can support from the people, even if it is only passive, such as not alerting authorities to the guerrillas' presence or whereabouts. As for Sendero itself, it has been able to grow because the Peruvian state has done so little for the people in the remote regions. It hasn't provided them roads, water, or electricity, or displayed much humanitarian concern for their children. So what Sendero is intent on destroying is a government and a social order that many Peruvians-particularly the Indians and the poor-believe is not worth fighting to preserve. "There is no sense among the people that the government exists to serve them", says Diego Garcia-Sayan, who is a lawyer and the executive director of the Andean Commission of Jurists, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization supported by the Ford Foundation. He backs up his statement by comparing Peru with neighboring Chile. A study by the commission found that in Chile in 1983 and 1984 eight thousand habeas-corpus petitions were filed. Granted, he says, maybe only ten were resolved favorably, but, still, the people looked to the government. By contrast, in Ayacucho during the same years a thousand and five persons were detained and disappeared but only fourteen habeas-corpus petitions were filed.

As the war intensifies, the peasants are being forced to choose: either join Sendero or support the government or fled to Lima. Some villages try to remain neutral. One Ayacuchano explained, "When Sendero comes in and demands food, the people feed them; Sendero asks for shelter, the people give it. Then Sendero leaves, and the community erases all traces, all evidence that it was there. Then the military comes. It asks for food, the people provided food. It asks for shelter, the people provide shelter." Such attempts aside, there is little tolerance for neutrality in this war-not by the government and not by Sendero. A major element of the government's counter-insurgency has been the formation of rondas campesinas-peasant patrols. (This is similar to what the Guatemala government has done against another Communist-led insurgency that, like the one in Peru, is based principally among Indians of the highlands, rich in culture but economically impoverished) . The peasants are trapped. If they don't join the peasant patrols, the government will consider them subversives. If they do, they and their families will be Sendero victims.

Just as the government's repression has impaired its counter-insurgency, Sendero's violence has sometimes defeated its own purposes. "The Senderistas have killed too many innocent people, too many elected officials", a medical worker who travels in the countryside said when I asked her why Sendero had lost support.

Nevertheless, no one thinks that the war is won-except, perhaps, some government officials and military officers, who, like their counterparts elsewhere, seem to have their judgment blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel. There are communities that are solidly Sendero, and the revolution has a presence in probably half of Peru's twenty- five departments. By taking precautions to avoid the military patrols, Sendero units can move almost at will along the country's mountainous spine from Ecuador to Chile. In the jungles that sprawl from the mountains eastward to Brazil, Sendero has increased its activities in recent years. These are coca-growing regions, and though Sendero does not take part in drug trafficking, it has formed alliances with small-scale coca-leaf growers in their wars against drug traffickers and the government.

"Who is winning the war in Peru in the last four years?" says Diego Garcia-Sayan. "Obviously, Sendero is winning the war. Not in the traditional sense of territory or battles. But who is stronger? There is no doubt. Four years ago, Sendero was a small group incapable of anything but small actions. Today, it can do what it wants-or at least, from the point of view of the people, it can. There is so much fear that it can set off a bomb or kill a policeman at will. And that means it is winning." No one thinks that Sendero is about to take power; but it can cause enough havoc to prevent the government from turning its attention to the other serious problems besetting the country.

While the government has not had great success in the war against Sendero, some villages have. In Huancasancos and Sacsamarca, two miles up in the Peruvian Andes, facing each other across a narrow valley, the villagers are descendants of the mitimaes-people the Incas relocated. They have retained many of the communal characteristics of the Inca era from granges to community-development projects. In terms of physical distance from urban centers, Sacsamarca and Huancasancos aren't terribly isolated-some two hundred miles southeast of Lima, seventy miles northeast of the city of Palpa, on the Pacific coastal plain, and approximately half that distance south of Ayacucho. But no direct road links the two villages to the city of Ayacucho; a circuitous bus trip takes twelve hours or more. And there is no road at all to Palpa.

To reach the area from Lima, as the journalist Gustavo Gorriti and I did not long ago, you drive to Nazca, two hundred and fifty miles to the south, on a paved road-one of the few in the vast country-that undulates over sand dunes. From Nazca inland, the trip becomes an ordeal. The road twists and reverses through the jagged mountains; periodically on the edges of the road are crosses, those ubiquitous Latin-American memorials to loved ones who went over the precipice in a bus when the brakes failed or the driver fell asleep. After fifty miles on the odometer and almost three hours on the clock-and two and half miles on an altimeter, from sea level to thirteen thousand feet-the road arrives at a broad plateau. The air in this vast, desolate area is thin, water is scarce, the earth is unyielding. It's a silent world. The land belongs to the alpaca and to the vicuņa, a graceful animal with spindly legs, a long, lithe neck, and short brown hair with a patch of white at the chest, which is protected in a government preserve in these mountains. Sometimes you see these animals roaming in herds; sometimes one or two stand quietly on a ridge, silhouetted against the horizon. Breaking the flatness of the landscape are circles of stones a few feet high the circumferences varying. These are shepherds' corrals. Along the way, when we saw someone, we usually asked how far it was to Sacsamarca. The answer was not in miles, not always even in time. "Oh, very far", was one reply. "This afternoon", shouted a woman in front of a small hut of stones and mud-the only living quarters for as many miles as the eye could scan. To traverse seventy straight, flat miles took us four jarring hours. Then the flatness gave way abruptly to a valley. We saw the towns that were our destination. From a distance, they looked like paintings of idyllic rural villages-leafy trees rising above red tile roofs, beneath slopes with terraced plots.

By Peruvian mountain standards, the four thousand habitants of Huancasancos are wealthy; it is not just wealth, however, but their commitment to the community that is the main reason for what development has taken place. The village has three schools, and each one has livestock assigned to it-to be cared for, bred, and eventually sold, the proceeds going to supplement what few resources the government provides. The boys' primary school has twenty-five head of cattle and seven hundred sheep; the girls' primary school, which has about the same number of students, has five head of cattle and a hundred and fifty sheep; the secondary school, which is coed, has two cows and two hundred sheep. (The distribution reflects, in part, the male dominance in the society, as does the fact that the boys' school is two stories high, with glass windows, and would be the pride of many coastal towns or departmental capitals, while the girls attend school in a crumbling adobe structure.) Cows and sheep belonging to the community as a whole graze in the communal grange. Profits from their sale are used for a number of village projects. A few years ago, Huancasancos built its own hydroelectric power plant on a hill behind the village, providing the people with something that the government has provided to few communities in the mountains. And Huancasancos recently bought two heavy-duty trucks to haul cows, sheep, people, and mail-for a fee, which goes to the community. To reduce from ten or twelve hours to four or five hours the time it takes to reach the coast, where there are markets for agricultural products, the villagers have already arranged for labor on a road that the government has proposed to build to Palpa: three thousand men from the region will donate six days of roadwork each.

It was this wealth, this way of life, and this form of government that the people ultimately rose up to defend against Sendero. The military doesn't want journalists in areas where it is operating against Sendero, and Gorriti and I were stopped and detained by soldiers. Eventually, however, an Army captain, persuaded that the villagers' story was one that ought to be told, allowed us to go into Huancasancos; he accompanied us. The villagers clearly had respect for this military officer-they are helping to build a military post. At one point, the village leaders told us that a lieutenant who had been in charge of the garrison a few years earlier was habitually drinking with a Senderista teacher and had been very drunk during a Sendero attack. The captain looked uncomfortable as they told the story, but he did not attempt to stop them. In general, the village leaders confirmed the broad outlines of what Gorriti had already learned, and added details. It was in late 1981 that Sendero began operating in Huancasancos. First came meetings in the leafy town square, surrounded by the church, a municipal building, and a soccer field, behind and above which is the high school. The Senderistas were hooded, so the people weren't sure who they were. Eventually, the leader unmasked himself. He was Juan Lopez Liceras, who had been teaching at the high school for four years. Lopez Liceras, a graduate of the University of Huamanga, was twenty-eight years old at the time; he was described to us by the major as "very reserved." He became the de facto commissar of the Huancasancos region, which Sendero considered a liberated zone and, in effect, the capital of Sendero's empire. Lopez Liceras and the Senderistas took over the municipal building, a two-story red brick structure, for offices and living quarters.

Sendero rule, which was at first more relaxed, gradually tightened as resistance grew. Ultimately, no more two people were allowed to gather on a street except when Sendero rang the bells in the twin towers of the church to call a meeting; the villagers were expected to appear in the square for indoctrination. A red flag would be raised, and the Senderistas would chant their revolutionary slogans. Whenever a bus or a truck left the city, Senderista guards stopped it and took the name of everyone aboard. The passengers were warned that if the police or soldiers came while they were away their families would be killed.

Sendero also reorganized economic life in Huancasancos. No one was allowed to own more than five head of cattle and fifty sheep. Animals over that number, and also the animals owned communally, were distributed to poorer families. Other were slaughtered for daily communal feedings; many of those fed were from poorer villages surrounding Huancasancos, where Sendero has considerable support. The community cattle herd, which had numbered four hundred head before Sendero arrived, was soon less than a hundred; the Senderistas slaughtered, sold, or gave away thirty-eight hundred sheep. Because farmers were prohibited from working their fields, other food also became scarce, and villagers were reduced to eating one meal a day. The Senderista leaders told them that this was a time of war, and during war people had to learn to do without, to sacrifice. Reducing agricultural production was also part of a Sendero policy to starve the cities- an application of Mao's strategy of strangling the cities from bases of control in the countryside.

For Huancasancos, however, the most cataclysmic event involved a well-to-do businessman and former teacher and mayor, Alejandro Marquina. Five years later, standing beneath a portal of the municipal building, two eye-witnesses--Clemence Jimenez, today's mayor, and Oscar Lajaruna Torres, the deputy mayor-were able to recall what had happened. Very late one night, Torres was seized at his home, taken to the municipal building, and locked in a dark room with several other people. The next morning, Senderistas entered the room and asked which of the people was Marquina; he was taken to another room and blindfolded, and his hands were tied behind his back. Then he was led outside. Along arcade under the balcony of the municipal building was packed with Senderista militants, most of them local high-school boys and girls; the square was filled with villagers who had been ordered to appear. Marquina was forced to kneel. His wife stood next to him. The Senderistas shouted accusations: that he had abused his office when he was mayor; that as a businessman he had stolen from the people. Then a shot was fired. "I thought they shot over his head", recalled Torres, who, from a window in the room where he was detained, was able to see only a little of what was happening. Jimenez, who was standing twenty feet away, saw immediately that Marquina had been shot in the head.

"They didn't ask the people", Torres told us. He explained that the Sendero leaders had previously told the villagers that they would consult the community before punishing anyone. Individuals who are subjected to "people's trials" are those accused of committing offenses against the common good, such as cattle thieves; men who abandon their families; businessmen who charged exorbitant prices or cheat customers; men with mistresses; fathers who commit incest. (Senderistas adhere to a strict moral code-no smoking and no drinking, for example-and often when they move into a village one of their first acts is to close down the brothel.) The "criminal" isn't always killed; he might be punished by having his head shaved or by being whipped in public. If the Senderista leaders had asked about Marquina, the community would have said he should not be killed, Torres and Jimenez said. He was "very honorable", one of them added. A year after the assassination, Senderistas dragged Marquina's widow from a truck on the way to Nazca and stoned her to death. Not long after Marquina's murder, the uprising began. It started in Sacsamarca in February of 1983, after several teachers and other villagers who were openly opposed to Sendero had been killed. One evening, some Sacsamarca men entered the room where two Senderista leaders were sleeping, beat them badly, and threw them out the window to the dirt street below, where accomplices finished them off. "The people were tired of their abuses", the mayor of Sacsamarca told Gorriti and me. Sendero responded by sending a patrol from Huancasancos. Sacsamarcans tried to flee up to hill, but Sendero captured at least twenty-two men and led them to Huancasancos. Some of them were tied near a walk-in oven that belonged to a village baker. The Senderistas began gathering wood. The captives were going to be baked alive.

There was no military presence in the villages back then-neither soldiers nor policemen. But one villager had walked all night to a military post at Huancapi, almost twenty miles from Huancasancos. (There is no road connecting the two.) The military headquarters in Ayacucho was alerted, and the Sinchis--a special unit within the Guardia Civil that was formed, with assistance from American Green Berets, in the mid-nineteen-sixties-were dispatched. When their helicopters appeared over Huancasancos, everyone was stunned: the villagers had never before seen these flying machines. (The villagers refer to them as "cachicahi"--the name of an insect whose wings make a sound faintly resembling that of a helicopter.) Several villagers were killed by the Sinchis, though the Huancasancan leaders we talked to were vague, perhaps deliberately so, about the exact number, who they were (Senderista sympathizers or innocent villagers) , or how they died in a cross fire or by execution. In any case, the remaining Senderistas fled.

Within a week, the people of Huancasancos elected new leaders and "pardoned" those young Senderistas who chose to return to the community. (The Army captain accompanying us made it clear that the military knew who they were and still kept close tabs on them) . During a village ceremony two weeks after the Senderistas had been driven out, they returned, apparently with plans to reestablish their control. The women of Huancasancos led the battle that followed. Several of them would set upon a Senderista and seize his or her weapon. Soon other villagers joined in, armed with rocks, slingshots, knives, and a few .22-calibre rifles. Juan Lopez Liceras was shot in the stomach. He tried to hide under a bed in a room behind the municipal building, but some women found him, dragged him out, and pummelled him with rocks and their fists and stabbed him with their knitting needles. They left him on the street, where he died. After he was dead, villagers stoned him and committed other indecorous acts on his body.

For the next several weeks, the region was close to a civil war as supporters-mostly students and teachers-and opponents of Sendero fought in the villages. In Luncanamarca, a tiny village that can be reached only by foot or on horseback, on February 25th Sendero publicly executed two villagers, charging them with being "informants." Three days later, soldiers arrived as the villagers were discussing how to deal with Sendero and the military. A number of people were killed; the government said they were "subversive delinquents." Then, on April 3rd, Sendero invaded Lucanamarca, killing at least sixty people. Some were executed, while others, including old men, women, and children, were killed with axes and knives while huddling in the town church, where they had sought sanctuary. The Army captain would not permit us to travel to Lucanamarca, but in Sacsamarca we managed to get the rest of the story about the eventual defeat of Sendero in the region.

First, we had to persuade someone to lead us up the hill to the spot where the final battle had been fought. While it was easy to find the leaders of the village, it was not easy to break through their fear and mistrust of outsiders. We talked in the dark of a mud-wall general store where the roof was held up by log beams and which had little merchandise to offer except a few cans of evaporated milk and bottles of liquor on its shelves and some large bags of feed on the dirt floor. Several of the men and one woman downed a number of jiggers of cane liquor before the group decided that Lazaro Poma Janampa, A Sacsamarca town official, would take us over the steep route that the villagers had followed to attack a Sendero unit four years earlier. We were above two miles in altitude, but Poma practically sprinted. Along the way, we crossed a stone bridge over a deep narrow gorge, which Poma proudly noted had been built by village ancestors-how many generations ago he didn't know. We passed horses and burros packed with supplies, and an old blind man holding on to the pigtails of a woman who was also leading a horse down the twisting narrow trail. In a clearing, with a view of the valley across to Huancasancos and beyond, a small girl, six or seven years old, with a pigtail falling to her waist, and wearing a hat, and a wool skirt that reached to her calves, was tending a single white lamb. When we finally reached the crest and began walking across a rocky plateau, we encountered a solitary shepherd. He was carrying a coiled whip in his right hand, and he wore a fedora, a brown sweater, and a sport coat, which, under dirt and stains, seemed to be a dark blue. A long piece of multicolored cloth, used for carrying things, hung empty around his chest and shoulder. He was Agustin Herrera, the president of the communal grazing area; he had been present during the battle, there on the plateau where we met him.

Our guides told us that in May of 1983 a man who had been seized by the Senderistas as they moved through the area had escaped in the night and made his way down the mountain to Sacsamarca to warn the villagers that the Senderistas were camped above and were preparing an attack. At five in the morning, between sixty and seventy villagers began the three-mile climb to the plateau, accompanied by six Sinchis, who had the only rifles. An hour later, they reached the crest and saw the Sendero encampment in the distance, inside a corral of rocks. They crawled slowly across the terrain for a couple of hundred yards until they were spotted. There were about three hundred Senderistas, but, according to our guides, only fifteen or twenty were armed with automatic rifles. The shooting lasted about thirty minutes, and then the Senderistas began to flee in all directions.

I asked Herrera how many Senderistas had been killed. None, he answered. During our climb, Poma had given the same answer. In fact, at least eighty had been, according to Gorriti, who had earlier interviewed the Sinchi commander. But Herrera and Poma weren't going to admit that, nor was anybody else in the village. They all feared that someone from Lima-a government official or a lawyer representing families of the Senderistas involved-might come and charge them and other villagers in Sacsamarca with murder. Nor did Herrera or Poma, or other villagers, want to talk about a retaliatory raid on a Sendero town after the Lucanamarca massacre, or the several graves, marked by simple wooden crosses, on the bank of a small river below Sacsamarca, the burial ground for suspected Senderistas who had been executed during one of their roundups.

With anguish, government officials and many other Peruvians as well complain that their country has been receiving a bad international press-that all of Peru is not in the midst of a civil war, as it might sometimes seem to be, from the foreign coverage of the bombings, and that the nation is not splintered, like Lebanon, as has been specifically suggested in some European newspapers. (In May of 1986, President Garcia told Le Monde that two American correspondents had "arrived in Lima with bulletproof vests, convinced that street battles were raging in the capital").

There is some legitimacy to the Peruvians' complaints. Lima is not Beirut. It's not even San Salvador as San Salvador was a few years ago, when diners were often jolted from their evening meals by bomb blasts, and the most popular automobile for the wealthy seemed to be an armor-reinforced jeep. The first time I got into a jeep in Lima-it belonged to Enrique Zileri Gibson, the owner, publisher, and editor of Caretas, Peru's largest-circulation newsweekly--I asked if it was O.K. to roll down the window; having read about Sendero, and having spent time in El Salvador and Guatemala, I was sure that the glass must be bulletproof. It wasn't. Zileri told me that there were probably no more than a hundred armor-reinforced cars in Lima, and that those had been bought to protect against garden-variety kidnappings for ransom, not against violent revolutionaries. Zileri doesn't travel with body-guards, and his house, a rambling, modern structure on a hill in one of the wealthiest sections of the city, is not surrounded by high walls and by armed men in civilian clothes-a common sight in El Salvador and the Philippines. And Zileri's attitude seems to be the rule, not the exception. I interviewed a former president of Peru's Central Bank at his beachside apartment without seeing any of the accoutrements of war, and had dinner with prominent businessmen without bodyguards lurking in the street. The wealthy in Lima don't seem to have a siege mentality, as if tomorrow they might lose it all. Men don't pack pistols, and night clubs don't have signs at the entrances saying "Check your weapons."

For most residents of Lima, the war is still something that exists principally in news reports. It gets closer when there is apagon, or blackout- a word that has entered daily discourse here. Blowing up power pylons is one of Sendero's favorite tactics, and has led to a duel of wits between the Senderistas and the engineers at the power company, who, fortunately, have proved to be some of the most talented people in the country: they move power among the various grids in an effort to keep Sendero from knowing which pylons are carrying electricity to which parts of the city. The apagons don't seem to upset people greatly. I was in a car during one that occurred around midnight, and was surprised at how traffic continued to flow without any frantic honking of horns or other evidence of panic.

Lima is perhaps something like Rome during the days of the Red Brigade, or like present-day Madrid, with its sporadic attacks by Basque separatists. A few spectacular bombings have startled the citizens of Lima, but so far the bombs have caused few deaths, or even injuries. Most of the bombs have been detonated at hours usually in the early morning-when there were no people around (SALVO LAS ULTIMAS BOMBAS A UN RESTAURANT (KENTOKY) EN MIRAFLORES Y A UN ENATRU DONDE SI HAY MUERTOSY HERIDOS) But disastrous consequences have been narrowly averted. In July, for example, police towed away a car illegally parked in front of the Sheraton Hotel. Unknown to the authorities, it was packed with dynamite; it exploded after being hauled a few blocks, but caused only a few relatively minor injuries. Certain death and serious injuries were similarly avoided that same month when a Toyota loaded with more than seventy sticks of dynamite and five packets of chemical explosives was discovered just forty yards from the airport's international-departure area in mid afternoon. The car, which witnesses said later had been parked by a couple with a baby, had been stolen a few days before by three men and a woman; its owner spotted it when he went to the airport to see friends off. These serendipitous escapes from tragedy have left some Limenos wondering whether the guerrillas are incompetent or may perhaps have arranged for tragedy to be avoided.

The city's collective jitters were displayed on June 19, 1987, the first anniversary of Sendero-led prison uprisings that the Garcia government had quelled-marines and policemen killed at least two hundred and sixty prisoners, shooting many of them in the head after they surrendered. As the anniversary approached, there were rumors that Sendero would mark it in a significant way. One senator told a colleague that the Intelligence services had detected a Sendero plan to utilize human bombs-militants with terminal tuberculosis would be wired with sticks of dynamite. The story was repeated by police, priests, and foreign diplomats. Reinforcing the nervousness was a bombing on June 6th. A car packed with thirty pounds of dynamite exploded in front of a branch of Banco de Credito, then the country's largest private bank, on fashionable Larco Avenue, in Miraflores. This bombing turned out to be the work not of Sendero but of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Known by its spanish abbreviation as M.R.T.A., this group, which is thought to have two hundred to three hundred members, emerged a couple of years ago; it is more like other Latin-American revolutionary movements, being urban-based and led by university students. A few of its leaders fought beside the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and it is also said to have loose ties with Cuba and some of the guerrilla organizations in Colombia. The blast blew out windows to the top of the modern, fourteen-story building and of another high rise, half a block away, on the opposite side of the street, leaving curtains fluttering through spaces where window glass had been. Half a mile away, a woman was awakened by the blast and thought it was another earthquake. On the morning of the nineteenth, the tabloid CAMBIO, which appears to represent the views of the M.R.T.A., warned on its front page, "Today blood could run." El DIARIO, which many here consider the unofficial voice of Sendero, had Guzman's picture on the front page, labelled, in block letters, "PRESIDENTE GONZALO'. The newspaper and also some flyers being passed out by people with their faces covered invited the public to a Sendero rally at five o'clock at the University of San Marcos-which, like many Latin-American universities, is autonomous, and therefore beyond the normal reach of the authorities.

At 3 p.m. on the nineteenth, Abel Salinas, the Minister of the Interior, appeared on television and said that "according to intelligence information" the "subversives" were planning to blow up the power lines and then, under the cover of darkness, carry out "violent acts of destruction." The alarm was repeated over radio and television. The city panicked. "It was like when Orson Wells claimed that the Martians had landed", one Lima resident says. There were hideous traffic jams as people tried to flee. But there was no violence. Government leaders later insisted that their warnings and their actions had thwarted Sendero; many Peruvians are convinced that the government overreacted. "It was absolutely cockeyed, giving so much attention to Sendero", Enrique Zileri says.

All that really happened on June 19th was the rally at the University of San Marcos-Sendero's first public demonstration in Lima. Though the university, which was founded in 1551, is the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, it feels less like a venerated institution than like the South Bronx. Students radicals have spray-painted seemingly every surface of every wall of the Schools of Letters and Law with revolutionary graffiti; a few years ago law students erected a life-size statue of Che Guevara in fatigues and holding a rifle. Long-standing government indifference to the nation's youth is reflected in broken windows, collapsing desks, plugged-up toilets, and filthy classrooms. Behind a platform at the School of Economics, a two-story red flag with hammer and sickle and the silk-screened faces of Mao and Guzman was displayed. A person wearing a bandanna read a letter purportedly from Guzman; then the families of prisoners who had been killed in the uprisings mounted the stage to be honored. There were periodic chantings of "Viva Gonzalo!" and "Viva la revolucion!" and "Viva la lucha armada!"-"the armed struggle."

Sendero is carrying on its revolution in a political landscape that is far different from most others where revolutions are seething. The Peruvian military is on the sidelines of the political game (for the moment, anyway) , and there is no reactionary right wing-or none that has any significant political power. Moreover, Peru's political playing field probably has more space for the left than that of any other Latin-American country except Cuba or Nicaragua.

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