Shining Path

At last the government of President Alberto Fujimori in Peru has done something right. The efficient capture of Abimael Guzman Reynoso, the leader of Shining Path, along with top lieutenants, gives the Peruvian state a chance to survive. Since the government will try him for treason in a military tribunal -- with execution not legal but hinted at by the president -- the challenge is to keep him behind bars against the inevitable rescue attempts.Peru was going down. Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path is part Communist Party, part mystic hero worship, part murder cult.

LIMA, Peru -- The daring rescue of 71 hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima last week brought a victorious end to one of Peru's worst terrorist attacks since guerrilla groups first took up arms against the government two decades ago.But the rebels, who occupied the residence for four months until commandos killed them in a surprise raid, demonstrated that despite years of aggressive counterinsurgency efforts, Peru is still far from conquering...

PERU -- This crazy guy wanted to dismantle Peru, redistribute the wealth and create a peasant agricultural society similar to that envisioned by Mao Tsetung during the failed Cultural Revolution of the 1970s.The guy was Abimael Guzman Reynoso, the charismatic founder of Shining Path, one of the most disciplined and bloody-minded revolutionary groups ever to hit Latin America.Until his capture last weekend, Mr. Guzman was getting alarmingly close to his goal. His 12-year campaign had moved from the Andean highlands to the slums of Lima, increasing the violence that had claimed more than 25,000 lives and that had caused $22 billion damage.

PRESIDENT ALBERTO FUJIMORI has earned the gratitude of law-abiding people everywhere -- not just in his own country -- for daring to use force to end a hostage-taking siege, the likes of which should not be tolerated by any government worthy of the name. His patience, his guile, his refusal to give in to the demands of terrorists culminated in a lightning strike that secured the freedom and saved the lives of 71 of 72 hostages held captive for four months at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima.

MIAMI -- The capture of Shining Path's leader, Abimae Guzman, is the most devastating blow the Maoist guerrilla group has suffered since it began its 12-year terror campaign.There is widespread agreement among terrorism experts that Mr. Guzman's arrest will cripple Shining Path's operations in the short run, although few are willing to forecast the group's definitive demise.Much of the experts' optimism is based on the fact that, perhaps more than any other Latin American guerrilla group, Shining Path has been built on a quasi-mystical personality cult for "Presidente Gonzalo," as the 57-year-old former philosophy professor is known to his followers.

VILLA EL SALVADOR, Peru -- It's not that Michel Azcueta lacks sympathy for the 73 hostages penned up in the Japanese ambassador's residence, far from it. It's just that he worries that Peruvian security forces, their attention fixed on the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas holding the hostages, are going to miss a much deadlier threat from a different direction."Terror, for the Peruvian people, has never been personified by MRTA," said Azcueta, the mayor of this sprawling shantytown built on seaside sand dunes just south of Lima.

LIMA, Peru -- When President Alberto K. Fujimori visited San Francisco recently, Amnesty International organized two picket lines: one outside a hotel where he was speaking, and the other outside a Berkeley bookstore that sold propaganda for the Shining Path.Human rights protests against Peruvian presidents are as old as Peru's 11-year-old counterinsurgency war. But the bookstore picket line reflected new concern about a growing U.S. and European support network for Peru's Maoist guerrillas.

C LIMA, Peru -- Peruvian officials said yesterday that with the arrest Saturday of Abimael Guzman Reynoso and at least three other senior leaders of Shining Path, much of the rebel movement's upper echelon had been captured or killed in the last few months.But experts on the Maoist guerrilla group said that other leaders remained at large and that there could be years of continued violence before Peru can declare the insurgency over.To underscore the point, Shining Path members yesterday set off a bomb on the Pan American Highway north of Lima, wounding eight people.

HUANTA, Peru -- Several dozen dark-skinned people sit on the dusty ground of the Castropampa military base. At an army officer's barked command, they rise and stand at attention. But these are not soldiers. They are Indian peasants, members of a local "Civil Defense Committee."Earlier that morning, answering an army summons to appear at the military base in Huanta, they walked 6 miles from the hamlet of Quinrapa. With 5,000 other Huanta peasants, these men, women and children form the backbone of the Peruvian government's controversial civil defense effort, designed to enlist civilian support against the Maoist rebels of the Shining Path movement.

Since Peru's President Alberto Fujimori with army help disbanded the nation's constitution, judiciary and congress on April 5, the congress has returned the compliment. It swore in his vice president, Maximo San Roman, as a rival president. Now Peru has two of them.What Peru does not have is much government at all. The economy minister resigned after hearing tough talk in Washington from the United States and Organization of American States about losing aid if constitutional law is not restored to Peru.

The violent end to Peru's long hostage crisis leaves the guerrilla group that carried out the siege, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, with most of its members either dead or in jail.For the Tupac Amaru, Peru's second-largest rebel group, the seizing of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima was from the start a last-ditch gamble.With 400 members, including its top leaders, in jail, the rebels had carried out only a handful of actions in 1996, apparently saving themselves up through the year for this one spectacular push.

VILLA EL SALVADOR, Peru -- It's not that Michel Azcueta lacks sympathy for the 73 hostages penned up in the Japanese ambassador's residence, far from it. It's just that he worries that Peruvian security forces, their attention fixed on the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas holding the hostages, are going to miss a much deadlier threat from a different direction."Terror, for the Peruvian people, has never been personified by MRTA," said Azcueta, the mayor of this sprawling shantytown built on seaside sand dunes just south of Lima.

TUPAC AMARU, the last Inca, rebelled against his Spanish captors and was beheaded in 1572. Two centuries later, an Indian who ignited rebellion in the Andes took the name Tupac Amaru II, before his own execution. Two centuries later, in 1984, middle-class Peruvian Marxists inspired by Fidel Castro in Cuba formed the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). The name connoted undying rebellion and lost causes.No one noticed. A larger, more murderous, mad Maoist movement called Shining Path was destroying the country.

LORI BERENSON is a throwback to the 1960s, a self-righteous young American who fights for the underclass in countries not her own. She has just been sentenced by a secret military tribunal in Peru to life in a wind-swept Andean prison for "treason."President Alberto Fujimori has done wonders for Peru since election in 1990, suspending congress for eight months, destroying the leadership of the Shining Path terrorists, jump-starting the economy, restoring civil society and winning triumphant re-election last year.

The most unlikely national leader in the hemisphere is vindicated. Decisively re-elected to a second term in the nearly-complete election count, and with nearly a majority in the congress against a fragmented opposition, President Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru will rise in the councils of the Americas. Perhaps U.S. agencies should listen more and advise less when the subject is guerrilla eradication, runaway inflation, alienated peasantry or Andean cocaine production.The second-generation Japanese-Peruvian technocrat is like no previous statesman of the Americas.

Washington -- AS A FOREIGN correspondent in Peru in 1964, I saw the dramatic, still unnoted events that were making that wondrous but tormented land a microcosm of change in the Third World.As the descendants of the great Inca empire were awakened to the modern world, they simply got to their feet and began walking down the black and barren Andes from their historic home in the high cordillera to the elegant and unprepared Spanish cities on the coast. They formed "bariadas," or "new towns," around Lima, Trujillo and Arequipa; these were hopeful places -- at first.

Craig N. Chretien has spent the past 21 years in the war on narcotics -- from steamy rain forests of South America where the coca bush is grown to U.S. cities where powdered and crack cocaine are the scourge of a generation.Today, he is assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for Baltimore. His primary job is to manage dozens of agents in an attempt to interdict drugs, primarily heroin and cocaine, coming into Baltimore and arrest traffickers.Hardly a day goes by, however, when he doesn't remember a lush valley about 200 miles long and 60 miles wide in Peru.

TUPAC AMARU, the last Inca, rebelled against his Spanish captors and was beheaded in 1572. Two centuries later, an Indian who ignited rebellion in the Andes took the name Tupac Amaru II, before his own execution. Two centuries later, in 1984, middle-class Peruvian Marxists inspired by Fidel Castro in Cuba formed the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). The name connoted undying rebellion and lost causes.No one noticed. A larger, more murderous, mad Maoist movement called Shining Path was destroying the country.

Havre de Grace. -- In the early 1960s, when I spent two exhilarating years working in the Peruvian Andes, a road I traveled regularly crossed a boulder-strewn valley which had been the site of a village that was no longer there.The village, called Ranranhirca, had been recently destroyed by an avalanche that had roared down from the glaciers high above and buried it, in seconds, beneath 20 feet of mud and rubble. Several thousand died. The survivors thanked God and went on with their lives.

Craig N. Chretien has spent the past 21 years in the war on narcotics -- from steamy rain forests of South America where the coca bush is grown to U.S. cities where powdered and crack cocaine are the scourge of a generation.Today, he is assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for Baltimore. His primary job is to manage dozens of agents in an attempt to interdict drugs, primarily heroin and cocaine, coming into Baltimore and arrest traffickers.Hardly a day goes by, however, when he doesn't remember a lush valley about 200 miles long and 60 miles wide in Peru.