Shining Path Guerrillas Becoming an Urban Force
Shining Path guerrillas, who started their bloody uprising in the mountains eight years ago, are moving into the shantytowns that encircle the capital like a noose. Abimael Guzman, founder of the rebel movement, has said of the slums and their people: ``The immense masses of the shantytowns are like belts of steel that lock in the enemy and hold back his reactionary forces.'' His Maoist rebels, once secretive fanatics, are becoming a political force that seeks public support in Huaycan and the other makeshift communities where two-thirds of Lima's 7 million people scrape along. About 10,000 people live in Huaycan. Their huts built of straw mats line the bone-dry slopes of the Andean foothills 15 miles east of downtown Lima. Most residents are poor migrants from the violent highlands where the rebel movement was born. They make ideal recruits for the Shining Path _ Sendero Luminoso in Spanish. Shining Path's move into a more public role, and through most of Peru from its Andean base in Ayacucho province, has coincided with economic collapse and annual inflation of nearly 2,000 percent. In the cities, the guerrillas combine conventional politics with terror. In the countryside, they make ever-bolder attacks on the military. Rebel columns strike along the spine of the Andes from the Ecuadorean frontier in the north to Bolivia in the south. The guerrillas also work with drug traffickers in Peru's eastern jungle, source of the raw material for much of the world's cocaine, and buy sophisticated weapons with the profits. More than 12,000 people have been killed in the civil war, most of them Andean peasants slain by rebels or security forces, and official figures put damage to the shattered economy at $10 billion. The guerrillas are believed to have only about 5,000 armed combatants, so they do not appear close to seizing power, but there is increasing pessimism about the prospects of controlling them. ``Most evaluations of Sendero Luminoso's eight-year expansion under the democratic system ... have become increasingly grim,'' the Andean Report, a respected economic journal, said recently. One reason the movement grows is its appeal to Peru's Indians, subjected for centuries to scorn and discrimination by the white ruling elite. ``Political violence in Peru is not the result of poverty alone but of humiliation, oppression, hate between classes, racism,'' Sen. Enrique Bernales, chairman of a committee on violence, said when it released a report in September. The most striking development of the last 18 months has been the Shining Path's move into public view in this grimy capital on South America's Pacific coast. Rebels organize support groups in the slums, infiltrate labor unions, organize marches, spread their message of revolution with the aid of a sympathetic daily newspaper and agitate among university students. Analysts and experts on counterinsurgency say Shining Path appears bent on dominating the radical left of legal politics. Officials have become alarmed by the broadening of tactics to include infiltration of legitimate organizations, including unions of government workers. They say this clouds distinctions between the legal and illegal left, making it move difficult to combat the rebel movement. ``Sendero is seeking semi-legal status as a way of winning militants and sympathizers, while at the same time generating a confusing situation in which the security forces indiscrimately repress members of the legal left along with leftist insurgents,'' a ranking police official said privately. Guzman, a Marxist philosophy professor, founded Sendero Luminoso in 1970 in Ayacucho, an Andean state capital 230 miles southeast of Lima where he had built a following at the University of Huamanga. Followers call Guzman, 54, ``the fourth sword of Marxism'' after Marx, Lenin and Mao. His movement, a splinter group of the Communist Party, gathered strength in Indian communities of the southern Andes for 10 years before launching its guerrilla war. According to counterinsurgency experts, the guerrillas switched their emphasis to the cities because migration of Indian peasants to urban centers accelerated after the highlands became a battlefield. Guzman's guerrillas have followed tens of thousands of peasants from the Andes into Lima's shantytowns and see the slums as a new stronghold. In July, the pro-Shining Path newspaper El Diario published a 48-page report on the guerrilla movement. It quoted Guzman as saying in his first interview since going underground in 1980: ``We had to follow the road from the countryside to the city. We must prepare for the insurrection that is coming, which means the taking of the cities.'' He said conditions were ripe for the next stage in the struggle for power: inciting a coup against President Alan Garcia by provoking economic chaos and increasing attacks on the army. The final stage, he said, would be a popular uprising against a repressive military regime. Shining Path has infiltrated 167 unions and neighborhood associations in the Lima slums this year, says a confidential Interior Ministry report obtained by The Associated Press. Guerrillas threaten and sometimes kill community leaders, establish ``people's schools'' and set up ``street theaters'' for propaganda, it said. Cardinal Juan Landazuri of the Roman Catholic Church said: ``Priests tell me that young people in the shantytowns are going over to Sendero. I have been in a shantytown where there is a Shining Path group, and the police are doing nothing about it.'' Huaycan is one of the slums where Shining Path works hardest because it is just off the Central Highway, a strategic route through the capital's main industrial zone to the mountains. The industrial zone contains 850 of the country's most important factories. Red-painted slogans hailing the ``People's War'' and ``President Gonzalo,'' the rebel name for Guzman, cover the concrete-block clinic, other buildings with solid walls and even large rocks. Residents were suspicious and uncommunicative when an Associated Press reporter visited, except for three 10-year-old boys at the entrance who laughed and waved red flags with the Shining Path's hammer-and-sickle emblem. The Central Highway passes through what looks like a military zone. Most factories are behind high walls topped with barbed wire and towers from which guards with automatic rifles keep watch. Guerrillas killed three plant managers in 1988 who were involved in labor disputes. Union leaders also are uneasy. ``I doubt if you'll find any union leader ... who will declare he is a Senderista, but I'll bet you'll find many who are afraid to say anything against Sendero,'' an American labor adviser said on condition of anonymity. The highway ties Lima to the agricultural lands of the central Andes and Peru's most important mines, where unions threatened by the Shining Path have conducted a strike since late October that costs millions of dollars a day in export earnings. End Adv for Sun Jan 8
public support;shining path guerrillas;central highway;rebel movement;shantytowns;huaycan;political violence;political force