Poor Peru

...If we avoid consumption here in our country, the problem of coca is solved...

...Fujimori's defeat of the staunchly pro-market novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in last summer's elections was due in part to his pledge to move slowly...

...The question of Sendero's military strength and popular support is debated constantly by politicians, the army, the police, and a group of journalists and academics specializing in the insurgency...

...Well-armed paramilitary policemen accompany them...

...The economy is a disaster and, for the moment, it overshadows all of the country's other considerable woes...

...The terrorism has reached such proportions that Caretas, Peru's leading newsmagazine, has taken to publishing a column each issue listing the week's subversive acts, as well as counterinsurgency operations by the state security forces...

...We told the people, 'We are your army, you don't need Shining Path,' " Arciniega explains to me in his Lima office...

...Making matters even worse is the terrible physical overcrowding and poverty that overwhelm the capital...

...Then there is the so-called niiiobomba: dynamitestrapped to a child and exploded near the Sendero target...

...government had little interest in the Pol Pot-like activities of Presidente THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 17 ing tainted are summarily executed...

...any cadres suspected of beCoca growing per se doesn't bother Peruvians much—they're far more worried about food shortages, inflation, and terrorist violence...

...Peru put it...

...Political violence has caused $18 billion in damage to the economy, according to a Peruvian congressional estimate, and thousands of civilians and soldiers have died as a result of Sendero bombings, assassinations (dubbed "selective annihilation" in Guzmanspeak), and other forms of mayhem...

...But the Peruvian police, and the U.S...

...Raul Gonzalez, a leading "senderologist," believes that Sendero's strength has peaked—and his articles to this effect have led to countless death threats from Sendero, forcing him to live a near-underground existence...

...Despite all of the people at Santa Lucia, it's remarkably quiet...

...As "Comandante Tomas" told the Sendero-controlled El Diario newspaper in 1988, "We aren't against coca, because that would mean being against the farmers...

...Initially dismissed as hopeless crazies when they launched their campaign of terror in 1980, Sendero has become a major threat to peace and stability in Peru...

...Many Peruvians believe the nightmare will get worse...

...As General Juan Zarate, the former head of the Drug Police Division explains to me, "Subversion and drug trafficking became inseparable...

...The sluggish, brownish-gray Huallaga River—utterly poisoned by kerosene, sulfuric acid, lime, and other chemicals used to refine coca—dominates the landscape...

...The State Department has been trying to persuade Fujimori to allow the spraying of "Spike," a herbicide it believes will destroy much of the valley's coca without harming humans, livestock, or food crops...

...You know, the police raise hell about taking pictures," Alberto says, "but they say nothing about me carrying my submachine gun up at Santa Lucia...

...A British-made armored personnel carrier, donated by Margaret Thatcher, is parked nearby, and I take a picture of it, and get Alberto to snap one of me in front of a little shrine to the Virgin Mary...

...For all its puritanism, Sendero has never opposed coca growing...

...Lima seems grimmer than ever, and Alberto is still fuming about El Jefe's attack on his manhood...

...Do you think they'll return quietly to wherever it is they came from...

...Frequent blackouts and brownouts—usually the result of terrorist bombings of electricity pylons—give the city a sinister air...

...Coca growing per se doesn't bother Peruvians much—they're far more worried about food shortages, inflation, and terrorist violence...

...Congress will pay to defoliate the Peruvian jungle.' Most important, the government realizes that legal crops can never give peasants the income that coca does, and it doesn't want 200,000 angry ex-coca growers on its hands...

...Winning broad support in and around Uchiza by allowing the peasants to grow coca in peace was central to his victory...

...As I'm eating my chicken, wondering whether I should've gotten that extra hepatitis shot before I left Boston, I notice El Jefe swaggering in...

...That subsidy has been ended, and the government has added a massive tax, bringing the cost to about four dollars a gallon—making it some of the most expensive gasoline in the world...

...It became like Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution," says Gorriti...

...Carved out of the jungle in 1987, and refortified last year, the hundred-acre "forward base" is the headquarters for U.S.- backed anti-drug operations in Peru...

...After you've flown over the Andes, which lie between the valley and Lima, the jungle emerges below you—mile after mile of green, flat land, dotted here and there with small farmhouses...

...In short, Lima can at times seem "a never-ending nightmare," as the trendy-left (but generally accurate) authors of The Real Guide...

...The futility of such "manual eradication," as the U.S...

...support group," headquartered, of course, in Berkeley, California...

...Recent conversations with Peruvian and American officials and journalists in Lima, as well as a trip to the U.S.-financed anti-drug base at Santa Lucia, convinced me that Peru has much bigger problems to solve than coca growing...

...The introduction last August of a new denomination of the inti, the national currency, is a perfect example of this Weimar-type hyperinflation...

...Large portions of the country are unsafe...

...Between last January and August, inflation was 2,886 percent, according to Cuanto, a magazine I found highly entertaining, despite the fact it does nothing more than calculate prices—a difficult task, given that they change several times daily...

...After an hour or so, the base and the landscape around it start to seem a little forbidding...

...Finally, we slink off...

...Sendero Luminoso, or "Shining Path," is an ultra-orthodox Maoist cult movement founded and led by Abimael Guzman, a shadowy former philosophy professor...

...There, a U.S.-supplied C-123 transport plane will ferry you to Tingo Maria, and then on to Santa Lucia—all in all, about an hour and a half of flying time...

...We told the peasants that we wouldn't fight against them...

...Violence is history's midwife...

...U ntil a few years ago, the U.S...

...Arciniega waged a devastating campaign against Sendero...

...congressional delegations, presidential rhetoric, and Yankee dollars have had the effect of concentrating Peruvian minds wonderfully on the issue...

...warns me before I leave Boston, a town not known for its balmy climate...

...for another, Greenpeace has launched an anti-Spike campaign, and in this environment-crazed age, it seems unlikely that the U.S...

...Alberto's Latin feathers have been ruffled by El Jefe's dressing down...

...Most Peruvians recognize the need for the government to control spending and inflation, but they're angry over the pace of the reform measures, dubbed "Fuji shock" by the press...

...Many live in the deceptively pleasant-sounding shantytowns ("La Flor," "Heroes del Pacifico") that ring thecity...

...At night, you know they're watching you," Alberto intones...

...His strategy worked, and the terrorists were driven from the Uchiza area...

...Arciniega began digging wells, bringing in electricity, and initiating other forms of goodwill-building "civic action"—a key component of any successful counterinsurgency plan...

...I want to have lunch first, though, and I persuade him to go to the mess hall...

...nowadays it seems quaint, with its oil-dripping turbo-prop engines and the oxygen masks you have to strap to your head in the unpressurized cabin...

...The police use these to bring the relatively well-paid, but sometimes short-lived, CORAH workers out into the field to destroy any coca seedlings they happen to find...

...A favorite tactic is to chop off the head of a suspected "collaborator," usually a helpless peasant, and then sew it on backwards...

...His immediate successor didn't fare much better: he was dismissed after DEA agents photographed some of his men standing guard as narcos loaded coca paste aboard a plane...

...A favorite Sendero tactic is to chop off the head of a suspected "collaborator," usually a helpless peasant, and then sew it on backwards...

...During the attack, the police didn't even bother to call the army—the two institutions hate each other intensely, and the army has made it clear that they won't risk their necks to save policemen...

...rr he world's biggest coca-growing 1 region begins about 250 kilometers northeast of Lima...

...officials deny that any pressure was placed on him—Arciniegahimself tells me that he left voluntarily—but many of his sympathizers believe that the United States had him sacked...

...Still, it's not a very festive occasion...

...instead, Peruvians were horrified to discover 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 basic food prices increasing from between 400 to 1,000 percent overnight...

...Alberto thoughtfully points out the minefields as we stroll around the camp, stopping here and there for snapshots (me with an Uzi, me standing in front of therazor wire, gazing thoughtfully across the river separating the base from Sendero land beyond...

...State Department, which had spent millions of dollars since the early 1980s fighting coca in the Upper Huallaga, weren't so pleased with Arciniega...

...Although some U.S...

...The number of attacks this year make it the most violent of the decade...

...Thousands of residents once again jammed the town's plaza, this time to cheer the general for ridding them of Sendero...

...But although some testing was permitted under Alan Garcia, nobody believes that it will ever be sprayed on a large scale...

...Sendero began to extract fees from traffickers who wanted to use the illegal jungle landing strips under Sendero control—as much as $10,000 per flight, according to some estimates...

...Nobody was hurt, but the police have built some 'Although they've mentioned it occasionally in their publications, Greenpeace is largely silent about the devastating effect of the coca trade on the Huallaga River—which is effectively dead, according to a study done by Buenaventura Marcelo of Peru's National Agrarian University...

...Violence is a universal law with no exception," Guzman said five years ago...

...o get to the Santa Lucia anti-drug 1 base in the Upper Huallaga Valley, you first have to go to the police air force hanger on the fringes of the main airport in Lima...

...They're the army of the night," he adds, only slightly melodramatically...

...Let's get out of here, man," he says...

...A miasma generated from thousands of exhaust-belching buses and cars adds to the gloom...

...We strongly disagree with his approach," Assistant Secretary of State for Narcotics Affairs Melvin Levitsky said last fall...

...I see many more columns of smoke, the telltale sign of jungle being cleared to grow coca...

...Last April, Sendero hit the base with small-arms fire...

...In Sendero's view, cocaine is the product of decadent, imperialist nations such as the United States...

...But according to Arciniega, "It's not true when the State Department says I don't want to fight against the narcotraffickers...

...In the past five years, economists say, prices have grown by 2.2 million percent...

...The much-feared Peruvian drug police were prohibited from conducting crop-eradication operations in the valley...

...dollars for Peruvian currency is still a wallet-bulging experience: fifty U.S...

...Sendero's zealotry was getting old, and when the army took over the valley following a massive Sendero attack on the Uchiza police garrison in April 1989, thousands of people came out to welcome the new military commander, General Alberto Arciniega...

...On top of all this, the city government recently discovered that Lima's aquifer is being drained at an alarming rate, and that the capital will run out of water by the end of the decade...

...Others say that the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a much smaller, more conventional Guevaraist insurgency, is the greater long-term threat...

...Even the "nice" parts of Lima seem remarkably seedy, and sometimes dangerous—the relatively well-heeled neighborhood of Miraflores, for example, is infested with pickpockets and other thieves...

...Congress and the White House...

...Known in Spanish as pueblos jovenes ("young towns"), these conglomerations are actually improvements over the miserable mountain villages from which many of their residents fled...

...Outside support for his movement he deems impossible, since "revisionists" and other traitors have come to power in Peking, Moscow, Havana, and Tirana.' His weird hubris is further evident in the nonce title he has chosen for himself: Presidente Gonzalo...

...Gonzalo and his comrades...

...Built along the most inhospitable part of the coast, the capital sits in a bizarre Andean microclimate—cloudy, misty, and cold every day from May to December...

...I assume he thinks I'm just another idiotic gringo thrill-seeker taking pictures of their drug war, and I decide to keep my mouth shut...

...Congress and the White House, which have been arguing for the last few years that cocaine is a threat to the security of the United States...

...The base itself resembles a prison work camp: barracks surrounded by razor wire and guard towers...

...Last December, after serving a little more than eight months, Arciniega stepped down as emergency-zone commander...

...Peruvian policemen sit at one table, and the DEA agents and other gringos are scattered around the other two...

...One reporter I meet proudly displays his arsenal to me: a ferocious-looking Uzi, a much-prized stainless-steel Colt .45, a box of grenades, and a short-barreled "riot gun," a weapon his young son, a toddler, delights in loading and pumping...

...It is staggeringly large...

...To the delight of the peasants, Sendero began cleaning up Uchiza and other drug towns, shooting homosexuals, banishing prostitutes, closing down nightclubs, and publicly flogging coca-paste smokers...

...During a typical month this year, Sendero Luminoso carried out attacks in the department of Ayacucho (a longtime Sendero stronghold), the town of Tingo Maria, Lima, and in Huancayo province...

...We understood that growing coca was the only thing they could do to make a living...

...And those are the least of the country's problems...

...Eventually, mellowed by the Cristal, he grows more philosophical...

...They're winning the war, in fact," Gorriti tells me in his comfortable (but highly secure) house in Lima...

...the departments that make up the central third of the country have been declared "Emergency Zones," and are under the control of a military commander...

...But it does concern the U.S...

...During the early years of the decade, Uchiza had become the coca capital of Peru, a lawless, wide-open town crowded with prostitutes, gangsters, barflies, and other riff-raff associated with the booming narcotics trade...

...But even though these peasants, and some 200,000 others in the valley, were growing coca for a living—having flocked there during the past ten years in search of a better life—they remained God-fearing campesinos at heart, and the lifestyles of the narcorabble horrified them...

...But Gustavo Gorriti, a journalist and scholar who is writing a three-volume history of the movement, argues that Sendero is actually growing in strength...

...With my untrained eye, I count at least a dozen during the Tingo Maria-to-Santa Lucia leg of the trip...

...After clammy, cold Lima, Santa Lucia seems like a furnace...

...But the army is suffering more casualties too...

...Alberto asks me...

...My traveling companion, whom I'll call Alberto, points out the coca patches: little plots of land with plants growing in perfectly straight lines...

...officials understood the dangers Sendero posed to Peru—and the role that the terrorists played in narcotics trafficking—others insisted that Arciniega's campaign was too easy on the growers and traffickers...

...fortified dugouts to protect the CORAH workers if another attack comes.' I don't even want to think about what this place is like after dark, with squads of Senderistas prowling around beyond the wire, just waiting to chop off heads...

...Sendero Luminoso is nothing compared to what these people would be like up in arms...

...But today, the Upper Huallaga is the object of intense official interest, in Washington as well as Lima...

...But by the end of the decade, the alliance between peasants and terrorists began to unravel...

...Soon Sendero established total control of the coca business throughout the Upper Huallaga...

...but even these proved inadequate, and a few weeks later it was forced to begin printing a five-million inti note...

...F or the past decade, Peru has also been confronting an insurgency whose ruthlessness, fanaticism, puritanism, and love of violence is unprecedented in this hemisphere...

...they're there to protect the machete-wielding eradicators from any irate growers or traffickers they might meet in the countryside...

...From the earliest days of its "people's war," Sendero had targeted the Upper Huallaga Valley...

...Isolated and relatively fertile, the valley became an ideal refuge during the mid-1980s, when the government's counterinsurgency campaign temporarily chased them out of Ayacucho and other departments...

...indeed, as a cab driver described it on the way in from the airport—which was blacked out shortly after I arrived—Lima had become an "eerie" place...

...In the hands of Sendero, dynamite becomes a particularly horrific tool: they have been known to fasten lighted TNT to a duck, and let it wander into a telephone switching exchange...

...government calls it, has been apparent to Peruvian and American officials for years...

...I couldn't agree more...

...Being ultra-orthodox Maoists, however, the cadres couldn't stomach an apolitical peasantry, and they began demanding the growers' attendance at indoctrination sessions...

...About eight million people are jammed into Lima, and most of them are poor...

...The Upper Huallaga Valley is about three times the size of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...

...Living here are about 400 "CORAH" coca eradication workers, a hundred Peruvian National Police, half a dozen or so long-haired U.S...

...But a visit to the Upper Huallaga—or anywhere else in Peru, for that matter—should be enough to disabuse most gringos of any sanguine notions they might have about the likelihood of eliminating coca from the valley...

...He gives us a look of utter contempt, and Alberto and I agree that it's probably best to skip dessert and head for the landing strip...

...Despite these huge denominations, changing U.S...

...The plane was probably once a state-of-the-art craft...

...What is more, the traffickers who bought the coca leaves from the peasants frequently abused and cheated them...

...We decide to have a look from one of the watchtowers, and we snap some photos of a police unit trotting around the base, "calling out" numbers in true military hard-guy fashion...

...He leaves me alone...

...I fought against them," he tells me...

...His hair plastered to his head by sweat and his gold front teeth gleaming in the sun, the colonel spends the next ten minutes reaming out Alberto for taking pictures without his permission...

...Early in the month, the government began issuing one-million inti notes for the first time...

...In the Upper Huallaga, the army is reporting huge casualties on the Shining Path side...

...Although Sendero makes millions of dollars a year off the coca trade, few observers believe the organization has been corrupted by the "business...

...dollars typically get you a wad of Peruvian notes nearly an inch thick...

...Before the late 1970s, nobody paid much attention to this hot, remote piece of jungle, including the Peruvian government, which didn't even build a road there until the 1950s...

...Vintage Huey helicopters, surrounded by protective concrete-filled bags, are scattered around Santa Lucia...

...Three hours later, we're back in Lima drinking Cristal, an excellent Peruvian lager...

...However, Shining Path does have a small U.S...

...It is also home to a uniquely violent Maoist insurgency...

...I have to get one last photo of them outside the barracks, I tell Alberto, and we stroll over to the building...

...As long as they were left alone, the campesinos tolerated, and sometimes welcomed, Sendero's presence...

...Now, according to one American economist in Lima, "all it gets you is a round trip to work on the bus and one piece of bread a day...

...Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) cops, and a handful of personnel from the State Department's Narcotics Assistance Unit (NAU), which pays for the place...

...T ima in the wintertime is a hell-1-r hole," an American academic William Rosenau is the coordinator of research for the National Security Program at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...

...Gasoline, for example, was so heavily subsidized under Garcia that Peruvians actually smuggled it out of the country for resale abroad...

...But then it was discovered that Sendero was increasingly linked with a problem that did concern the United States—coca growing and trafficking...

...The minimum wage, roughly $42 a month, was barely adequate before...

...At first, the dirt-poor peasants around the UHV town of Uchiza welcomed Shining Path...

...As a result, the Upper Huallaga Valley, or "UHV," as the State Department likes to call it, has become a "front line" in the drug war, and visits by U.S...

...Violence is central to his "people's war...

...Then, as I'm reloading my camera, a Peruvian police colonel, who turns out to be the commander, strolls up to me and Alberto...

...Dubbing himself the "Fourth Sword of Marxism"—the first three being Marx, Lenin, and Mao—Guzman has become to his followers a kind of deified "philosopher-warrior," the only true Communist leader in the world...

...Sendero promised to end that, and the terrorists began operating as middlemen between the growers and the narcos, demanding ever-higher prices for the crop and shooting buyers who beat up on campesinos...

...Journalists who go to Sendero country go well armed, and in groups...

...Despite his mild-mannered appearance—Sendero's kitschy propaganda posters depict him as a bespectacled, rather bland-looking individual—Guzman advocates violence as both a means to destroy Peruvian society and as a psychically purifying act for his cadres...

...President Alberto Fujimori, in an effort to control the hyperinflation created by his Social Democrat predecessor, Alan Garcia, has eliminated many of the subsidies that benefited workers, businessmen, and middle-class civil servants, and he has allowed the market to set prices for most goods...

...For one thing, Sendero as well as the large and highly vocal legal left will cry "Yankee Imperialism...

...But it does concern the U.S...

...They're also worried about Sendero, which has been known to shoot CORAH workers and nail them to stakes...