The Dirty War
Salcedo, Raúl González José María & Reid, Michael
A special three-part report on the guerrilla war between the Peruvian government and Sendero Luminoso. Peruvian reporter Ratil Gonzalez outlines Sendero's philosophy and reviews the...
...The blond-haired tourists are back, here to see the historic sights...
...Here, somebody has scratched or drawn a kind of gravestone in the rock, bearing the names of a number of desaparecidos...
...Who has the money...
...The basic rule of conduct for Monsefior Richter, the local bishop, has been to remain silent...
...Sendero has established an important presence in the southern department of Puno and in the northern sierra of Ancash and La Libertad...
...But the landowners, working hand in glove with local politicians and the police, had him arrested...
...Wilfredo Mori, political and military commander of the Ayacucho Emergency Zone...
...Belafnde's surrender of the conduct of counterinsurgency policy to the military failed to stop the growth of Sendero...
...There was a mass exodus of campesinos to the cities: first Huancav6lica, then Ayacucho, stopping points on the way to their final destination-Lima perhaps, or further inland to the jungle, away from the danger...
...Garcia has left the armed forces' political-military command in charge of the Ayacucho area...
...Adriin Huamin...
...Civil defense patrols often have little to do with politics...
...The challenge facing the Garcia government, however, is how to channel this injection of government funds in a way that will bring tangible benefits to the mass of subsistence farmers...
...He claims that he and two other prisoners have formed a Sendero cell inside the jail...
...At the same time, military sweeps in the countryside and the destruction of revolutionary cells in the city contributed further to Sendero's decline...
...T HE MAYOR OF HUANTA SAYS THAT SENdero has withdrawn almost totally from the area...
...Tayacaja's ordeal illustrated how the repression favored Sendero in practice, by destroying the only bulwark capable of standing up to rebel incursions-the independent organizations of the peasants themselves...
...The security forces launched anti-subversive dragnets which failed to capture a single terrorist but succeeded in fragmenting the local system of community organization...
...in all likelihood, they ended up in one of the many unmarked mass graves that have made this part of the Emergency Zone notorious...
...H UANCAVELICA, WHICH LIES TO THE northwest, is an Ayacucho in miniature...
...As far as this prisoner knows, Sendero has yet to react...
...on the other, the vengeance of the police...
...Since 1971, Sendero theoreticians have claimed that "the essence of fascism" lies not in its methods, but in its objectives, which are "the liquidation of every last vestige of democracy and the establishment of corporativism...
...Official figures show that guerrilla actions nationwide increased from 2,408 in 1984 to 3,079 in 1985...
...But their hostilities are often motivated by old grudges between neighbors...
...Some of the villagers were present when soldiers arrived to interrogate the detainees...
...In 1984, Noel was replaced by Gen...
...If he was not on the side of the Marines, who appoint local authorities, then he must be pro-Sendero...
...The report continues, "On the contrary, the facts would seem to show a new phase of growth...
...Huanta is celebrating its fiesta again, and the local saints, raised aloft by the faithful, can once more venture out onto the streets...
...Mori's birthday coincided with our visit to Ayacucho...
...In terms of how their political message was conveyed, the answer may be yes...
...This occupied the whole of 1982...
...The authorities continued to blame the attacks on the Tayacaja Peasant Federation, and community organization began to crumble under the weight of military repression...
...His colleague Jose Maria Salcedo provides a vivid account of life under military occupation in Ayacucho...
...The second bloc is made up of the proletariat and the peasantry, "who refuse to go on living as they have any longer...
...The Marines, who had controlled these areas since the armed forces first began counterinsurgency operations in Ayacucho, have now pulled out...
...The senderistas were present in the audience, with submachineguns and other weapons concealed under their ponchos...
...The MRTA is a more traditional organization, typical of many Latin American Marxist-nationalist groups...
...Moreover, Sendero appears to reject any kind of social or political alliance with other groups...
...The two groups hold separate meetings and rival party assemblies...
...Direct imperialist intervention is probable at this point...
...Sendero, for its part, shows no sign of compromising or softening its hard line...
...He has proved his innocence repeatedly, but interminable red tape prevents him from going free...
...The nation became visibly polarized...
...IN THE HUANCAYO JAIL WE FOUND PROSpero Gaspar, a peasant leader from Tayacaja who fell victim to the indiscriminate repression...
...Sendero in turn murdered community leaders and tried to forcibly introduce collectivized agriculture...
...It issues no statements on its program, and says nothing of how it intends to achieve its goals...
...In the eyes of many observers-including some of the city's priests-the Ayacucho Church has simply rolled over and played dead during the State of Emergency...
...At the same time, many Sendero recruits are secondary school or university students of peasant extraction, whose education only serves to increase their frustration at the lack of employment opportunities...
...Wilfredo Mori-alter the conduct of the armed forces...
...Later, however, the attacks grew more serious and the news from Ayacucho-Sendero's chosen theater of operations-began to indicate that the rebels enjoyed manifest popular support...
...Since the first Sendero attacks left no victims, they were ignored...
...Its few publications reveal a dogmatic, fundamentalist Maoism, mechanically translated to a Latin American representative democracy...
...And they will go on receiving a steady flow of reinforcements and ammunition...
...The first bloc is composed of imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the feudal landowners, "who can no longer go on running the country as they have before...
...Communities throughout the region reacted by forming their own self-defense unitsrondas campesinas...
...The bishop ended a pastoral visit to the community of Vilcashuamin, an early center of Sendero activity, by lifting-off in an Army helicopter with jewels from the local church-supposedly to "protect" them from terrorist attack...
...The Army gradually came to see the rondas campesinas as potentially as great a threat as Sendero...
...To mark the occasion, the Army threw a banquet for the civilian authorities in the Tourist Hotel...
...Sendero sees a mounting revolutionary situation in Peru, characterized by the contradiction between what they call "those on top" and "those underneath...
...Yet the president's bold gestures and powerful rhetoric have produced little sign that he is having any greater success than his predecessor in checking Sendero...
...they just watched...
...Both Sendero Luminoso and the armed forces have capitalized on these longstanding rivalries, unleashing a cycle of violence whose consequences are incalculable...
...Between 1976-1978, the agrarian reform, though sluggish in other parts of Peru, brought considerable benefit to Tayacaja...
...Expansion of the guerrilla war into new areas to disperse enemy forces...
...In August 1984, the civilian population began to evacuate the Tayacaja region...
...A lot of people want to get out," he says, "because their families are suffering...
...These new areas of operation are in addition to the organization's existing bases in the Ayacucho area and the northcentral sierra region of Huinuco and Cerro de Pasco, where a total of 19 provinces remain under military rule in two Emergency Zones (see map...
...Complete defeat of reaction and installation throughout Peru of the People's Republic of New Democracy as a concrete form of the first stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...On September 24, 1984, they said, the villagers of Tapuna had seen some outsiders proselytizing for Sendero Luminoso...
...The good gentlemen of the Republican Guard appeared to see this as a useful way to improve ties with the civilian population...
...The patrol's commanding officers told them to set up a civil defense committee...
...D ID THE CHANGES OF MILITARY COMmand-from Gen...
...According to Hildebrandt, the pressure came from Justice Minister Luis Gonzdlez Posada, one of Garcia's closest advisers...
...Clemente Noel as regional military commander...
...IT HAS BEEN A year now since this Andean city, also known as Huamanga, shook to the sound of Sendero Luminoso dynamite...
...Since Alan Garcia's election a month ago, he has talked of dialogue, and of establishing a peace commission...
...We manage to interview Pr6spero Gaspar by slipping a bribe to a prison official...
...The commanding officer, a colonel, presided over the reception and decorated a variety of Ayacucho's leading citizens with the insignia of Llapan Atic-the specialized counterinsurgency unit of the Republican Guard, whose name means "he who can do anything...
...he had just been discharged from the city's General Hospital and was anxious to talk...
...There was an outdoor mass, at which Monsefibr Richter's personal envoy read verbatim a proclamation that had been handed to him by the Guard's public relations chief, then a parade and finally cocktails inside the barracks...
...In November 1982 there was frequent subversive activity in nearby villages...
...Beladnde's policy also brought down national and international condemnation on his government for its complicity in what Amnesty International called human rights violations...
...Its cadres claimed to be followers of Carlos Taipe, who was hunted by the authorities and prevented from entering the area...
...The military enacted a two-phase operation in response: the first was to conduct sweeps through the mountains, "combing" the area in "cleaning-up" operations...
...T HE BEHAVIOR OF OTHER INSTITUTIONS that might act as a counterweight to the military is equally depressing...
...Official figures show only 495 guerrilla actions in Ayacucho in 1985, compared with 821 in 1984 and 1,226 in 1983...
...The result was a military strategy that brought massive violations of basic human rights...
...In the end, the assembly voted to expel the followers of "comrade Gonzalo...
...from one Emergency Zone commander to the next, there was no substantial alteration in military behavior or counterinsurgency strategy...
...In his opinion, though, it is only a "tactical retreat": Sendero has taken some punishment here, but it has not been defeated...
...The leaders of Tapuna's Civil Defense Committee keep a thorough record of everything that happens in their community...
...It suits them to cultivate the image of facing an uphill struggle...
...For example, the high point of the Pope's visit to Ayacucho was a donation of $50,000 to aid local children...
...The most recent clash, and the most dramatic, came on June 26, 1985, leaving four civil defense members dead and 16 wounded...
...The armed forces therefore proceeded to evacuate isolated communities and herd the villagers into strategic strong points...
...When the military had ordered the man to accept a position of leadership in his community, he had refused: this made him politically suspect...
...G ARCIA ALSO PROMISED TO PUNISH HUman rights violations by the security forces, saying, "To fight barbarism it is not appropriate to fall into barbarism...
...PEASANTS BEGAN TO ORGANIZE IN TAYAcaja in 1973...
...Vivanco, director of the Ayacucho orphanage, complains bitterly that he has not seen a penny of this small fortune...
...When the war heated up and it became apparent that the police had lost control of it, the government opted for a purely military response...
...But Garcia has also said that his aim is "a productive, social reactivation" to benefit what he calls "the marginal 70% [of Peru's population], agricultural and campesino, unemployed and street vendor, provincial and shanty town...
...APRA's plight is indicative of the dismal state of affairs in a city that badly needs a vibrant civil society as a corrective to the power of the military and police...
...They regard themselves as the vanguard of this movement, the "fourth sword" of world revolution after Marxism, Leninism and Maoism...
...Both by day and by night, it is quite still...
...HE GOVERNMENT, MEANWHILE, HAS moved to restrict coverage of human rights questions in the media, particularly in television news and current affairs programs...
...The government's response to the Sendero insurgency, coupled with the severity of the economic crisis, led to a loss of its credibility and an erosion of its authority...
...Its attacks on local authorities and community leaders had a clear purpose-to eradicate the presence of the government in the countryside and destroy traditional community authorities in order to replace them with a "new order": local organs of senderista power...
...The area began to swarm with police and troops from the barracks at Pampas, who carried out searches and ransacked homes...
...in his own community, he had quickly made clear his opposition to Sendero...
...The newly formed Peace Commission also found many of its efforts blocked, and five of its six members resigned in January...
...HE STRATEGY WAS BASED ON THE ASsumption that the area around Ayacucho was plagued by senderistas who were able-in the classic Maoist dictum-to move around freely like fish in water...
...One was limping...
...Protests began to fly from all sides...
...JUNE 1986 0 8 0 II 41GARCIA'S PERU What if these peasant organizations, operating independent of Army control, proved sufficient to hold the rebels at bay...
...It is also unclear whether cash alone can achieve change for the majority, as long as the underlying problems of land tenure remain unresolved...
...The other was to make the civilian population understand that the power of the armed forces-including the power to inspire terror-was infinitely greater than that of Sendero...
...Informer" killed by Sendero sinchis...
...Wilfredo Mori...
...How, he wonders, can a member of Sendero Luminoso hope to return to normal life...
...From this, it concludes that the new Administration of Alan Garcia is the continuation of fascism in Peru, which is paving the way for a full-blown fascist regime just as surely as its predecessors...
...As the new Prime Minister Luis Alva Castro put it during a press conference, by the end of Belafinde's term it seemed that the only shred of his liberal message that remained was the anarchic cry of "sauve qui peut...
...And Lima-based British journalist Michael Reid looks at how Alan Garcia is trying to deal with the Sendero threat through political reforms rather than military offensives...
...There is both an ethnic and a generational side to Sendero's appeal...
...Until last year, Sendero frequently hurled sticks of dynamite at local offices of Belatinde's Popular Action party...
...Urban insurrection to complement the noose drawn around the cities from the rural areas...
...Hildebrandt's report was not alone in concluding that Artaza's "kidnapping" had been arranged by his Navy colleagues to help him evade trial by a civilian court on charges relating to the disappearance of a local journalist in Huanta...
...The ceremony took place in a former restaurant, right across the street from the Ayacucho Hospital...
...Worse was to follow: mass rapes, houseburnings, several hamlets razed to the ground...
...Official pressure on broadcasters came to a head in March, when C6sar Hildebrandt, Peru's best-known television journalist, closed down his biweekly program rather than submit to government demands that he scrap one of his news reports...
...Today, only the target has changed...
...Sendero hit power lines in Lima, blacking out the city time and again and spreading panic among the population...
...Sendero, meanwhile, embarked on a new series of military operations, assassinating hacienda owners, looting stores and assaulting police stations...
...The people's army will move in from the countryside to surround the cities...
...As if all this were not bad enough, the ruling party, APRA, is split in Ayacucho...
...Events proved them wrong...
...Belatinde's answer was pacification first, investment later...
...Since 1968, they believe, the country has been engaged in the consolidation of a new kind of corporativist state, first designed and structured during the twelve years of military rule...
...At first she answers, "The Marines are fine, they do good things...
...In 1983, Belatinde named Gen...
...However, Gen...
...T HE NEWLY ELECTED BELAUNDE GOVernment paid no heed to the rebels...
...These people's families never found their bodies...
...The military and police who run the Emergency Zone would say much the same...
...Long accustomed to kowtowing, the Ayacucho officials-even those whose job is supposedly to prosecute the abuses committed by the political-military command-are totally submissive to the dictates of the armed forces, often of their own free will...
...Garcia has ordered a fourfold increase in state spending in the Ayacucho Emergency Zone, with more than $75 million budgeted for 1986...
...The civil defense committees, where they exist, have taken over from the regular military as the first line of security and vigilance...
...curfew...
...Any community that refuses to join JUNE 1986 37ReporA o' t4 AmCea4s GARCIA'S PERU the civil defense network is promptly accused of Sendero sympathies, either by a rival community or by the military...
...the "dirty war" began to turn the tide against the rebels as peasant communities chose to collaborate with the new and more powerful terror of the armed forces...
...Two years ago, the smaller Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) also began armed guerrilla action, most of it in Lima...
...Near the Municipal Stadium, however, we come across a shopkeeper...
...Large numbers of peasants were dragged off to the Colcabamba jail in what people called "the sinchis' big offensive," and only released after the payment of exorbitant sums...
...The prefect was there (a Belatinde holdover who had not yet been replaced by the new government) along with the local judges, representatives of government ministries-in other words, a full turnout of Ayacucho's movers and shakers...
...A silent Church, servile judges, a divided ruling party, and not a single prosecution for the disappearances and human rights violations: civic life in Ayacucho is languishing under military occupation...
...The result was a certain degree of peasant support for the followers of Abimael Guzmin...
...An Americas Watch report called Belatinde's decision an "abdication of democratic authority...
...Mori's command...
...U REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42BUILDING BRIDGES...
...Dynamite attacks on local police stations followed...
...Faithful to the classic theses of Maoism, they adhere firmly to two central beliefs: their struggle will be a prolonged one, and it will move from the countryside to the cities...
...But they fear the consequences--on one hand, reprisals by Sendero...
...A new wave of land struggles erupted throughout the region, and the Lima newspapers began to denounce "guerrilla uprisings" in Huancav6lica...
...The government has also implemented measures designed to boost farm prices for the agricultural sector as a whole...
...Belauinde turned over conduct of government policy in the war zone to the armed forces and told the military to eradicate what it called the "social sickness" in Ayacucho...
...At the same time, new committees mushroomed in the villages around Tapuna...
...What do you think of the Marines...
...Garcia appointed a broadly based Peace Commission, similar to Colombia's...
...This was the first official acknowledgment that the armed forces had indeed been engaged in barbarism...
...It fell to HuamAn to carry out the second phase of the operation-the creation of anti-Sendero organizations...
...He and his fellow senderistas in the Huancayo jail are awaiting instructions from "the organization...
...JUNE 1986 33GARCIA'S o APERU GARCIA'S PERU GONZALO'S THOUGHT, BELAUNDE'S ANSWER BY RAUL GONZALEZ ON MAY 18, 1980, PERUVIANS WENT TO the polls to elect a new civilian government...
...Yet this is a very different kind of group from those which have taken up arms in other Latin American countries...
...to 5:00 a.m...
...The cycle of violence continued...
...By chance, Gen...
...By 1985, and the election of the Garcia government, Sendero had arguably entered the early phases of stage four...
...In practice, though, the new government has so far failed to come up with policy instruments consistent with these broad goals...
...AdriAn Huamin and then Gen...
...With the departure of the Marines, regular Army troops have arrived in Huanta, but they have set up their base two and a half kilometers outside the town...
...Peruvians were seized by uncertainty...
...You ran away...
...Even as the government insisted that it was winning the war against subversion, the public could plainly see that more and more troops were being sent into battle, with all that this implied for a hard-pressed treasury...
...According to the organization's ideologues, Peru remains the same semifeudal and semicolonial society that it was half a century ago...
...Speaking of the need to rescue the thousands of Indian peasant communities in the sierra from poverty and neglect, he warned, "If we don't make haste, others will get there first, and however much we might win through force of arms, we will not really win...
...According to survivors, not a single senderista was captured, yet the Army burned down an entire village that it accused of terrorist leanings-a community that Sendero itself had attacked a year earlier...
...The offending report had concerned the February kidnapping and disappearance in Lima of Marine Capt...
...In recent months, there has indeed been a sharp drop in both the death toll and the incidence of disappearances in Ayacucho...
...ROM SENDERO'S PERSPECTIVE, THE ELECtion of Alan Garcia in July 1985 meant no change...
...Some weeks later, shortly before the inauguration of President Fernando Belatinde Terry, residents of Lima woke up one morning to find dead dogs strung up from a number of lampposts...
...Sendero, meanwhile, despite taking a pounding in Ayacucho, opened new theaters of operation further north, in the mountains of Cerro de Pasco, HuAnuco and La Libertad...
...But this may be less significant than it appears...
...Reorganization of economic activity to place production at the service of the people's war...
...every man for himself...
...5. Full-scale civil war...
...Worse yet, there are charges that the bishop has been involved in shady dealings...
...T HE CIVIL DEFENSE COMMITTEES ARE most prevalent in the provinces of Huanta and La Mar...
...In an open letter, the five who resigned complained of "the scant interest shown by some sectors of the public authorities" in their work...
...The commission was deprived of adequate funding, had no legal powers, and was unable to visit the Ayacucho Emergency Zone...
...3. Generalized guerrilla warfare and the first creation of a mass support base after the expulsion of the reactionary authorities...
...Its politics are akin to those of Colombia's M-19, with which it has links...
...while they in turn have become the symbol of a kind of civil war that rages among the villages of the Emergency Zone...
...One officer told their leader, "You didn't want to take responsibility...
...Appearances can be deceptive...
...morale slumped...
...And Sendero has conducted its armed campaign in opposition to the mass organizations of trade unions and peasant farmers associated with the United Left (IU) coalition of left-wing parties that is Garcia's main parliamentary opposition...
...Belatinde regarded the rebellion as little short of an invention, given artificial life in the hothouse of his opponents' imagination...
...Leaders of the Ayacucho campesino federation complain, for example, that much of the increased volume of farm credits has been channelled to more prosperous commercial farmers who live closer to the cities...
...By September 1983, these were taking hold in many areas...
...A wave of bomb attacks in the capital after Christmas led President Garcia to place Lima under military control JUNE 1986 43ReIo o4 he4 AmcaR GARCIA'S PERU Election day, Ayacucho in February, imposing a State of Emergency and a 1:00 a.m...
...In response, the government sent a specially trained police unit into the region-the Rail Gonzdlez is a Peruvian journalist on the staff of the magazine Quehacer, published in Lima by the Centro de Estudios y Promoci6n del Desarrollo (DESCO...
...As a result of earlier military pressure, Sendero activity in this area has also fallen off dramatically...
...But it soon became clear that Garcia and the military had reached a rapid understanding...
...Now, however, there is a booming trade in bars, discos and chicha halls.* And the consumers who are boosting this new branch of the local economy are the military and the police...
...According to the National Intelligence Service report, the group's "organic structure would seem not to have been proportionately affected by the casualties, arrests and reverses inflicted by the armed forces and the police...
...Its actions aimed to destabilize the political system, polarize the country and create the necessary conditions in the countryside for the revolt of the Maoist support bases.E \ K i~` i iI I t 1' ~Yp...
...In Vicos, for example, a community in the province of Huanta, there was a fierce clash early this month...
...Though its function was to act as an advisory body to the president, it did not meet with Garcia after October 30...
...But the communities soon found themselves in conflict with the authorities, who tried to impose handpicked peasant leaders of their own...
...The capital of the department of Ayacucho now looks like a huge marketplace, something that would have seemed unimaginable a few months ago...
...In March 1982, a squad of police-with the Republican Guard well represented-burst into the hospital and assassinated three young male patients...
...In the final sub-stages combat is likely to move on to a war of movement involving large columns of troops...
...she never saw him again...
...Yet Sendero has demonstrated that it exercises a powerful appeal in some quarters of a society whose traditional deep inequalities have been intensified by a decade of economic depression...
...Jesug Cirdenas, a former member of the community who is now recovering in the Ayacucho hospital, says the attackers were tall...
...Once Tapuna had set up its civil defense committee, it began receiving instructions on security from the Marines...
...Today, it is no longer a strictly regional movement...
...Though the attacks by Sendero have stopped, there are still power cuts: the problem today is the shortage of gasoline to run the generators...
...Military power in Ayacucho rests not only on force of arms but on the mediocrity and cravenness of the region's civilian leadership...
...A number of them supported Sendero at first: with rebel protection, they attacked other communities, stealing sheep and cattle...
...Things changed in 1980, however, with the election of the conservative Belatinde government...
...For the time being at least, he has opted to divert resources from foreign debt payments in order to halt the slide in living standards and reactivate the local economy...
...The problems start with the state bureaucracy...
...All this was accompanied by actions designed to root out local corruption and boost peasant morale...
...In the rebels' view, neither Belatinde nor Garcia has done anything to halt the growth of this corporativist state...
...Large-scale land seizures began, and in some cases villagers managed to elect their own mayors and local authorities...
...The basic terms of the agreement were that the military should desist from its previous policy of "disappearances" and apparently indiscriminate massacre of civilians in Ayacucho...
...Each office has its own loudspeaker set up on the square, each blaring out competing slogans...
...Sendero Luminoso lacked the military capacity to support and protect "its" communities...
...Witnesses speak of as many as 150 attackers, heavily armed, semiuniformed-presumably senderistas...
...In some cases, they have been helped by the passive collaboration of the local civilians...
...This extraordinary affirmation is rooted in the particular notion that Sendero has of fascism...
...Some villages are organized in civil defense committees...
...This includes a small program of cash grants for the campesino communities...
...And the faithful of Vilcashuamin are still waiting for Sendero's acts of sacrilege...
...The armed forces' anti-subversive tactics for the last two and a half years have relied on the civil defense committees...
...and Mori simply kept his mouth shut...
...S ENDERO, HOWEVER, REMAINS AN ENIGma after six years of action...
...Before long, the country would be shocked by news of the atrocities committed by those charged with maintaining public order...
...Garcia then appointed a second commission, but its membership was restricted to APRA sympathizers...
...As a peasant leader, Pr6spero Gaspar had advocated land takeovers...
...LAN GARCIA HAS INTRODUCED A MORE sophisticated approach to counterinsurgency policy, incorporating political and economic elements as well as purely military ones...
...the same approach gave us the opportunity to talk to a second prisoner-a member of Sendero Luminoso, who was jailed for handing out leaflets...
...Now, when the subversives tried to organize the peasants politically or economically, they found that the peasants fought back...
...Community leaders now found themselves facing a string of lawsuits brought by landowners who felt they could now count on government backing...
...In 1982, Sendero made its first appearance in the region...
...that way, they can be sure that the sweeping powers that they were granted when Belatinde first sent them into Ayacucho will not be tampered with...
...When nine senderistas arrived in the village of Chopeca, for instance, the communal assembly had initially decided to help them...
...The fighting in Vicos might seem to be a new phase of regular war by Sendero...
...Nor has there been much to choose between the three generals in terms of their absolute domination of the civilian authorities and their utter disregard for judicial and constitutional norms...
...others then organized a patrol, captured members of a Sendero combat unit and killed them...
...Peruvian reporter Ratil Gonzalez outlines Sendero's philosophy and reviews the Belatnde government's disastrous handling of the insurgency...
...In the city of Huanta, known as "The Pearl of the Andes," they have abandoned the Municipal Stadium, leaving a legacy of bitter memories for local residents...
...Her husband was arrested in November 1983 and held by the Marines in the Huanta stadium...
...But the government refused to listen to any condemnation of the abuses...
...T HE FOLLOWERS OF ABIMAEL GUZMAN, leader of Sendero Luminoso, maintain that the era of national liberation struggles in Europe and Asia is over...
...Sendero is not the only group responsible for recent urban violence...
...He looks like a ghost: skinny, pallid, malnourished...
...The parliamentary opposition argued that, in the war against Sendero, the highest priority should be to solve the chilling problems of human suffering in the poverty-stricken Andean region...
...Prestobarba girls" are another new appearance on the Ayacucho scene: they get their name from the ad for a popular disposable razor-easy to use, easy to throw away...
...THREE CAMPESINOS CAME UP TO US AS WE walked through the streets of Huamanga...
...Some time ago, Cardenas helped other villagers form a civil defense committee: he says this was the attackers' main target...
...The sweeps began, with Noel following two grim rules...
...Soon after this, the peasant communities launched their own war on Sendero, eager for revenge against the rebels who had abandoned them to Army reprisals...
...For Sendero, the "official" political struggle is meaningless: it sees no difference between a military dictatorship and a civilian government, or between a parliamentary conservative and a parliamentary leftist...
...This barely exists in the countryside, and has tended to identify itself with local elites rather than with the indigenous majority...
...A guerrilla spokesperson in a recent, rare interview, called the APRA government of Alan Garcia simply "the continuation of a reactionary power...
...Heavy contingents of police and the military were dispatched to these new "red zones...
...A new group of Maoist rebels, belonging to one of the country's numerous communist parties, and going under the name of "Sendero Luminoso," or "Shining Path," had taken up arms and declared war on Peru's social, economic and political system...
...On the contrary, Sendero sees both governments as simply "continuations of the strategy of the armed forces...
...Speaking for himself, though, he favors peace and dialogue and would like to abandon the armed struggle...
...At the same time, many other communities were starting to form Army-sponsored civil defense committees...
...Their Maoist orthodoxy is not, however, as absolute as it appears: they consider that the Chinese revolution went off the rails because Mao Zedong made the mistake of creating a broad front that included the rural petty bourgeoisie-from whose ranks the "traitors" like Deng Xiaoping later emerged...
...Garcia has clearly recognized that the political defeat of Sendero depends on whether he can bring about the structural transformations that this language implies...
...Many women in this town could tell the same story...
...Huamr.n found it difficult to promote the new civilian self-defense bodies, and complained publicly that a severely restricted budget made it impossible for him to do his job...
...A constant struaale for subsistence REPORT ON THE AMERICAS E C 40they do the rounds of these establishments, out of uniform but still packing a gun under their jackets...
...The anniversary of the Republican Guard coincided with our stay in Ayacucho, and its commanding officer invited us to join the celebration at the unit's headquarters...
...The party has two separate headquarters in the Plaza de Armas, run by rival deputies...
...At the same time, other peasant communities which were sympathetic to Sendero three years ago-such as Chuschi, scene of the guerrillas' first public action-now give every sign of being loyal converts to the government side...
...First military actions and training of combatants in attacks with limited objectives...
...They said nothing...
...With only rare exceptions, the civil defense committees have become a civilian arm of the military's fight against the rebels...
...Sendero's efforts at forced collectivization antagonized communities with opposing traditions and property systems...
...It has coldbloodedly assassinated dozens of campesinos accused of being "traitors" or "informers," whose deaths serve in part as a warning to the very social sector that Sendero claims to represent-the peasantry...
...In a joint action with two neighboring communities, the villagers stoned three rebels to death and took six more prisoner...
...the focus has now shifted to Latin America...
...Its task, the president said, was "to build bridges of dialogue" to Sendero and make proposals "to free the many innocent people unjustly accused of terrorism...
...but in fact it was the latest incident in a long series of conflicts between rival peasant communities...
...With the drinks flowing freely, the banquet ended with several of these representatives of "civilian power--by now a little unsteady on their feet-offerJUNE 1986 I' V I n ! 39Repor o0 the A0mer4 GARCIA'S PERU ing obsequious toasts to the Peruvian Army and applauding Gen...
...In September 1983, Sendero attacked the famous Pucari fair, Ayacucho, under military occupation in the province of Acobamba...
...At this point, the rondas campesinas, often uniting several communities, began to gather strength as a defense against abuses by landowners and the police...
...This lasted from May 1980 to the end of 1981...
...Its leadership operates in the deepest clandestinity, makes almost no effort to contact the media and never claims responsibility for its actions...
...The three were from Tapuna, 120 kilometers away, and they had come to Ayacucho to ask for help from the government-weapons, ammunition and protection from the Marines for the village civil defense committee...
...36 REPRTONTH AERCA 36 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VTHE PRICE OF PEACE: A REPORT FROM THE EMERGENCY ZONE BY JOSE MARIA SALCEDO Civil defense, often a cover for old grudges A YACUCHO, AUGUST 1985...
...The fact is that neither the papal donation nor the Vilcashuamdn church valuables have ever reappeared...
...In return, the government would protect the armed forces from outside investigations of past human rights violations...
...He viewed the revolutionaries themselves as nothing more than a band of unhinged individuals with no support, or as common criminals, acting one day under orders from drug traffickers, the next on the instructions of some never defined foreign power...
...Alvaro Artaza, more commonly known by the pseudonym of Camidn ("Truck"), in keeping with an official practice under which most officers assigned to the Emergency Zone work anonymously...
...Noel's public utterances were not exactly the sharpest...
...It was followed by the worst wave of repression yet, with police raids and the jailing of community leaders...
...First of all Sendero Luminoso is not ideologically, politically or economically dependent on any foreign power: the Peruvian authorities are now convinced of that...
...Carlos Taipe, a longtime peasant leader, found himself accused of masterminding a "subversive movement...
...Deferring to pressure from the armed forces, the government held back from earlier plans to replace the military REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 0 0r 0 0; M 44body with a mainly civilian commission...
...The three were Air Force Gen...
...By March 27, 1985, their new committee had been duly ratified by the authorities...
...Ayahuarcuna lies 30 kilometers from the city of Ayacucho...
...They serve as a reminder that the Marine Infantry, the famous elite corps of the Peruvian Armed Forces, was here, giving the orders, making the rules and carrying out the abuses...
...C6sar Enrico, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...The Army burned houses and took terrible reprisals...
...The community of Vicos is a picture of utter desolation: huts reduced to ashes, the remains of modest sticks of furniture, the wails of families mourning over corpses...
...The conflict gave birth to the Tayacaja Peasant Federation, the nucleus of the Peasant Confederation of Peru...
...The organization sees Peru as a vast expanse of dry tinder in which "just a single spark will be enough to start the prairie fire...
...The arrival in government posts of local members of Garcia's ruling APRA party has done little to check this tendency: throughout the sierra, APRA's membership is typically made up of lawyers and traders, transport owners and small-time gamonales (landowners), whose interests run contrary to those of the mass of poorer farmers...
...Then the Army came in helicopter gunships looking for subversives, and a massacre took place at Chacapuco...
...Monsefior Richter...
...Shortly afterward, the committee captured a group of strangers coming from the direction of the jungles to the east...
...Recent events in the community of Tapuna are a good illustration of this pattern...
...The organization works through terroriststyle urban cells and, in Ayacucho, an irregular campesino militia...
...When a patrol from the Marine Infantry base at Tambo happened to pass by two days later, the men of Tapuna asked for help...
...The Army tortured a number of villagers from Acobamba...
...Its name, appropriately, means "the place where the corpses hang...
...At the end of 1982, however, with the intervention of the armed forces, Sendero's influence started to deREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38AYACUCHO 9 La Libertad cline...
...Thousands of campesino migrants have flooded into Huamanga, which is now ringed by sprawling shanty towns...
...As long as the security forces believe that improving military-civilian relations means wining and dining a handful of local dignitaries who have no standing with the average citizen of Ayacucho, while abuses like the hospital killings go unpunished, the population's view of the military is not likely to change...
...sion in its birthplace in the Ayacucho area of the Andes, Sendero has spread out to cover much of Peru...
...This pattern of behavior has startled and confused Peruvian and foreign observers alike...
...While rebel cadres continued to infiltrate the area, the various peasant communities decided to hold a joint public assembly to thrash out their attitude toward Sendero...
...At the same time, Peru's Agrarian Bank has been empowered to give the communities interest-free loans...
...Sendero has also stepped up its urban sabotage operations and assassinations in Lima...
...The city of Huanta itself appears much like Ayacucho...
...The story of Tayacaja, where military repression was aimed at the rondas rather than at Sendero, is an eloquent one...
...others may have some kind of connection with Sendero...
...In an ideological sense, Huamin was the "clearest...
...This fourth stage is longer and more complex than the first three, and the Communist Party has divided it into a number of subsidiary stages, each with its own tactical objectives...
...Reports of violence, however, still reach this nowpeaceful city from other parts of Ayacucho...
...They know that this will not be easy, but they have planned the process with care...
...This lasted through the whole of 1983 and from the outset had to contend with the intervention of the Army...
...Though it has suffered intense represMichael Reid is a British journalist based in Lima...
...But shortly afterward, Army threats made the community change sides...
...At the same time, more than 1,000 people had "disappeared" after being kidnapped by the security forces, according to denunciations by relatives...
...Only the occasional leaflet speaks in general terms of "a radical revolution...
...the "war against subversion" is often a cover for land seizures, robbery, violence and looting...
...A YACUCHO HAS A TRADITIONAL REPUTAtion as a sober and serious town...
...But they are accused of committing all kinds of human rights abuses...
...Today, the stadium is deserted...
...Since then, representative democracy in Peru has faced the threat of insurrection...
...But Sr...
...According to townspeople, the senderista cells here have been almost entirely smashed...
...4. Conquering the support base and setting up the power structure of the People's Committees, strengthening the militias and the people's army...
...At this, the woman starts to cry: she is the widow of yet another desaparecido...
...Gaspar "disappeared," then turned up in the barracks at Pampas, before being transferred here...
...we ask...
...At first he tries to conceal his identity, but later admits that he belongs to "the organization...
...The unprecedented sackings produced a wave of discontent within the armed forces...
...In 1983, during the tenure of Gen...
...With the backing of almost half the electorate, and a mandate for sweeping social change, Garcia appears to have directed much of his message of populist nationalism to Sendero's social base of support...
...In this sense, the existence of certain democratic freedoms under a constitutional regime are purely incidental and have no major significance...
...Garcia followed this up by sacking three top generals in response to revelations that army troops had massacred as many as 75 civilians in two separate incidents in Ayacucho in August 1985...
...The real test for the armed forces will be whether they can contain Sendero activity in other parts of the country without resorting to the indiscriminate "counterterror" methods used in Ayacucho...
...Josy Maria Salcedo is a Peruvian journalist on the staff of the magazine Quehacer...
...Under Noel's command, 1983 became the year of wholesale disappearances and killings...
...He is the author of the 1985 book Peru: Paths to Poverty...
...Since their earliest days as a group of intellectuals in Ayacucho's San Crist6bal University, the senderistas have worked unstintingly to "reconstruct the party of the revolution...
...they are the founders of a new era in revolutionary history that they have christened "Gonzalo's thought"-after the nom de guerre used by Abimael Guzman...
...The government responded by sacking him, and replaced him with Gen...
...The area, which is encircled by large private haciendas, was soon affected by the military government's land reform, which seemed to acknowledge the peasants' longstanding grievances against local landowners...
...Sendero is convinced that its job is to correct Mao's error...
...The latent threat posed by Sendero serves to justify the actions of the political-military command...
...on a scale unprecedented in modern Peru...
...Clemente Noel as regional military commander, the first civil defense committees were set up, making it impossible for Sendero to return to communities from which it had been expelled and forming a human barricade against pro-Sendero villages...
...At the same time, though, they are a way of legitimizing the traditional violence between rival communities...
...They are: Correcting Mao Zedong's errors 1. Agitation and armed propaganda...
...There's a lack of decision over how to tackle the problems of the Emergency Zone," says respected political analyst Federico Velarde...
...The idea was to concentrate these in areas which had been secured by government soldiers...
...and the country's fifth highest ranking officer, Lima regional commander Gen...
...First, with its strategy of assassinating local officials and traders in the sierra, Sendero is attacking the representatives of centuries-old white and mestizo domination of the region's Indian majority...
...The conflict between "those on top" and "those underneath" is sharpened by the government's "continuationist" policies, and by the harshness of the economic crisis, which "creates the conditions for carJUNE 1986 35GARCIA'S PERU rying out the pending task of the democratic-national revolution: that is, to begin surrounding the cities from the countryside...
...In November 1984, attacks on the civil defense committees began on a massive scale...
...A Sendero document published in Spain in 1984 lists five stages through which the Peruvian revolution must pass...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 34Twice, they went so far as to launch bold attacks on the headquarters of the governing Popular Action party...
...Artaza had been military commander of Huanta, near Ayacucho, in mid-1984...
...They cruise the streets aboard patrol cars, armored cars and jeeps, smiling from the windows as they figure out whether the cop buying them a drink will make a good catch...
...Beladinde's interior ministers consistently played down the scale of subversive activity, and gave repeated assurances that they had dealt the rebels the death blow...
...GARCIA CONFRONTS SENDERO BY MICHAEL REID Attacking Sendero means helping "the marginal 70%" A RECENT CONFIDENTIAL REPORT BY Peru's National Intelligence Service concluded that, if present trends continue, the guerrilla threat to the government of Alan Garcia "will become a real rather than a potential danger, as it has been until now...
...After its first appearance in the ballot-burning incident in Chuschi in 1980, Sendero grew slowly but surely, building a support base among the peasant communities, forming political-military groups and attacking rural police stations...
...Sinesio Jarama...
...Today, they have turned Pr6spero Gaspar's former farm into grazing land...
...But these were differences of personal style...
...But the committee managed to repel the attackers and seized seven shotguns, three revolvers and a collection of homemade explosives...
...The last Sendero bombing came at the end of 1984...
...At dawn, a group of youths broke into the election office in the small community of Chuschi in the Andean department of Ayacucho, hauled the ballot boxes into the square and burned them...
...After the military arrested a number of suspects in the town, Sendero activity fell off sharply...
...the second was to enlist the civilian population against Sendero and separate the rebels who survived from the social base that sustained them-draining the sea in order to kill the fish...
...Meanwhile, Sr...
...Vivanco's orphans, who lost their parents to Sendero violence or Army repression, are having a hard time getting enough to eat...
...After seven or eight o'clock in the evening, *Chicha is an alcoholic drink of fermented maize...
...Beladnde himself retorted that reports by Amnesty International or any other human rights monitoring group would be thrown straight in the trash can...
...Patrols of other districts, confessions extracted from prisoners suspected of belonging to Sendero, joint assemblies with committees in neighboring communities: all these records are constantly checked by the military authorities, and their pages stamped with official seals...
...One was to take no prisoners-which meant license to commit extrajudicial murder...
...At the edge of a ravine in CapitdinPampa, a 20-minute drive from Huanta, in an arid landscape of cactus, we were still able to find bones on top of just such a grave...
...February 1983 saw the last big peasant assembly...
...Clemente Noel to Gen...
...The "Prestobarba girls" have their own elaborate social stratification, depending on which section of the military and security forces they "belong" to: in descending order of status, the Air Force, the Army, the PIP (Peru's equivalent of the FBI), the Civil Guard and the Republican Guard...
...Those honored included the local commanders of the Army, the Marines, the Civil Guard and the PIP, as well as the president of Ayacucho's Supreme Court, the departmental prefect and the local administrator of the National Bank...
...The senderistas withdrew, only to be replaced by the security forces...
...By the end of 1985, official figures put the death toll from the festering near-civil war at 8,256...
...At the same time, the group avoids the local and foreign press, and never gives interviews...
...Six years after beginning armed action, Peru's main guerrilla organization, Sendero Luminoso, appears stronger than ever...
...2. Systematic sabotage and the beginning of regular guerrilla actions aimed at destroying the power of the landowning bourgeoisie in areas selected as bases of support...
...The Marines' legacy, however, remains a frequent topic of conversation...
Vol. 20 • June 1986 • No. 3
