Peru's Shining Path guerrillas on the rise again

Interior Minister Luis Alva Castro, who heads the national police, and other government officials argue that today's Shining Path cares more about drug trafficking than its long-term goal of imposing a Maoist regime.

Flores, the army commander in the Apurimac valley, said the guerrillas now "have fields deep in the jungle where Indian communities are forced to grow coca for them."

But top military officers and other experts dismiss the idea that today's rebels have abandoned their ideology.

"They do ideological work, move through areas, gather people together in meetings, hand out flags and carry out attacks," then-Defense Minister Allan Wagner said last December. "The revolution has not ended for them."

Washington has supported Peru's war on a drug business that produces a quarter of the world's cocaine, second only to Colombia. Aid includes 23 helicopters to ferry police from U.S.-built bases in the Apurimac and Huallaga valleys on raids to destroy cocaine labs.

Police hit hardest
Police have been hit hardest in the renewed guerrilla attacks. Some 40 officers have died in ambushes in and around the Apurimac Valley since 2005. November saw the boldest raid in years: A column of 60 insurgents destroyed a police station and killed its commander in the mountain town of Ocobamba.

In response the police have pledged to work in closer cooperation with the army, and Defense Minister Antero Flores Araoz has promised to increase military forces in the valley. But budgeting restraints have limited his plans.

Flores, the Apurimac valley army commander, complained that funding for troops to fight the guerrillas has been cut back in recent years even as the rebels grew stronger.

"Sendero remains a latent threat," he said after climbing from the single, aging Soviet helicopter that his base has for ferrying troops to battle rebels.

Village "self-defense committees" supported by Fujimori once fought the rebels and provided guides and intelligence for army units. Now, with both peasants and rebels involved in the drug trade, the militias are not always on the soldiers' side.

Police seized a revolver and three shotguns during a recent raid on a cocaine lab in the village of Villarrica — weapons that, it turned out, had been assigned to the village militia.

Walter Aguilar, 47, a militia leader from the town of Quimbiri, blames such incidents on new arrivals to the valley who have joined self-defense committees. He said the Shining Path tortured and killed his father and several other relatives and insisted militia fighters who suffered such experiences would never cooperate with the rebels.

"We have spilled blood. We have lost family," he said, showing an ugly bullet scar on his left forearm from a rebel ambush. "We could never be the allies of those criminal terrorist groups."

Fujimori is accused of murder and kidnapping for allegedly authorizing a military death squad to fight the rebels. But his defenders here say his arming of the militias enabled them to regain control of their lands, in vicious fighting that claimed 8,000 lives in the Apurimac valley alone.

'They're stronger than ever'
Jose Luis Farfan, 33, a militia leader in the jungle village of Triboline, complained bitterly that the militias have been abandoned by the governments that followed Fujimori's regime.

"Thanks to him we were able to rid ourselves of that curse," Farfan said, holding one of 12 Winchester repeating shotguns the village received from Fujimori years ago. "But now they're stronger than ever, with good arms."

Experts on the Shining Path see other ominous developments in Peru's cities, key to the rebels' support 20 years ago. They worry that rebels who have completed prison sentences have returned to clandestine political organizing in labor unions and universities and that pro-Shining Path rhetoric is allowed to flourish under the protection of free speech.

Hector Jhon Caro, who once led Peru's anti-terrorism police, said such attitudes are dangerously reminiscent of the early years of the insurgency. The government, he warned, "still doesn't understand the potential danger of letting remnants of the Shining Path remain active."

Anti-terrorism police aren't bothering to keep tabs on released rebels, Jhon Caro said. Even more worrisome, he and other experts on the movement said, Guzman has regained the right to hold private meetings with his lawyer — and thus to communicate with his followers — after years in isolation during Fujimori's regime.

Guzman, unrepentant at 73, still has a long-range strategy for taking power, the experts said. And he's working to bring errant jungle columns back under his control, said Egoavil, the former rebel commander.

"They all recognize the leadership of Abimael Guzman," he said. "They are beginning to accept it. They are coming together."

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