Pubdate: Mon, 18 Mar 2002
Source: Newsweek International
Copyright: 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/747
Author: Joseph Contreras
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Peru

TURNING THE CLOCK BACK TO CHAOS?

Peru's drug lords are gaining ground, and so are rebels.

Toledo's Battle Against A Return To The Bad Old Days

Mario Ayala Otarola is running scared.

The mayor of San Miguel de Ene fled his isolated village in the
jungles of eastern Peru last December. He had heard that a column of
Shining Path guerrillas operating in the area planned to assassinate
him. Three local mayors have gone into hiding after receiving death
threats, and the rebels have warned employees of a U.S.-funded
development project that they are under surveillance and should not
interfere with local coca farming. "Either you're with Shining Path or
you must leave the area," says the 50-year-old sesame farmer who
escaped with his wife and five children. "The narcos and Shining Path
are helping each other, and that puts us in great danger."

THAT HAS AN all-too-familiar ring for millions of Peruvians. After 10
years of steady decline, the Shining Path is stirring again.

An estimated 150 guerrillas lurk in the verdant hills above the Ene
and Apurimac river valleys, occasionally venturing from their redoubts
in search of new recruits and easy targets like Mario Ayala. Aided by
their cut of profits from suddenly resurgent coca and opium-poppy
cultivation-in a country long touted by U.S. officials as a success
story in the war against drugs-the guerrillas are ambushing cops,
blowing up electricity pylons and even hatched a plot to detonate a
car bomb outside the American Embassy in Lima. The terrorist attack
was thwarted, but U.S. officials are worried. "We're not at all
complacent about this," says one. "It's not like we're witnessing
anything on the scale of what we saw in the 1980s and early 1990s, but
all the ingredients are there-all they lack right now is
leadership."

Peruvians older than 25 grimly recall the dark days of the Shining
Path's ascendance in the late 1980s. Peru appeared to be drifting
toward civil war and economic collapse under the stewardship of a
young, impetuous president named Alan Garcia. Four-digit inflation
ravaged the spending power of workers.

The 10,000-strong Shining Path was carving a swath of murder and
destruction through much of the countryside, earning them a reputation
for atrocities second only to the Khmer Rouge among communist
guerrilla movements.

In the squalid shantytowns ringing Lima, urban cells were springing up
in preparation for the final assault on the capital.

In most respects, Peru today is a far cry from that imperiled nation.
The take-no-prisoners counterinsurgency campaign waged by former
president Alberto Fujimori all but crushed the Shining Path and the
smaller, urban-based Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. After
Fujimori's own autocratic implosion at the close of his 10-year reign,
ending with his resignation in 2000, democracy has been fully
restored. The economy remains stuck in a three-year recession.

But inflation and other economic vital signs are stable, and President
Alejandro Toledo has entrusted economic recovery to an internationally
respected team of bankers and technocrats.

But beneath the surface calm are warning signs that bear watching.
Toledo, 55, is perceived as weak. He has tumbled in the polls and
strained relations with his Peru Posible party by dismissing cabinet
members drawn from its ranks.

A wave of protests by laid-off government workers, trade unions and
other disgruntled groups has swept through Lima and provincial capitals.

The armed forces are restive: the defense budget has been cut by $60
million, and two communiques surfaced late last year signed by
active-duty Army and Air Force servicemen that accused the government
of "constant abuses."

Toledo won the nation's highest office on promises to create hundreds
of thousands of new jobs, spend more money on education and end
Fujimori's abuses of power.

Drug trafficking and the continued existence of guerrilla forces
received scant attention, and Toledo's business-as-usual approach to
both issues has created unforeseen headaches for his eight-month-old
government.

Peruvian counternarcotics officials say the drug war is faltering-and
question whether it was ever as successful as Fujimori and the
Americans claimed.

Opium-poppy farms are cropping up across the Upper Huallaga Valley
with the help of Colombian guerrillas and traffickers who infiltrate
Peru and distribute seeds free. Toledo's anti-drug czar Ricardo Vega
Llona has publicly challenged U.S. estimates that place the total area
of coca farms at nearly 85,000 acres and says the real figure is
closer to 148,000 acres.

Others accuse the Fujimori regime of cooking the numbers with the
tacit approval of Washington.

U.S. Ambassador John Hamilton flatly denies the allegation, and the
State Department released figures last month indicating a continued
decline in Peruvian coca production last year. But Hamilton also
recently announced plans to triple the $50 million counternarcotics
package earmarked for Peru this year. He said last month that the U.S.
and Peruvian governments hope to resume drug-interdiction flights soon
after President Bush hosts a summit of Andean leaders in Lima next
week.

The reality on the ground seems to support the Peruvians. The Apurimac
Valley is to cocaine what the Caspian Sea is to caviar: some of the
world's most potent coca leaves come from the region.

Since 1995 the U.S. government has invested $110 million in
development programs aimed at weaning farmers off the raw material of
cocaine in the Apurimac and Upper Huallaga valleys (which
traditionally accounted for roughly 80 percent of the country's annual
harvest). Bridges and roads were built and loans were granted.

By the end of the 1990s, Washington was trumpeting statistics showing
a 70 percent drop in the amount of land planted with coca.

But today indigenous women in braids and straw hats openly sell one-
pound bags of coca leaf at a busy corner in the main town, San
Francisco, directly opposite the police station.

Hundreds of small farmers are ripping out coffee plants, cacao trees
and other crops in favor of the spindly, bright green bushes.

Profit is the driving force: prices for coca leaf, rising steadily
since 1998, bring farmers up to three times the going rate for coffee
and cacao beans. "Practically everybody who lives in this valley is
involved in coca," admits the commander of a counternarcotics police
outpost in the town of Palma Pampa. "We do what we can, but carrying
out a raid is difficult when the people rise up against you."

The dozens of Shining Path fighters based in the jungles downriver
from the valley are raking in a share of the newly thriving drug
trade's profits.

Under the leadership of a thirtyish native of the Ayacucho region
named Raul, the guerrillas charge traffickers a fee to move shipments
of processed coca paste through rebel-controlled territory. The
revenue is used to buy modern assault rifles and pay local farmers for
food crops in hard cash. The system represents a sea change in tactics
for a rebel movement that in its heyday slaughtered peasants, torched
farms and stole livestock. "Shining Path is radically changing its
modus operandi," says Capt. Edward Lopez Torres, the head of the
police force in San Francisco. "Instead of killing or kidnapping
people, they enter a community, talk with the farmers and buy their
produce."

While they're trying to win hearts and minds in the hinterland, rebels
are stepping up attacks against their traditional targets.

One cop died and another was critically wounded last December in a
guerrilla ambush on a police checkpoint along the narrow dirt road
connecting the Apurimac Valley to the outside world.

Four policemen perished in a skirmish with Shining Path units outside
the valley within days of Toledo's Inauguration. All told, the Maoists
killed 31 Peruvians last year.

The Toledo government is now taking steps to combat the twin scourges
of drugs and guerrillas before they get worse.

Peruvian anti-drug czar Vega Llona has been lobbying U.S. officials to
reactivate the aerial drug interdiction program that was suspended
last April after a Peruvian Air Force jet mistakenly shot down an
American missionary plane, killing Roni Bowers and her infant daughter.

Toledo recently reaffirmed his resolve to stamp out any signs of
renewed guerrilla operations. "My government will not yield a single
centimeter to any terrorist action in the jungles or the urban
centers," Toledo said. Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi last
month announced plans to open five Army bases in the Upper Huallaga
and Apurimac valleys.

But the reduced defense budget will hamper the military's ability to
wipe out the rebels once and for all, and the deployment of special
anti-subversion police units in the Apurimac valley last year has
failed to calm the nerves of area residents. "The entire valley is
infiltrated by Shining Path," warns Francisco Barrantes, the head of a
local farmers' association. "In the mid-1990s they disappeared and we
practically forgot about them."

In reality, Shining Path-or the Communist Party of Peru, as its
soldiers prefer to be called-never completely vanished.

The 1992 capture of founder leader Abimael Guzman opened up deep rifts
within the guerrilla movement.

While some rebels supported Guzman's efforts to seek a negotiated
settlement with the government from his jail cell, others rejected the
strategy and vowed to continue the armed struggle. Their numbers
dwindled over time, and the remaining 450 to 600 guerrillas hunkered
down in their bastions in the lawless Apurimac and Upper Huallaga valleys.

With the return of democratic rule, those rebels are now trying to
expand their area of operations beyond the wilds of eastern Peru.
Students at two public universities in Lima say that Shining Path
militants are actively recruiting sympathizers for guerrilla training.
The Shining Path members who were arrested in November for planning to
set off car bombs outside the U.S. Embassy came from the Upper
Huallaga Valley. They belonged to an urban cell that was formed last
year to carry out terrorist attacks in the capital.

For now, however, senior Toledo government officials dismiss talk of a
significant Shining Path resurgence. "We are taking steps to prevent
that from happening," Interior Minister Rospigliosi told NEWSWEEK.
"But Shining Path has no serious prospects for growth."

Peruvians who have seen the guerrillas up close aren't prepared to
write them off. Antonio Cardenas was a wiry youth of 19 when he
organized the country's first self-defense peasant militia to fight
off rebels in the Apurimac. Now 37, he warns that Shining Path's
alliance with drug-traffickers threatens a return to those days. "They
are the same bloodthirsty killers, only now they are better armed and
organized," says Cardenas. "They will come back stronger than ever,
and things are going to get worse." In some ways, they already have.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake