Pontiff Urges Peru Rebels to Lay Down Their Arms

Surrounded by the tightest security cordon of his current South American trip, here in the heartland of a violent Maoist guerrilla movement, Pope John Paul II voiced an urgent plea to the rebels Sunday to lay down their arms.

“I beg you with pain in my heart,” the pontiff pleaded in this Andean mountain town. Ayacucho is the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist guerrilla band whose war with the government has claimed more than 4,000 lives since 1980 and led to emergency military rule over an 11-county region.

“To those who have let themselves be tricked by false ideologies to the point of thinking that terror and aggression . . . can lead to a better world, evil is never the road to good,” the Pope proclaimed to an enthusiastic but tightly controlled crowd of about 20,000, who were screened and admitted to the airport parking lot to hear him.

Slight Ailment

Speaking in a slightly raspy voice, the only visible sign of tiring from his three-city schedule, John Paul continued:

“The cruel logic of violence leads nowhere. No good is obtained by contributing to its growth. If your objective is a more just and fraternal Peru, seek the paths of dialogue and not those of violence.”

During the last four years, Sendero Luminoso’s insurgents have spread from this rugged mountain area to distant parts of the country, carrying with them terror by bombings, killings and sabotage of public services.

President Fernando Belaunde Terry, who will leave office later this year, declared a state of emergency in afflicted parts of the country, and the Peruvian armed forces have since waged a bloody counteroffensive. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, charged two weeks ago that more than 1,000 people in the Ayacucho area have “disappeared,” many while they were known to be in army custody.

Limited to 90-Minute Stop

Peruvian authorities initially resisted the Pope’s request to speak in Ayacucho. When he insisted, they relented but limited him to a 90-minute stop at the airport.

Earlier Sunday, John Paul flew into the old Inca capital of Cuzco, where thousands of colorfully dressed descendants of the ancient civilization were gathered on the stone foundations and battlements of an 11,000-foot-high mountain fortress that was an engineering marvel of the Inca age.

Long a growing center of the coca plant, mostly for local Andean Indians who chew its potent leaves, the Cuzcoans remained impassive as the pontiff warned them of the “corrupting business” that has grown up around cocaine, the plant’s end product.

Seemingly unaffected by the chilled mountain air and rarefied altitude despite having had a mild fever and sore throat the day before, John Paul spoke forcefully for Indian rights, including land reform, and for more official attention by authorities to “the problem of justice and humanity.”

Later, in the capital city of Lima, he conducted Mass at the city race track for a crowd estimated by local church authorities to number 2 million.