Anxious Peru Seeks Electoral Relief : Maoists Strike, Police Make Sweeps Before Today’s Vote

Damaged by guerrilla extremists and its inability to effectively confront national economic distress, Peru’s uncertain young democracy seeks renewal today in cumbersome presidential elections.

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas dynamited three offices of the right-wing Popular Christian Party on Saturday, blew up a bridge and a waterworks, and blocked some country roads in the Andes. Four urban guerrillas also briefly took over a Lima radio station and broadcast a 15-minute call for Peruvians to stay away from the polls.

Police in Lima rounded up several thousand street people in sweeps that by now are routine before such events. Nearly all will have been released in time to join more up-scale Peruvians at the polls today.

Around the country, but particularly in the central Andes and here in Lima, reinforced units of police and soldiers braced for fresh assault from the Maoist guerrillas, who have vowed to disrupt the election.

The election itself is both a celebration--of a democracy restored in 1980 after 12 years of military rule--and an anticlimax.

At stake is the presidency, and a Congress of 60 senators and 180 deputies. Because new electoral laws require presidential candidates to win an absolute majority of all votes cast--including blank and spoiled ballots--only the Congress is expected to be decided today.

The overwhelming favorite in the nine-candidate presidential race is Alan Garcia, the earnest 35-year-old candidate of the nationalistic, center-left American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, popularly called the Apra party. Not even Garcia, though, expects an absolute majority today, predicting instead final victory in a June runoff.

There were two principal uncertainties as 8.2 million voters prepared to choose a successor to President Fernando Belaunde Terry: how much damage the guerrillas would wreak, and who would face Garcia in the runoff.

Most polls said it would be Alfonso Barrantes, the wry 58-year-old Marxist mayor of Lima, who is the candidate of an eight-party Marxist coalition running as the United Left.

The possible spoiler is Luis Bedoya Reyes, 66, a suave and popular Christian Democrat who was once mayor of Lima. As favorite of the center-right, Bedoya may beat Barrantes in the capital, where about a third of all voters live, but he is likely to be overtaken in a national count.

With Belaunde legally barred from seeking reelection, Javier Alva Orlandini, the candidate of the government’s centrist Popular Action party, rates no better than a distant fourth.

Five minor candidates, none of whom is given a chance of seeing double percentage figures, include Francisco Morales Bermudez, a former president in the cycle of military governments that ended with Belaunde’s election in 1980.

At 72, Belaunde is one of the grand old men among Latin American democrats. When he passes the red-and-white presidential sash to his successor in July, it will mark Peru’s first constitutional transfer of power between elected civilians in about four decades.

Belaunde points to total freedom of expression, the absence of political repression, a functioning (if chaotic) Congress and an independent (if sluggish) judiciary as among the hallmarks of his administration, along with major public works projects to modernize the national infrastructure.

Still, Peru has not prospered in the Belaunde years. Drought, flood, international recession, and--Belaunde’s critics say--misplaced government priorities, have all contributed to economic decline and worsening social unrest.

Personal income is at levels first achieved two decades ago. Unemployment is high and new investment low. Inflation was 35% for the first quarter of 1985, and the beleaguered Peruvian unit of currency, the sol, fell 10% against the dollar in the last week alone. A foreign debt of $13 billion is unpayable as currently structured. Garcia calls for immediate renegotiation, and Barrantes wants a moratorium.

The bizarre rural insurgency, which has claimed more than 5,000 lives since 1980, persists despite strong military pressure. Human rights abuses attributed to security forces have earned Belaunde an improbable black eye in international public opinion.

As they vote today under guerrilla threat, all candidates are pledged to destroy Sendero Luminoso without further abuse, but none has explained in detail how that is to be done.