Coping With Chaos : Lima Prefers Army’s Order to None at All

Juan Rojas and his truckload of strawberries met the Peruvian Army on a bridge over the Rimac River just north of Lima.

It had been a terrible day, Rojas complained--two flat tires, delayed shipments--he’d had no chance to get a pass. Time gets away from a busy man, he went on. Didn’t anybody understand?

Everybody understood. The rifle in the hands of a teen-age private never wavered. Rojas and his three helpers would go to jail, at least for a few hours, as curfew violators.

“The funny thing is that I agree with all the security,” Rojas said as he recounted the incident later. “I’ve been robbed twice at the market. Once they cut me with a knife.”

Troops-in-the-street security was something new in Lima, and it was largely welcome, for law and order had broken down.

On Feb. 8, the populist President Alan Garcia decreed a state of emergency that suspended constitutional guarantees. The armed forces became supreme in Lima and its port of Callao, and army patrols with armored personnel carriers now enforce a curfew from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.

Peru’s grimy capital, where the population has multiplied 12 times over in three decades of unchecked expansion, is a textbook example of the violent breakdown of order that characterizes urban Latin America today. As in Lima, security is a high-priority preoccupation in cities as diverse as Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Bogota, Colombia.

In Lima, though, the situation had reached absurd proportions. When Garcia took office last July, 22 police cars patrolled this city of 6 million as it was being stalked by terrorists, kidnapers, lesser criminals and crooked cops.

The terrorists, guerrillas representing two dissimilar Marxist bands, proved to be one burden too many. In Garcia’s first five months as president, Peru endured terrorist incidents at an average rate of 144 a month.

Garcia has not said how long he intends to keep the emergency measures in effect, but after their first week, the president’s private pollster found that 86% of Limenos approved them.

Crime, Terrorism Reduced

After the first two weeks, terrorism had dropped to half a dozen hit-and-run dynamite attacks on foreign embassies, and crime was down too, although one prominent businessman did join the kidnap victims. A few hundred curfew arrests nightly have seemed a small price to pay for increased security.

Lima’s sensational press, deprived of more spectacular stuff, has turned to the strangulation of a murder suspect by the police psychologist who was interrogating him. “Divine justice,” the psychologist called it, but it developed after the funeral that the suspect had been innocent.

“Even if they have hurt our international image, the emergency measures were necessary as a symbol,” Garcia said in an interview. “People want confidence and an expression of authority. This government is not going to be twisted around, like a windmill, by terrorists.”

Seven months into his term, the 36-year-old Garcia, a brash and iconoclastic Social Democrat, is widely credited with restoring a sense of purpose to a poor country dogged by economic decline. Peruvians applaud him for arbitrarily limiting payments on the foreign debt to 10% of export earnings.

He has wide backing for a breathtaking array of social and economic reforms that range from an assault on an obstructionist bureaucracy to reorganization of police forces that are corrupt as well as inept. According to Garcia’s pollster, only 1% of Peruvians think he is doing a bad job.

Yet for all his dynamism, Garcia has made no appreciable headway against the Maoist guerrillas of a band known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), based in the Central Andes, or a lesser, more conventional Castroist band of university students in Lima.

Rash of Terrorist Attacks

Guerrilla attacks around the Andean city of Ayacucho are fewer of late, and so are complaints of human-rights abuses by troops pursuing the guerrillas, but Lima has felt Sendero’s sting.

Garcia’s emergency declaration, announced as a footnote to an address on economic reform, came after a week in which Sendero had exploded 16 bombs simultaneously in Lima, killed a retired army intelligence officer and set fire to a gallery of 30 shops two blocks from the presidential palace in the heart of the capital.

The guerrillas, led by a former university professor who calls himself President Gonzalo of the Popular Republic of New Democracy, dismissed the “miserable” Garcia as the head of one more “repressive, reactionary government.” A peace commission named by Garcia when he took office died aborning, and not even he imagines that a newly named commission will have any better luck in talking with the guerrillas.

Sendero Luminoso is tough and intransigent. In five years, the police have managed to capture just one major Sendero leader. The guerrillas kill without mercy and are so tightly knit that they defy effective infiltration. A woman police sergeant who tried last year was murdered.

Castroists Are Nuisance

The Castroists, who call themselves Tupac Amaru , after an 18th-Century guerrilla opponent of the Spanish colonizers, won headlines before the emergency declaration by bombing upscale restaurants and shopping areas of the sort their parents patronize. Tupac Amaru, which does not kill, is an embarrassment to Garcia but more of a nuisance than a threat to his government.

However, the terrorist activities hit Garcia at a time when he would have preferred to concentrate on domestic reform and his feud with the International Monetary Fund.

Garcia’s calling on the army for help is interpreted either as a good idea, because it actively and visibly involves the armed forces in the public interest, or a bad one, because it underlines the weakness of civilian democratic government in a country in which the military historically has been the ultimate political arbiter.

Either way, the state of emergency promises to be more of a respite than a watershed in Garcia’s struggle with the guerrillas. He announced the measures on a Friday night but they did not take effect until 48 hours later, so that those who needed to get out of town were given ample opportunity to find a bus.

Still, for however long the emergency lasts, the peace and quiet in Lima are as welcome as they are unusual. In Lima, law and order had become one more casualty of the explosive urbanization that was swamping the city, overwhelming its resources and changing its character.

Police Feared as Criminals

“In 1954, Lima was a pleasant city of 500,000 with a good infrastructure,” Juan Francisco Raffo, the head of a private bank, said recently. “We have somehow coped with the enormous growth since then, but some parts of the infrastructure, like the police, have declined.”

Once an elegant old colonial capital, “The City of Kings,” Lima has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 300. A white man’s city became a magnet to Indians fleeing misery in the highlands. Today in Lima, nearly 400,000 street vendors ply their trade amid crime that is at once so rampant and so accepted that most of it is not reported. Many people fear the police as much as the criminals.

Villa El Salvador, a sprawling slum on desert land south of the city, did not exist in 1954. Now it has about 500,000 poor inhabitants jostling for scarce water, electricity, schools and medical facilities. Villa El Salvador recently got its first police precinct and its first patrol car.

When the 1980s began with an economic stagnation that continues unchanged, bank robbery became a growth industry in Lima. Desperate banks hired battalions of private guards and donated 60 vehicles to the police.

“A foreign security expert we hired warned that control of the bank robberies would eventually generate an increase in kidnapings,” Raffo, the banker, said. “That is what happened. There has been a definite panic. Some families are exiling themselves.”

Kidnapings Became Common

For a time late last year, Lima rivaled Beirut and Bogota as the kidnaping capital of the world, with as many as 20 abductions a month reported and several times that many resolved privately. Rich men and members of their families were snatched and held for big ransoms. Poor men’s relatives were taken for a few hundred dollars.

The kidnapings seem to have peaked, but they have left their mark. An American banker says that his office’s security personnel forbid him to go jogging, ride his bicycle or take his family on a Sunday drive.

The police did not stand idly by as lawlessness overwhelmed Lima. In recent months, ranking police officers have been linked to cocaine mobs, kidnaping gangs and extortion rackets. A $100-a-month salary is not bad pay in Peru, but looking the other way has often proved to be much more rewarding. In one recent poll, more than 80% of the people questioned said they had no confidence in their police.

Garcia’s announcement of a police reorganization won resounding applause at his inauguration last July. Since then, Interior Minister Abel Salinas, an unflappable, 56-year-old engineer, has purged 1,700 men, including 70 generals, from the three principal police forces, and has begun to build a unified police command.

The fired cops present a new dimension to the security dilemma. They are angry and out of work, and nearly all still have their guns and their badges. Salinas says that he is trying to recover the guns, or at least license them. A new badge is being designed, so that people will be able to distinguish between Peru’s 82,000 real cops and the crooks with badges.

Police Arms Imported

Salinas insists that the purge strengthened the loyalty and improved the morale of the officers who survived it. Now, to arm its police effectively , Peru has bought 10,000 assault rifles from North Korea at a bargain price of $92 each. South Korea, not to be outdone, is donating 50 patrol cars, Salinas said, and the government is spending $2.75 million for 250 new cars assembled in Peru.

“When the president discovered how few cars we had on the street, he ransacked government ministries for vehicles,” Salinas said. “Now we have 250 cars. That is progress, sure, but we should have 700.”

As Garcia and Salinas quickly concede, restoring order here will take a long time. But support for the reforms and emergency measures runs deep. An American resident, who asked not to be named, is particularly enthusiastic.

One night her apartment was burglarized and, not having been in Lima long enough to know any better, she called the police. When they finally turned up, a modest amount of police work ensued and as they were leaving, the woman caught a detective walking off with a silver figurine the burglars had overlooked.