Alive or Dead? : Guzman--Messiah of Peru Terror

It is eight years since anyone on the right side of the law saw moon-faced Abimael Guzman, but all Peru seeks him now. The terror that Guzman has unleashed weighs like the Andes Mountains on a troubled nation that does not understand it and cannot control it.

Once Guzman was a radical but well-mannered professor at an obscure provincial university. Now he calls himself “Gonzalo,” president of the Republic of New Democracy. Gonzalo is the self-anointed “fourth sword of Marxism,” almost mythical and so invisible that there is no certainty that he still lives.

Dead or alive, Gonzalo is a killer.

Peruvians murder for Gonzalo. They battle the army, terrorize peasants, assassinate politicians, military officers and policemen. They blow out the lights, destroy rail lines and bridges. In the name of a low-budget, self-reliant revolution, they hurl dynamite bombs with the nonchalance of miners blasting rock.

‘The Andes Shake’

Peruvians die for Gonzalo, among them 250 prisoners in jails where security forces answered revolt with massacre. “The masses roar, the Andes shake,” the guerrillas would sing before sitting down to lunch with regimental precision inside a prison compound where Gonzalo’s spirit ruled and guards never entered.

As founder and leader of an insurgency called Sendero Luminoso, Abimael Guzman, wherever he may be, remains Latin America’s most messianic revolutionary, and perhaps the hemisphere’s most dangerous. He was a prize-winning Roman Catholic schoolboy who marched ever to the left, through classical Marxism to Castroism to Maoism, unrepentant and unremitting.

Gonzalo wars without allies and with calculated primitivism. One informed guess is that after six years of battle, the arsenal of Sendero’s few thousand militants amounts to 900 mostly captured weapons and 300,000 stolen sticks of dynamite.

Maoist-Style Terror

Guzman’s Maoist brand of terror, though, was nearly two decades in the making, and it has already claimed about 10,000 lives, most of those poor Peruvians trapped in the middle.

Worse, it is accelerating. When reformist President Alan Garcia took office 14 months ago, Sendero figured well down the list of national urgencies. Today it is paramount, jeopardizing not only peace on the Andean spine but also the stability of an uncertain democratic system.

Despite military counterattack and heavy losses, Sendero continues to grow from its original base around the Andean provincial capital of Ayacucho. In recent months, Sendero guerrillas have killed an admiral and a police colonel in Lima. They have bombed foreign tourists in mountainous Cuzco and Soviet seamen in the Pacific port of Callao.

In the most recent expansion, the guerrillas have terrorized peasants on the altiplano, the high plateau near Peru’s border with Bolivia, hundreds of miles south of tormented Ayacucho. And in mid-September, they stole another 92,454 sticks of dynamite from a government mining warehouse near the central Andean city of Huancayo.

What Sendero’s widespread warriors have in common is a sense of isolation and alienation from humid, coastal Lima and the aloof white men’s governments here that represent not only another civilization but also another century. A frumpy, white, middle-class intellectual has galvanized descendants of the Incas.

“This is a country where differences and distances are of great magnitude. The Indian identity with the rest of the country is very fragile,” said Julio Cotler, a sociologist who heads a private research center here. “Peru is the only country in South America where Sendero could exist. It requires a certain minimum of irrationality and anachronism to speak of such things.”

Bespectacled Abimael Guzman, a high-brow ideologue who loves good literature, classical music and violence, launched his armed struggle in the afternoon of May 18, 1980, in the near-nothing mountain hamlet of Chuschi. Townsfolk had just voted for president for the first time in 17 years when intruders appeared with homemade weapons and blood-red banners. They burned the ballot boxes.

Sendero’s first and only war communique had been issued a few months earlier in Lima on placards tied to dogs hanged from lampposts. The placards attacked China’s current reformist leaders with such slogans as “Deng Xiaoping--Son of a Bitch.”

In a country rich with intrigue of feuding Marxist cabals, Peruvians at first laughed at the Maoist kooks.

It was a mistake.

“Peru had never known an organized political movement of fanatics for whom assassination is the utilitarian basis of action. They kill by stealth and by night, and their very nature creates excesses in the struggle to control them. It is not a movement of madmen, but it is an irrational movement,” said Abel Salinas, the Peruvian interior minister whose police forces have had no better success than the army in hunting Guzman.

In Name of Ideology

President Garcia, a demagogic nationalist who believes that he speaks for Peru’s poor majority, denounces Sendero’s “crimes committed in the name of a dogmatic and totalitarian ideology.” Garcia came to power with pledges of Andean development and a willingness to talk with Sendero.

Now, a government peace commission is moribund in the face of Sendero’s mocking silence, Garcia’s reforms are prisoners of Peru’s intractable bureaucracy and his government lacks any effective anti-insurgency program.

“Garcia thought Sendero would be easy. He didn’t understand that for Sendero, all governments are equal. The only one that counts is Guzman’s so-called Republic of the New Democracy,” said Carlos Ivan Digregori, an anthropologist who was on the faculty with Guzman at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho in Sendero’s formative years.

It is not that Guzman’s war has failed to win outside support. He spurns it. The Soviets, Cubans, Albanians, Chinese--particularly the new breed of Chinese leaders--are equally despicable to Guzman. So are the United States, Italy, whose embassy Sendero bombed recently, Peru’s less radical Marxists--and all Peru governments.

Opposed to Left, Right

Guzman laid the groundwork for Sendero under a nationalist military dictatorship. He went to war against a center-right civilian reformer and is now unflagging against the center-left populist, Garcia.

In a hemisphere where guerrilla insurgencies are common, there is no ideological precedent for Sendero. Both as a political movement and a conspiracy, Sendero Luminoso is more closely held than any other in Latin America. It is the hand-tooled creation of one patient, single-minded, uncompromising zealot who has ground to a killing edge what President Garcia has called “undernourished and precariously armed peasants for use as cannon fodder.”

Sendero Luminoso--or Shining Path, in its English rendering--is a purely Peruvian rebellion that seeks no allies and tolerates no false Marxist gods. Sometimes, Guzman is compared by nonplused Peruvians to Cambodia’s nihilistic Pol Pot. More accurately, he mirrors the young, rural-minded Mao Tse-tung, rallying China’s peasants to march in to strangle the cities.

Mao was a hero to Abimael Guzman, who had only two others: Marx and Lenin. With those three now dead, Sendero dogma teaches that Gonzalo, “the Fourth Sword,” survives as the world’s only living Marxist.

Guzman once dismissed the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, as a “vedette”--a chorus girl. Sendero has only disdain for Guevara’s concept of a mobile rural guerrilla column, sharing Mao’s criticism of “wandering guerrillas.” Like Mao, Guzman believes that the heart of revolution must be a disciplined, party-led political movement with a rural territorial base. Thus far, hard-pressed by military counterattack, Sendero has been unable to secure a base, a failure that encourages urban terror as a second front.

‘Ideology Is Everything’

“Ideology, having the correct political line, is everything,” said Gustavo Gorriti, a Peruvian journalist who has written extensively on Sendero. “If the guerrillas wanted modern weapons, the cocaine Mafia would provide them happily as a means of diverting attention from their own operations. Sendero doesn’t want them. They like to quote Mao: ‘If we don’t have men or rifles but have the correct line, we’ll get men and rifles. If we have men and rifles but don’t have the correct line, we’ll lose both.’ ”

Even in battle, ultimate authority rests with a Sendero cell’s political officer. Sendero’s goal is manifest. “Without power, all is illusion,” jailed guerrillas would chant. Guzman seeks not recompense for grievances but total overthrow of the system in exchange for an agrarian-based and Indian-stoked communism of a utopian purity that not even Mao achieved.

“Their liturgy of revolution was impeccable. They were as devout as novitiates,” said Father Hubert Lanssiers, a Belgian Roman Catholic missionary who used to visit the jailed guerrillas.

‘Trenches of Combat’

“We will transform the dingy dungeons into shining trenches of combat,” the Sendero prisoners used to sing.

A 17-year-old Sendero recruit once recited his master’s credo this way:

“First, mobilization and armed propaganda. Second, sabotage. Third, generalization of the revolutionary violence. Fourth, conquest and expansion of support bases. Fifth, insurrection in the cities and total destruction of the bourgeois state.”

Sendero reinforces its fanaticism with silence. Latin American guerrillas are, almost always, triumphalist. They trumpet their cause, lobby for domestic and foreign support. Sendero says nothing. It makes no claims, offers no self-justification.

The few Sendero documents that have floated to the Peruvian surface preach only to the converted, many of them urban immigrants from the mountains who have passed through other radical Marxist factions on their way to Gonzalo’s true revolution. The documents reinforce the image of Sendero as fanatically secretive, exceptionally disciplined and inflexibly self-righteous. Reviling all elements of the Peruvian political spectrum outside its own extremist quadrant, Guzman’s conspiracy is at once disconnected from Peruvian reality and is the Peruvian reality.

Sendero Luminoso is both more than it seems at first glance, and less. The ideology is novel, even to a part of the world weaned to violence, but the inspiration is familiar.

“This is not an indigenous uprising, or a class or race revolt,” said Gorriti. “It is the result of an infestation of a group of white and mestizo (mixed-race) intellectuals from the provinces who took advantage of poverty and isolation by nurturing despair and offering the means of combatting it.”

In Ayacucho in the high Andes, the people are short and barrel-chested, the color of their copper-tinged mountains, and as tough. The city’s 33 colonial churches attest to its bygone importance as a staging center on the mule track between Lima and Cuzco. Ayacucho means “Corner of the Dead” in Quechua, the language of the Andean Indians, after the many Indian battles fought in the region before Spanish times.

After the Spaniards left, new times came, but not to Ayacucho. Isolated and water-short, it is among the poorest areas on the poor Peruvian altiplano. As a region, Ayacucho has a declining 3% of the national population but produces only 0.8% of the gross national product, according to anthropologist Digregori’s research.

‘Poverty Was Incredible’

“I first went to Ayacucho in 1952 as a young student. The poverty was incredible, unbelievable. There were four automobiles. The pharmacies sold leeches to suck blood,” said Fernando Silva Santiesteban, an anthropologist who would later become director of Peru’s Institute of Culture. “I went back 10 years later as a beginning university professor. When I tried to rent a house with an indoor bathroom, none of the local landlords could understand why I wanted one.”

Founded in 1540, Ayacucho did not join the national highway system until 1924, the centenary of the Battle of Ayacucho, which sealed South American victory in the struggle for independence from Spain. The railroad from Lima stops one dusty day short of Ayacucho. The telephone came in 1964, and television 10 years later, to mark the battle’s 150th anniversary. Per capita income was about $100 per year then among about 430,000 people in the Ayacucho area, 90% of them rural Quechua speakers, and three-quarters of them illiterate. By 1981, a population of half a million, half of that literate, shared 30 doctors, 827 telephones and 27 miles of paved roads.

Abimael Guzman arrived in Ayacucho in 1963 as a professor of philosophy at the 300-year-old but recently resurrected Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga. Huamanga--which in Quechua means place of the huaman, a bird--is used as a synonym for Ayacucho by the people who live there.

No Talk of Politics

“He was a precise teacher who demanded that his students work hard. There was no talk of politics in class,” said Hugo Ned, who knew Guzman as a young man and is himself now a teacher in Ayacucho.

Abimael Guzman Reynoso was born Dec. 4, 1934, in the small port of Mollendo in southern Peru, the out-of-wedlock son of a businessman and a local woman, Bernice Reynoso. At 14, he went to live with his father’s wife and family on Ejercicios Street in Arequipa, a city of high intellectual tradition in the southern mountains. At the La Salle High School there, Guzman excelled in logic and ethics and won a prize for exemplary conduct from his Jesuit teachers.

In 1953, he entered the University of San Augustin in Arequipa to study philosophy and law. He joined the Communist Party while at the university, and his dense, tedious 1961 theses, the 178-page “Kant’s Theory of Space,” for philosophy, and the 189-page “The Democratic-Bourgeois State,” for history, were both cast in a mold of dogmatic Marxism.

After Guzman became a national figure, his friend and tutor at Arequipa, Dr. Miguel Angel Rodriguez Rivas, himself a maverick Communist, would tell the news magazine Caretas: “Arequipa is poor except in producing men. Guzman is one of them.”

A young faculty, attracted to Ayacucho by intellectual renaissance and princely $1,000-a-month salaries made possible by U.S. and West European aid, welcomed Guzman. He seemed less an activist or organizer than the retiring sort of theorist who dwells happily with the delicious mysteries of the dialectic.

“He was a man of the left. Nearly all of us were,” Santiesteban of the Institute of Culture recalled. “He was a good professor, not one of the best; very orthodox, a traditional Marxist. He didn’t come with his current ideas. They were born in Ayacucho.”

Hugo Ned remembers the young Guzman as a soft-spoken aficionado of Beethoven, Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway and the pre-Socratic Greeks.

David Scott Palmer, now a U.S. diplomat, taught at Huamanga in 1962-64 as a Peace Corps volunteer. For six months, he shared an office with Guzman. Palmer recalls Guzman as a bright, reserved individual who was unfailingly polite to visiting American volunteers while at the same time agitating behind the scenes against the Peace Corps presence at the university.

“He was able, intelligent, and respected by students and teachers alike. His philosophy lectures were popular with the students, his contributions at faculty meetings cogent,” Palmer said in a telephone interview from Washington. “Politically, he was then a Fidelista, an admirer of the Cuban Revolution.”

Like Guzman, the other Huamanga professors who would form the leadership of Sendero Luminoso were imports to Ayacucho. Like him, none of them spoke Quechua, to the best of Palmer’s recollection.

Guzman kept moving left. He sided with the Chinese when the Sino-Soviet split fractured the Peruvian Communist Party in 1964. After a series of fights with Lima-based Maoists who found Ayacucho’s “country bumpkins . . . hopelessly out of step with the proper ideological approach,” Guzman wound up heading his own party.

Borrowing a phrase from the writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui, the founder of Peruvian communism, Guzman called his movement the Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariategui. President Gonzalo says it is the only true Communist party in the world.

By 1965, Guzman had already moved beyond the tenets of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He refused to support a short-lived, Lima-inspired Castroist uprising in the mountains around Ayacucho that year. It was about that time, during repeated long absences from Ayacucho, that Guzman is thought to have made the first of at least two visits to China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Embassy here, a favorite Sendero target, will not talk about the guerrillas.

Control of University

For long years, Sendero controlled the university, a teachers’ college and an experimental high school. For a time, Guzman oversaw staff hiring and firing as the university’s personnel director.

Most of the Huamanga students came from poor Quechua-speaking families in the Ayacucho region. Guzman and a small group of like-minded intellectuals wooed them, trained them and, year by patient year, sent them back into the countryside in the name of revolution. As early as 1971, Palmer notes, Sendero forcibly blocked government agrarian reform efforts in one rural area in the Ayacucho region.

For one period, Guzman’s politics attracted less attention in Ayacucho than his torrid affair with a married woman, according to one old friend. It was in Ayacucho as well that Guzman also met Augusta la Torre, the convent-educated daughter of local leftists. La Torre, about 15 years Guzman’s junior, became his student, his wife and his tireless companion in revolution.

She is missing, too.

For a time in the early 1970s, Guzman taught at a teachers’ college in Lima. The last confirmed picture of him is a police mug shot taken in 1974 when he was jailed briefly in Lima for protesting against the government, then ruled by the armed forces.

In 1977, Sendero lost control of the Huamanga university to a coalition of opposition Marxists. The next year, Guzman, La Torre and a handful of intellectual-revolutionaries went underground to begin planning a war that, the 51-year-old President Gonzalo teaches, may take 75 years to win.

Sendero Luminoso formally opted for violence at a Central Committee plenum on March 17, 1980. Guzman used excerpts from an 1849 treatise by Washington Irving, “Life of Mohomet and His Followers,” to demonstrate how a handful of zealots can overcome seemingly impossible odds.

The vote for violent revolution was not unanimous. Guzman purged the weak-willed, at one point ordering readings from the first two acts of “Macbeth” to show the faithful “how treason is born,” according to journalist Gorriti.

In April, 1980, Sendero warriors attended a clandestine military school with the theme “How to begin an armed struggle out of nothing.”

They have been fighting with almost nothing in an escalating spiral of violence ever since.

Peruvian police, whose corruption and incompetence are targets of an unprecedented purge by Garcia, have no inkling where Guzman is, or even if he is still alive. Guzman-hunters such as Interior Minister Salinas believe that if President Gonzalo lives, it is mostly as a source of doctrine.

‘A Figure of Mythology’

“Guzman is by now a figure of mythology,” said Salinas.

At present, decentralized operational command of his movement is thought to rest with second-line leaders. Authorities cite a recent decline in Sendero’s urban attacks to support a widely held belief that the guerrillas used the jails as key command and coordination centers.

One wistful, widely circulated account in government circles is that Guzman is known to have suffered years ago from a kidney ailment that should by now have killed him. Yet last year a hand-tooled leather trunk was seized with Guzman’s likeness on the cover. It was apparently intended as a present to Guzman, marking his uprising’s fifth anniversary. Sources close to Sendero say he was present at the last meeting of the group’s Central Committee in March.

Six years and 10,000 dead later, Abimael Guzman remains a deadly enigma to the uncomprehending country he terrorizes.

Sendero utterly lacks either the popular support or the military capacity to conquer Peru. The danger, rather, is that its rampage could provoke enough additional instability in an already sorely tried nation to eventually trigger a new military dictatorship, thereby driving more Peruvians into violent revolt against the state.

President Gonzalo would like that, wherever he is.