Old Inca Capital a Microcosm of Peru’s Rebel War, Political Turmoil

The Marxist mayor of this imperial Inca capital said to pardon him if he seemed disheveled.

“They tried to kill me two nights ago,” Daniel Estrada asserted, blaming supporters of what he called the “authoritarian” American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, Peru’s governing political party.

“If there was an attempt, it was self-inflicted,” scoffed Carlos Chacon, the APRA candidate running against Estrada. Chacon’s jacket concealed a gun on his hip--for protection, he said, against the “totalitarian” instincts of Estrada’s followers.

Ancient and elegant Cuzco, an alluring Andean magnet for international visitors, is a microcosm of a struggle for power being waged in the shadow of South America’s most bizarre guerrilla movement, a Maoist infestation called Sendero Luminoso.

10,000 Lives Lost in War

Rival political movements, led on the one hand by populist President Alan Garcia and on the other by a rules-abiding Marxist coalition, jostle with Sendero throughout the Peruvian Andes today for the support of Peru’s poor majority.

Since 1980, the stubborn and elusive guerrillas have stung two elected governments in far-off Lima during a primitive backland war that has already claimed 10,000 lives.

Sendero is no closer than ever to achieving its quest for power, but it is expanding despite government counterattack, and its onslaught has rewritten the rules of Andean political life.

Because of Sendero, an unprecedented degree of national concern and resources are focused today on the long-neglected plight of the poorest of Peruvians who live here on the sere altiplano two miles above the sea.

Calls Garcia Rightist

“Sendero is not a military problem. It is the historic fight of the Andes with the outside world, the battle of oppressed and oppressor,” said Estrada, who describes his politics as “redder than red.”

Estrada portrays the social democratic Garcia as “a rightist,” a description that would find scant echo among Peru’s international creditors, whom Garcia taunts with severely limited debt repayments.

A chunk of what Garcia is withholding from foreign banks is earmarked for a $350-million-a-year grass-roots development plan aimed at alleviating what Ramiro Velasco, head of the government’s development corporation for Cuzco, calls “some of the most depressing social and economic conditions in the world.”

“Sendero drew attention to the misery. The guerrillas exist because the state never paid any heed, and now they are difficult to control. In response, we are trying to lay the foundations for necessary peaceful change,” said Velasco.

Peru’s Third City

Although it is probably no more dangerous than any big American city, Cuzco, Peru’s third-largest city and capital of a highland region of about 800,000 people, feels ripples of guerrilla savagery swirling around the cities of Ayacucho, to the north, and Puno, to the south.

A midyear bomb on a tourist train to the nearby Inca ruins of Machu Picchu killed seven tourists. Three policemen died in terrorist attacks presaging the electoral showdown between Estrada, a lawyer-member of a nationwide Marxist coalition called the United Left, and Chacon, a social Christian recruited to the ruling party’s banner for the election.

Estrada won the mayoralty three years ago in a city known as “Red Cuzco” in memory of its long leftist tradition. Coming to power with him in the colonial City Hall was a 12-to-8 majority of Marxist councilmen.

They have ruled since with polemics and vigor, stoking Incan nationalism in the context of Marxist ideology, which they depict as a peaceful alternative to Sendero.

Spurred Public Works

Estrada’s team embarked on an ambitious public works program; nearly 200 projects are aimed principally at fast-growing slum neighborhoods. They paved General Buendia Street, brought light to the Plaza del Cabildo, built a market in the San Blas district, expanded the municipal library, erected 20 playgrounds, extended sewer lines and potable water supplies and began a monument to the Incas.

To beef up municipal finances, Estrada imposed a $2-per-head exit tax for air travelers, most of them foreign tourists. When expected financial aid from Lima was slow in arriving, he threatened--jokingly, he says--to hijack a plane belonging to the government’s airline.

The Marxist city government sued a brewery that is the city’s second-largest industry for increased tax payments.

“They use one-third of our drinking water in a city where one-third of the people have no drinking water and pay us $5 per year,” Estrada snapped. The suit is before Peru’s molasses-slow courts.

Welcomed Pope

When Pope John Paul II came visiting last year, there was some suggestion that an official less “red” might more appropriately receive him at Cuzco Airport.

“I told the Church and the government that if the mayor of Cuzco could not greet the Pope at the airport, then the Pope would not reach the city from the airport. I greeted him. When the Pope left, he blessed me and said, ‘My son, keeping fighting for your people,’ ” Estrada asserted.

When Garcia took power in July, 1985, he changed Peruvian development priorities from big spending projects aimed at stitching the country together to community-level aid designed for more immediate impact.

Concentrating on the worst areas of poverty, he proclaimed five provinces, including Ayacucho, Cuzco and Puno, and the highland parts of three others a special zone of development. In all, the area makes up a fifth of the national territory and about 3.3 million people, where one baby in 10 dies before its first birthday.

Bureaucracy Bypassed

Assistance is directed by the presidency, shortcutting the notoriously inept Peruvian bureaucracy. In practice, it is aid with direct political kick: a program administered top to bottom by ruling party faithful.

In Cuzco alone, about 3,500 workers are employed to build dirt roads, wells, community and health centers and rude classrooms. The pattern is repeated in isolated Indian communities scattered through the mountains.

One continuing project is the pick-and-shovel construction of new irrigation canals to feed reconstructed agricultural terraces that date to Incan times in the town of Chincheros, about an hour from Cuzco.

On a recent rainy morning, men and women laborers paid $50 a month gathered with a bugle, a drum and vats of chicha, a local firewater, to celebrate completion of one section of canal and a makeshift dam dug with tools that have hardly changed since Incan times.

Mayor Complains

“We are prompting development on projects that the people themselves think are important while at the same time trying to neutralize Sendero,” said Jose Luis Monteagudo, an engineer and ruling party loyalist who came out from Cuzco for the occasion.

Snapped Estrada: “Garcia says ‘The poor are first,’ but where is the money? The municipality has received less, not more. Instead, the funds go to an APRA-controlled agency.”

In his bid for reelection, the 39-year-old Estrada campaigned on his strong performance, relying on deep-seated leftist strength in a region where the ruling American Popular Revolutionary Alliance has traditionally been an also-ran.

To confront him, APRA adopted Chacon, a bearded 48-year-old agronomist who had been mayor in the mid-1960s and is currently rector of the 18,000-student university here.

Images on Posters

In campaign posters, Estrada became the Andean condor, a figure of mythical and religious moment to the Incas. Underdog Chacon’s symbol was the bull, a figure of strength. Behind him, critically, stood APRA champion Garcia, whose unquenchable energy and peerless ego harvests enormous popularity in Peru.

“Garcia has created APRA’s strength in the Andes,” Chacon said on election eve. “I am not an Aprista, but I am fighting with him to help consolidate democracy. Our enemies are Sendero and the extreme elements of the leftist front that spring from the same ideological base and are to some degree the legal arm of Sendero.” He meant Estrada and extremist allies on the city council.

Election Sunday came to Cuzco with bitterness and uncertainty. When it was over, a national ruling party landslide on Garcia’s prestige had claimed Estrada’s government, also toppling other Marxists in the altiplano as well as the mayor of Lima, the national president of the United Left.

Pending expected certification of the election results, Chacon will take office Jan. 1.

As Peru prepares for a wholesale shift of local power in cities stalked by Sendero Luminoso, many Peruvians like Carlos Chacon must wonder if Garcia’s development strategies will prove effective against the guerrillas or if Marxist disenchantment in electoral defeat will win them new recruits to violence.