Politicians Become Target in Peru’s Bloody October

The third mayor this year was assassinated in the town of Tingo Maria. A 5-year-old boy was killed by a dynamite bomb hurled at an election office in Huancayo. Eleven members of a peasant self-defense committee were executed by rebels in the village of Huayllay.

With the killing of 17 people in all, last Friday was a terrifyingly typical day for Peru in what is being called “Red October.”

This is one of the bloodiest months ever in the nine-year-old guerrilla war waged by the fanatical Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency. And the target now, according to Peruvian politicians on both the left and right, is democracy itself.

Mayors and local candidates have been executed at the rate of three to four a day across the country as the Maoist rebels attempt to sabotage nationwide municipal elections scheduled for Nov. 12. Previously peaceful districts are being swept into the turmoil.

The campaign has been effective: Hundreds of local officials and candidates have resigned, and security sources fear that the vote will not even take place in nearly one-third of the country. Nevertheless, many more politicians are ignoring the death threats and killings of their colleagues and daring to seek office, often with little or no security.

“It is vital to be aware that democracy in Peru is in danger,” the conservative daily Expreso said Sunday. “That is to say, the possibility of development and progress in freedom is in danger. The irony is that at a time when politics and politicians seem more devilish than ever, it is the politicians who are adhering heroically to democracy, who show their face despite the assassins’ bullets.”

The killers often come at night, sneaking into candidates’ bedrooms and sometimes killing their spouses too. Or guerrilla columns of 100 or more invade villages, rounding up politicians, justices of the peace and other symbols of authority. After a summary trial in the town square, the victim dies with a bullet to the head.

More than 60 officeholders and candidates have been killed in the last few weeks, according to government figures. The toll for the year has surged past 2,400, already above the total for all last year.

The government of President Alan Garcia appears helpless to halt the onslaught by Sendero Luminoso against the nation’s institutions. Officials have authorized citizens to form self-defense committees to assist overstretched police and army troops.

The municipal balloting is seen as a major test of Peru’s democratic system ahead of the April presidential and congressional elections, in which Garcia’s successor will be chosen. Garcia’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) is considered certain to finish a distant third because of the ruinous economic situation.

The totalitarian rebels are as hostile to Peru’s array of legal leftist parties as they are to APRA and the rightist alliance, the Democratic Front of writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

In the past, the terror has been generalized, aimed at police, foes of Sendero in trade unions and economic targets such as electric power lines. For now, the focus has shifted almost completely to the political system.

Party affiliation is irrelevant. The latest mayor slain in Tingo Maria, in the coca-growing Upper Huallaga Valley, was Carlos Ojeda Candela, a Communist; his predecessor, Manuel Espinoza, slain in June, was an APRA man. The town council’s four APRA members had resigned previously. Another mayor was killed in January.

The left-leaning daily La Republica said the elections are an important public weapon against Sendero.

“It is necessary,” it said, “that the elections be realized with the maximum normality, and that the country be aware that each ballot cast represents the most potent defeat that can be dealt to a violent minority which, lacking popular support, seeks to impose its . . . ideas by terror.”

Eduardo Orrego Villacorta, the Democratic Front’s vice presidential candidate, said citizens must form municipal self-defense forces for their candidates because the government is not doing enough to protect them.

Orrego, just back from a swing through the most troubled provinces in the Andean highlands, said Peru is witnessing a kind of “genocide of the mayors.” He said there must be better security “for those who are showing their will to serve and to fortify the democratic system.”

From the start of the year through last Thursday, a total of 2,403 people were killed nationwide, including 93 officials, according to a spokesman for Sen. Enrique Bernales, who leads a commission on violence and is running as the vice presidential candidate with the main leftist candidate, Alfonso Barrantes.

At the current pace, there is little doubt that this year’s toll will approach the 4,300 victims of 1984, the bloodiest year by far in the nine-year-old war. In all, more than 15,000 have been killed.

In the first 12 days of October, 174 people were killed in political violence, Bernales’ aide said, and the toll since then is pushing the killing rate to nearly double the recent 10 or so a day. The number of rebel attacks is running at three times the rate in August and September, before Sendero began its anti-election assault.

The violence has spread from Puno in the south to Chiclayo in the north. It has been exacerbated by Peru’s smaller guerrilla group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which this month abducted a prominent television executive, Hector Delgado Parker, a former adviser to Garcia. He is still missing, despite a manhunt in which tens of thousands of people have been detained.

The generalized sense of terror has not galvanized unity among the disparate political forces that support Peru’s democracy, which was restored in 1980 after 12 years of military dictatorship. The United Left movement has split into two main groups, each running its own presidential candidate, and the centrist APRA is staggering toward the end of its term.

This year, the gross domestic product is expected to fall 16%. With hyperinflation punishing salaries, retail sales have fallen 58% in the last 12 months. Shortages of bread and cooking oil mean long lines and much anger.

Cesar Hildebrandt, a prominent political journalist, said Peru is “a hostage to inflation, terrorism and drug trafficking.”

“The crisis in Peru,” he said, “will demand an exceptional and nonpartisan effort, a consensus for reconstruction, a broad and new will to disinfect ourselves, pacify ourselves and retake the road of common sense.”

Left-wing Sen. Rolando Ames complained that in the face of a “mortal offensive,” the government has merely relied on more military force. “It does not understand,” he said, “that that is exactly what Sendero Luminoso wants and seeks.”

Ames noted that the number of emergency zones in Peru had been doubled since September, 1988, increasing the army’s power in many areas--”and now we see the results.” Nevertheless, he said, the people themselves will reveal their loyalties on election day.

“The guerrillas believe that in the face of threats and killings, the people are not going to vote, but they are wrong,” Ames said. “The people’s organizations have decided that their leaders are to be elected by the ballot, and that Sendero Luminoso is not going to destroy these elections.”

BACKGROUND

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) regards itself as the only true Communist force in Peru, dismissing the rest of the left as “revisionist.” More than 15,000 people have been killed in Sendero’s nine-year war to overthrow Peru’s political and social order and impose an authoritarian Maoist system. Shining Path’s founder, Abimael Guzman, a former college professor, calls himself the “fourth sword” of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. The radical group staged its first armed attack in the Andes in May, 1980, with the intent of destroying the nation’s political and economic fabric, including assassinations of mayors who ignored orders to resign.