Prison in Peru Becomes a Forge for Guerrillas

It looks like any other maximum security jail, with barbed wire, guard posts and attack dogs.

However, for about 300 “Shining Path” guerrillas inside, Canto Grande prison is a “fascist concentration camp” in which the Maoist guerrillas have turned their cells into “combat trenches.”

While communism crumbles around the globe, it lives on in this prison where convicted guerrillas of the Shining Path movement live communally beneath giant murals of Marx, Lenin and Mao.

Thousands of their comrades carry on a 10-year-old struggle in the countryside to turn the country into a worker-peasant state to be called the People’s Republic of Peru in a war which has cost 17,000 lives.

“The government thinks that, since we are prisoners, we must be downcast,” a guerrilla convict named Claudia said.

“But we are prisoners of war and combatants and therefore still engaged in the armed struggle which continues towards its inexorable goal, communism,” said Claudia, whose eyes glisten with conviction as she repeats Shining Path slogans as if they were Biblical truths.

Shining Path, almost unique among Latin American guerrilla groups in its allegiance to such discredited figures as Mao and Josef Stalin, now sees itself as the world’s vanguard of hardline communism.

“We are leading the revolutionary counteroffensive against (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping and the rest of the revisionist traitors,” said another inmate in the women’s block, referring to the Soviet and Chinese leaders.

Except for occasional searches, prison guards rarely enter the two Shining Path cellblocks. There the guerrillas make their own food--and their own rules--beneath red flags adorned with the hammer and sickle and portraits of the movement’s legendary founder, Abimael Guzman.

Guzman, a former philosophy professor from a middle-class background, launched the insurgency with a band of students and disaffected peasants after visiting China in the early 1970s and becoming enamored of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Guzman has not been seen publicly since 1979.

His movement has fed on poverty and class hatred and has brought parts of Peru’s countryside to the brink of civil war.

Government forces under President Alan Garcia have inflicted heavy blows on Shining Path in recent months, killing scores of guerrillas in clashes in the Andean highlands and the Amazon Basin.

While weakened in combat, the group has vowed to try to prevent Peruvians from voting in presidential elections on April 8.

“A revolution can never succeed through elections but only through violence,” said one guerrilla who, like most of her comrades, refused to give her name.

“We call on Peruvians to boycott the electoral farce, and wherever possible we will stop the elections from taking place,” she said.

Most of the 84 guerrillas in the women’s block are serving time for such crimes as homicides and bombings. The 210 male Shining Path convicts live in a separate cellblock.

The women are usually cordial with visitors, greeting them dressed in elegant skirts and high heels and proudly showing the block’s tidy cells, corridors and dining hall.

All duties such as cleaning, cooking and cultural activities--which range from ideology sessions to revolutionary theater--are divided among the inmates.

Reading material includes Mao’s “Little Red Book,” works by Marx and Lenin, Shining Path literature--and little else.

Memories of the 1986 massacre of about 300 guerrillas in three other Lima prisons are still fresh in the minds of the inmates, some of whom were survivors of the massacre, which were triggered by simultaneous riots at the jails.

“Any day, the fascist police will commit another genocide. They are waiting for the right moment and we will be prepared to shed our blood again for the revolution,” said an inmate.

She and her comrades claimed that prison guards at Canto Grande recently burst into the men’s cellblock, painted slogans like “Death to Terrorists” on walls and wounded an inmate.

Prison authorities moved most guerrilla convicts to Canto Grande, wedged in the Andean foothills on the outskirts of Lima, after the 1986 massacres.

Modeled on maximum-security prisons in the United States, Canto Grande’s list of inmates reads like a Who’s Who of Peru’s most notorious criminals, drug lords and guerrillas.

Convicts include Reynaldo Rodriguez Lopez, a cocaine baron nicknamed “the Godfather” who was sentenced in June to 25 years, and Victor Polay, former commander of Peru’s second-largest guerrilla force, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

Shining Path’s reputed top aide to Guzman, Osman Morote, has been living in one of the prison’s isolation wards since he was captured in 1988.