COLUMN LEFT : Drug War Is a New High for ‘Shining Path’ : Maoist cult has become the self-appointed defender of coca-farming peasants.

It would be intellectually satisfying to know if Abimael Guzman Reynoso, the “thinker” behind the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the totally ruthless Maoist guerrilla group of the Peruvian Andes, ever envisaged the extraordinary good fortune that Washington now seems intent on putting in his hands.

Revolutionaries of various Marxist persuasions always theorize that if they raise the ante, some crude capitalist-inspired, heavy-handed repression will bear down and radicalize the undecided people onto their side. If the Shining Path needs ammunition for its archaic dialectic--that the root of all evil is in the New York Stock Exchange, and that this accounts for the continuing economic misery of the Andean Indians and their turn to coca production as a desperate last resort--they have it in President Bush’s decision to send the U.S. Special Forces into Peru, even if only in a “training” role.

As Guzman will doubtless argue it, the Americans are coming in to close off the one apparent avenue of economic escape. To fight this determinist “logic” is going to be a very painful exercise indeed. The Shining Path is an act of its own--tough, disciplined, killing without quarter anyone who momentarily gets in the way. And Guzman is unlikely to be captured. In the movement’s 12-year history of working underground, he has been sighted only once, in 1979.

The Shining Path, Guzman’s brainchild when he was a young philosophy professor, was hatched in the seminar rooms and coffee shops of the oldest university in the Hemisphere, San Cristobal de Huamanga, in the mountain town of Ayacucho. Guzman has kept his ideology of alienated Maoism pristine and fiercely alive.

Parliamentary leftism in Peru--Marxists are well-represented in Parliament, and one was a serious contender for the presidency this year--is anathema to the Shining Path. Indeed, they decided in 1980 to launch themselves into public view at the very time that the Peruvian generals decided to step out of politics and allow elections for the first time in 12 years. The Shining Path chose not to give democracy a chance. Their first strategic attack was on a village polling station. Their second was to stalk the nighttime streets of Lima and hang dead dogs from the lamp posts--”the running dogs of capitalism”--so that people on their way to work would reflect on their posters denouncing Deng Xiaoping and praising the Gang of Four.

Not surprisingly, the Shining Path has received neither money nor guns from Peking. Nor from Moscow and Havana. They operate on their own, their preferred weapon being stolen dynamite hurled with precision by Indian slingmen at army posts, police stations, power lines.

The Shining Path also has operated independently of the drug traffickers, despite remunerative offers to go into alliance. But as the army has moved with increasing vigor against the peasant coca growers, the Shining Path has moved to protect their “right” to grow what they have to in order to make a living.

It is this that has brought them into the sights of George Bush. But both morally and militarily, it is dangerous ground for Washington to tread. As a cause it lacks credibility. In Afghanistan, the Reagan Administration did the opposite to what Bush now wants to do in Peru: It effectively allied with the poppy growers--many of them moujahedeen--in order to defeat the Soviet occupation. In the process it gave the opium industry in Afghanistan and Pakistan a massive boost. The clearing up of that residual mess should be a priority for Bush, yet there is not a word of explanation, much less contrition, for this U.S. behavior.

U.S. military intervention in Peru will play right into the hands of the Shining Path. This is not a war that can be won with guns. It’s very much a hearts-and-minds operation. If the Indians weren’t aliented centuries ago by the behavior of the conquistadors and their racially arrogant descendents, they certainly have been by today’s Peruvian army, which has killed men, women and children en masse in the attempt to root out Shining Path suspects and sympathizers.

Defeating the Shining Path can happen only through reform of Peru’s inflation-ridden, socially ossified, racially stratified, society. This is what the ballot box is for. There are feasible social and economic policies that could pull the rug gradually from under the Shining Path. Peru’s political institutions and personalities have to work this out for themselves.

American economic policy abroad and social policies at home can contribute to Peru in a useful way. The U.S. Special Forces can contribute nothing. The Marxist philosophy professor must be lying awake all night laughing.