Peru Guerrillas Take Aim at Lima : Latin America: The Shining Path is on a drive to dominate the poor slums that encircle the capital. It seeks to eventually surround and strangle the city.

In Raucana, a fledgling slum of adobe bricks and straw matting on Lima’s eastern outskirts, Shining Path guerrillas organized residents along the lines of a “new state” envisioned by the fanatical Maoist rebels.

Communal work gangs dug wells, built community centers and erected turrets on walls surrounding the 37-acre squatter settlement. Night and day, militias manned the turrets and screened people entering and leaving the slum. The 1,200 residents learned Shining Path principles in daily indoctrination sessions, and a “popular assembly” tried those who broke the rules, sentencing them to public whipping.

“Depending on what the assembly decides, up to 35 lashes are given,” said Rene Subia, a Raucana community leader.

Revolutionary Raucana exemplifies a mounting drive by the Shining Path to dominate the impoverished slums that encircle Lima. Some analysts say the guerrillas are making alarming gains in their urban strategy, aimed at eventually surrounding and strangling the national capital.

Roughly half of Lima’s 6 million people live in suburban slums where unemployment is overwhelming, crime is rampant, hunger is widespread and government services are largely absent. It is a classical case of desperate masses ripe for radicalism.

More radical and ruthless than any other Latin American guerrilla group, the Shining Path has a bloody record of stopping at nothing in pursuit of its goals. Its leader, a former provincial professor named Abimael Guzman, is often compared to Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge revolution in the late 1970s turned the Cambodian countryside into bone-strewn killing fields.

The Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso in Spanish, has used mass killings and other forms of terrorism to spread its clandestine network through Peru’s Andean Highlands over the past 11 years, waging a largely rural war that has cost more than 23,000 lives. In the last year the rebels have redoubled efforts to move into Lima.

Raucana, at the foot of two desolate gray hills in the suburban district of Ate-Vitarte, was a dried-up pasture behind high brick walls when squatters invaded it two years ago. The squatters clashed with police, a man named Felix Raucana was killed, and the new community adopted his name.

Analysts familiar with Lima’s slums say Sendero was active in Raucana from the beginning, and it is clear to any visitor that this pueblo joven, or young town, is special. Small but well-built adobe huts line straight lanes laid out in an orderly grid divided into seven sectors, each sector with a deep well. There are community vegetable gardens, soup kitchens and latrines. The words organization and discipline pop up persistently in the conversation of young leaders such as Subia, 32, a muscular man with long hair.

“What have we done? Organized ourselves--but first, disciplined ourselves, as poor people, to be a single person,” Subia recited.

He denied that community leaders were members of the Shining Path, but when asked if Sendero guerrillas had been in Raucana, he said: “They are infiltrated everywhere, even among the military. As long as there is hunger and misery, the Sendero will advance.”

On Aug. 7, after a court ordered the evacuation of Raucana, residents and Shining Path militants blocked a five-mile stretch of the nearby Central Highway, the capital city’s main industrial axis and its link with highland provinces to the east. The defiant demonstration of Sendero power shocked Limenos who realize that most of the city’s food comes in on the Central Highway.

“What happens if they take over this district? They would leave all of Lima without food,” Consuelo Assurza de Contreras, the mayor of Ate-Vitarte municipal government, told a visitor in her heavily guarded office.

The army had to respond. But instead of moving into a violent confrontation, troops introduced themselves into Raucana by offering food, medical care and other services. Today helmeted soldiers man the turrets and screen people coming and going.

So Sendero responded. On Sept. 23, rebel-led slum dwellers blocked the Central Highway again to protest the army occupation, and on Sept. 25, suspected guerrillas killed army Gen. Walter Pena, who was in charge of the health-care program in Raucana. The gunmen shot Pena in his car near Lima’s oceanfront.

But even with army occupation, Sendero remains in Raucana, according to sociologist Vicente Otta, who heads a non-governmental social agency that works in Lima’s slums. “It is no longer a center of operations,” he said. “The Sendero cadres, the leaders, have left. But their ‘base’ people are there.”

In several similar communities, Sendero continues to organize residents, and in many others it is working to establish its presence. Otta predicted that guerrilla advances will continue around Lima, and the army will be hard pressed to keep responding as it has in Raucana.

“The more spread out the army is, the less coverage it has,” he said. “What will you do when there are 50, 100, 150 places like Raucana? There will be confrontations, violence, deaths. Time is short. The Sendero growth tendency is geometric.”

Otta and other analysts say the guerrillas are experimenting with different techniques for penetrating slum communities. One successful way is to help homeless people, including those fleeing from war-torn highland provinces, to invade vacant land and organize new slums like Raucana.

In established slums, the guerrillas quietly come in and begin doing favors for needy residents, infiltrating community organizations and recruiting young militants. “They are now doing forced recruiting,” Otta said.

Sendero has established its authority in some slum marketplaces, setting maximum prices that merchants can charge. Borrowing a tactic from its less-successful rival, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Sendero also hijacks food and soft-drink trucks, handing out the products to poor people.

In several slums, Sendero guerrillas enforce curfews and persecute petty criminals, scaring them off or killing them. “And since they are the only ones filling the space where authority is lacking, people respect them,” said Mary Watson, a Peruvian member of the world human rights network Amnesty International.

In a June opinion survey by Apoyo, a Peruvian polling firm, 17% of the poorest people interviewed said they had a favorable opinion of Sendero leader Guzman. His nom de guerre, Presidente Gonzalo, has become one of the most widely known names in Peru.

Sendero marches periodically through some Lima slums, waving red flags and chanting revolutionary slogans. Sendero has established “pioneer schools” to indoctrinate slum children, and militant teachers spread the organization’s doctrine in public schools.

Community leaders who resist the guerrillas are threatened and sometimes killed. In mid-September, a guerrilla death squad executed Fortunato Collazos and Alfredo Aguirre, both officers of the community council of a slum called Juan Pablo II in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho.

Two weeks earlier in a slum near Callao, Lima’s port district, guerrilla gunmen killed Juana Lopez Leon, an organizer for a widespread program that distributes free milk to poor children and mothers.

In the southern district of Villa El Salvador, after Sendero dynamited a food warehouse used by women’s committees that run soup kitchens, the committees staged a protest march that brought thousands of women to the streets.

Maria Elena Moyano, vice mayor of Villa El Salvador and a leader of the march, said Sendero uses terrorism to co-opt community organizations or shut them down. “All of those that oppose their strategy are eliminated,” she said.

Moyano acknowledged that Sendero has a clandestine presence in Villa El Salvador, “as everywhere.” The presence is frequently advertised by red slogans painted on walls, like one near her modest concrete home that said, “For the People’s Rights, Popular War.”

But Moyano vowed in an interview that members of the United Left, a nonviolent leftist coalition that has dominated Villa El Salvador for years, will not be intimidated by Sendero’s aggressiveness.

“The only ones who can defeat the Shining Path in this country are the left,” she said. Many independent analysts agree with her assessment, but they point out that the United Left is weak and divided after a dismal showing in Peru’s 1990 presidential elections.

Gustavo Gorriti, a Peruvian journalist who is writing his second book about Sendero, said the traditional left has been further demoralized by the collapse of world communism, leaving a political vacuum in some areas where the United Left was strong.

“In that vacuum, Sendero is starting to advance, and advance very rapidly,” Gorriti said.

He said that more than 3,000 soup kitchens, operated by church and community organizations, have lately become the “backbone of community life” in Lima’s slums. “Sendero seeks to totally capture that form of organization,” he said.

The response of community women’s committees that run the soup kitchens will determine Sendero’s future tactics, Gorriti predicted. If the guerrillas find they can take over by force, the violence will continue, he said, but if the committees show determined resistance, the rebels “will proceed with more patience.”

A woman volunteer who has helped organize soup kitchens around the city said many committees have been caught off balance by Sendero aggression. “The women don’t know what they are going to do with this situation,” she said.

She added that committees may protest, as they did in Villa El Salvador, but “after the march, what? It isn’t just courage that is needed. They have to have something more to defend themselves.”

The volunteer, who asked that her name not be used, said she favors the organization of armed community patrols to keep Sendero out. If residents don’t do it, she said, Sendero will spread through the slums, triggering drastic action by the army. “Indiscriminate repression, that is what worries me,” she said.

Under the year-old administration of President Alberto Fujimori, the army has made the organization of armed peasant patrols a major element of its anti-Sendero strategy in the rural highlands. Gen. Alberto Arciniega, a senior Defense Ministry official, told The Times that the peasant patrols are working well, a development that he said has helped influence the guerrillas to concentrate more effort on the city.

“Here they are gambling everything, because out there the peasant patrols and the army are hitting them hard,” Arciniega said.

In the city, he said, the battle will be to “win the minds” of slum dwellers. And if the government is to win, he continued, it must help the people meet their critical needs for food, housing, education and health care.

“There is no solution until there is economic hope,” the general said.

A foreign Catholic priest who works in a Lima slum said the army’s strategy in Raucana is more promising than the brutal repression sometimes used in the highlands. “The army is at least trying out this tactic of making the civilian population an ally in the fight against Sendero,” the priest said.

He also said Sendero’s ruthless tactics are unlikely to win many minds in the slums, but he added that he did not mean to belittle the growing urban guerrilla problem.

“The problem is very, very serious,” he said.

Fernando Rospigliosi, a researcher with the private Institute of Peruvian Studies, voiced similar concern. He predicted the rebel urban front will become increasingly more active, and Sendero will try to provoke bloody clashes between the army and people.

He said distributing weapons to slum dwellers as a defense against the guerrillas would only increase both political and criminal violence, but he predicted that as the guerrillas advance, violence will inevitably rise.

“The people can’t do anything, and (the rebels) continue advancing,” Rospigliosi said. “I think it is absolutely impossible for them to take power, but what is perfectly possible is that they will tear up the country. They can tear it to pieces.”