COLUMN ONE : Professor of Terror in Peru : An owlish intellectual turned ruthless zealot has opened the way for upheaval in Peru. His guerrilla army could wreck the government and economy.

By disrupting this nation with devastating terror and violence, a former philosophy professor known as “Chairman Gonzalo” helped set the stage for this week’s civilian-military coup.

Chairman Gonzalo is Abimael Guzman. He is the legendary creator and guiding light of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a guerrilla army unmatched by any other in Latin America for ruthless zeal. Since 1980, some 25,000 Peruvians have died in the bloody upheaval instigated by Guzman, and the carnage shows no sign of abating.

President Alberto Fujimori, describing why he abruptly shut down Peru’s Congress and courts Sunday night, accused opponents of obstructing his war strategy “because they don’t dare take a clear position against terrorism.” He promised “drastic” sanctions against terrorists.

Guzman, 57, probably would explain Fujimori’s military-backed coup as a vain, bourgeois attempt to prevent the coming revolution. In fact, part of the rebel leader’s strategy is to provoke harsh measures by the government as a way of increasing popular discontent.

Carlos Ivan Degregori, a social scientist who has written extensively on Sendero, speculated that Guzman’s current objective is to prove his group’s disruptive power in Lima, a city of 7 million.

Degregori predicts some kind of major action in Lima this year, such as an “insurrectional strike.”

“Not that they are going to seize Lima, not that they are going to win,” he said. “But they would provoke a violent reaction by the government in which, let’s say, there would be 500 deaths.”

That would contribute to the impression that this nation of 23 million is becoming ungovernable, which is Guzman’s objective, Degregori said. “So these coming months are decisive.”

At a U.S. congressional hearing in February, the U.S. State Department’s top official for Latin America called Sendero “a direct threat” to Fujimori’s government. Bernard Aronson, an assistant secretary of state, also warned: “If Sendero were to take power, we would see this century’s third genocide.” He listed the first two genocides as the Nazi Holocaust and the Pol Pot massacres.

Guzman has often been compared with Pol Pot, whose radical Communist regime killed an estimated 1 million Cambodians in the 1970s. Guzman’s ideology seems equally radical and his guerrillas have been blamed for mass killings of peasants and “selective liquidations” of others who refused to support his revolution.

Few analysts deny his capacity to further devastate Peru’s impoverished economy and disrupt its fragile democracy. And some predict that he will spread his bloody campaign into neighboring countries, such as Bolivia and Brazil.

An owlish intellectual, Guzman formed his radical movement between 1962 and 1974 while a professor of philosophy and education at Huamanga University in Ayacucho, a provincial capital in the Andean highlands. Members of his small Communist group even then promoted his legend. “They have always created the myth that he was a genius,” said Fermin Rivera, one of Guzman’s fellow professors in the 1970s.

But according to Rivera and others who knew Guzman then, he was not a brilliant ideologue, not an original thinker, not a great debater. He faithfully repeated the “Mao thought” that he had learned on two secret trips to China, where he studied ideology and guerrilla warfare.

In his Ayacucho days, Guzman wore black-rimmed glasses, dark suits and white shirts without ties. Acquaintances remember him as formal, courteous, respectful. When he spoke in class or at political meetings, no one challenged what he said, said Rivera, who added: “He was like a priest who gives a very convincing talk, a nice sermon, to his faithful.”

Guzman’s organization officially is named the Communist Party of Peru; he is called Chairman Gonzalo--as in Chairman Mao, the leader whom he reveres. His dogma is called “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought.” Guzman, Rivera said, has always recruited “somewhat frustrated, resentful people, above all young people” and indoctrinated them. “More than convinced militants, he has turned them into fanatics,” Rivera said.

Guzman’s key tenet is class hatred, “that the struggle will be between two classes, and one of them will have to die,” he said. “He preached it here, he inculcated it in his people.”

In 1974, Guzman left the university, ostensibly because of medical problems caused by Ayacucho’s altitude. In Lima, his activities grew increasingly clandestine as his disciples went out into Peru’s central Andean highlands to organize recruits for a “popular war.”

The first armed actions began in 1980 near Ayacucho. By decade’s end, disciplined Sendero cells were active in most of Peru, attacking with stunning ferocity. Police and armed forces responded with equal ferocity. Civilians caught between the two suffered the heaviest toll.

That was part of the plan. Sendero documents say that “popular war” results in a blood bath and that militants must be willing to pay a “quota” with their lives. They do it for Chairman Gonzalo.

The devotion to Guzman could be seen recently at the high-security prison in Canto Grande, a ramshackle neighborhood on Lima’s edge. There, two cellblocks had been set aside for Sendero members, about 120 women in one and 400 men in the other. In the courtyard of the women’s block, prisoners played volleyball on a recent Sunday under painted wall murals with messages such as: “Learn from President Gonzalo, Incarnate Gonzalo Thought!”

Prisoner Janet Talavera, 28, acknowledged that she had once met and talked with Guzman. Talavera was an editor of El Diario, the Sendero newspaper, and participated in a 1988 interview with him. “He is full of a tremendous vitality,” she said. “That optimism that he radiates is tremendous.”

Nelly Evans, 47, was another imprisoned Sendero supporter. Police say that Evans, a Peruvian of British descent who was arrested last year, was a top Guzman assistant. She denied that she ever met him but expressed her admiration, saying: “The chairman really is more than an intelligent person, he really is a genius. Through his leadership, we are convinced that we will triumph, and for that cause we are prepared to give our lives.”

Guzman’s strategy is to spread Sendero’s influence and organization through the provinces, “annihilating” anyone who resists. More and more guerrillas are recruited among teen-age peasants, sometimes by force.

In the Huallaga Valley area on the eastern slope of the Andes, Sendero has found a ready source of abundant financing. It takes control of clandestine landing strips and charges cocaine traffickers for landing rights. Sendero also has worked to organize slum dwellers around Lima.

In the final phase of the “popular war,” according to Gonzalo, the capital will be strangled by the “iron belt” of Sendero forces and a popular insurrection will bring down the government. Sendero prisoner Evans did not give a timetable for that end but said: “We know it is close.”

In Lima, Sendero activity has increased significantly in the last two years, and numerous resistant neighborhood leaders have been slain. In February, for example, Sendero assassinated Maria Elena Moyano, a popular leftist leader in the southern district of Villa el Salvador. She was shot in the head at close range at a community meeting, then her assassins dynamited her body.

Pablo Rojas, executive secretary of a Peruvian human rights group, said Sendero kills 70% of those who die in Peru’s political violence. What makes Sendero such an implacable death machine is Guzman’s “iron will” to reach his goal of Maoist power, Rojas said.

Analysts often compare Sendero to a religious sect, and some question whether Guzman is sane. “The guy is not demented in the sense that Hitler could have been,” said Gustavo Gorriti, who wrote a 1990 book on Sendero. “But as occurs with many of these desert prophets, his vision is one of fire and flames, of growth through the purification of fire and suffering.”

As for Guzman himself--a man for whom a group of businessmen is offering a $1-million bounty--officials haven’t seen him since 1979, when police detained him briefly. “We believe he goes all over Peru, moving around with 14 or 15 people,” said a military intelligence officer. “He arrives in a town with two or three cars. A truck gets there a day before and scouts the whole zone.”

Investigators believe that Guzman cannot spend much time in the high Andes because of his intolerance for altitude and that he stays out of the eastern lowlands because humidity aggravates his severe psoriasis. “Gonzalo is in Lima,” said a senior police investigator, “because of his illness and because Lima is the center of communications for the whole country. He wants to know everything that happens.”

The investigator said police have learned much about Guzman and his organization from documents and other materials seized in recent raids. For example, he said, they have learned that the No. 2 in Sendero command was Guzman’s wife, Augusta La Torre, known as “Norah.” She died in November, 1988--apparently a suicide, a captured Sendero videotape shows.

On the tape, Guzman is shown at a wake, caressing his wife’s head. With pained expression, and somber voice, he says she gave her life rather than raise a hand against the party. Analysts have deduced that Norah became entangled in a policy dispute with Guzman and “she could have been forced to commit suicide,” Sendero expert Degregori said.

Other seized Sendero tapes have helped identify many other high party officials, “people who had been detained and we didn’t know their importance,” the investigator said. Police have made numerous key arrests in the past two years. Officials say Sendero has lost eight members of its 25-member central committee, as well as many key members of its Lima medical network, propaganda apparatus and legal defense team.

But if Guzman has proven anything over time, it is that his underlings are expendable. Still, that does not mean Sendero has unlimited human reserves. With no more than 10,000 to 15,000 militants, it is not a mass movement, as was Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front. Sendero’s radical violence and exaggerated discipline are unacceptable to most people, and Guzman refuses to make the ideological compromises required for alliances with other leftist groups.

Without a larger “social base,” an insurrection to topple the government would be difficult to engineer, said historian Jaime Urrutia, who added, “I don’t believe they can seize power.” But Sendero will undermine Peru’s already precarious economy and institutions, he predicted, “and they could last 30 years.”

Whether Guzman himself will last that long is questionable. But even when he is gone, many observers say, Sendero could continue to live on his legend.