Shining Path Brightens in Lima’s Slums : Peru: The coup’s effects will fall hardest on the urban poor, who won’t find much relief in the legitimate opposition.

The coup in Peru has been eloquently denounced by Peruvians and Latin Americans of all political stripes, and rightly so. There is no justification for dissolving Congress, abrogating the constitution and suspending individual rights, whatever difficulties the government of Alberto Fujimori may be encountering in its various endeavors. But beyond the question of principle, there are two additional reasons for bemoaning the interruption of democratic rule in Peru. They have to do with the strategy of Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), the ostensible adversary invoked for the necessity of the coup, and the effects of unrestrained free-market mechanisms on the shantytown population of Lima.

Shining Path has many peculiar features distinguishing it from traditional Latin American guerrilla movements. One of them is its dependability: It tends to do most of what it says, and, more remarkably, to say most of what it intends to do.

For some time now, at least since 1988 and the notorious interview that leader Abimael Guzman gave to El Diario--it consumed 90 pages in the newspaper, the movement’s unofficial organ--Shining Path has been frank about its strategy: Since it could not expect to gain power under existing political conditions in Peru, it was bent on creating such a chaotic situation that a military takeover would become inevitable. This evidently was foremost in Guzman’s mind when Fujimori, a scientist and political unknown, was elected in 1990; the disorder that could be expected, with his lack of experience, party machinery or constituency, would eventually lead to a crisis. That in turn would precipitate a coup, and, because it is armed and organized, Shining Path would become the dominant force in the opposition and in the anti-military coalition that would have to be constructed.

For several years now, Marxists, socialists, intellectuals and Communists in Peru have labored to separate Shining Path from the opposition, to distance themselves from its methods, ideology and goals. These efforts have not all been successful, but in general, the Peruvian left has refrained from extending the smallest corner of its mantle of legitimacy to Shining Path. The coup will make this much more difficult, if not impossible. If both oppose the coup, what separates them? The left either fights the coup, becoming what Marxists call “objective allies” of Shining Path, or caves in and supports it, becoming allies of Fujimori and the military. It is the devil’s own alternative.

The coup will also in all likelihood drive to despair--and into the arms of Shining Path--many of the social movements that have made Peru, and particularly Lima, a greenhouse for Christian base communities, municipal self-management by squatters associations, women’s self-help groups, student and worker mobilization and social activists of all types. The grass-roots left in many of Lima’s sprawling, apocalyptic shantytowns has been a source of resistance, perhaps the only one, to Shining Path’s recruitment of an urban constituency. It may well cease to be so as the urban poor feel the heavy hand of a state without democratic guarantees and an economy in chaos. If Shining Path had planned the coup, it could not have turned out as well.

Peru’s Congress, judiciary, unions, parties and opposition in general were no paragons of virtue, democracy or ideological steadfastness. But they represented an institutional constraint on unfettered application of the Draconian free-market economic and social policies that Fujimori has sought to implement. This constraint was not enormously effective; living standards in Peru have continued to drop since Fujimori took office, and the “Fujishock” has spared hardly anyone. But the absence of institutional restraint will certainly enhance the temptation to take these measures to their extreme.

Throughout the Hemisphere, the economic crisis of the 1980s and the remedies applied thereafter have hit the urban poor hardest. In Venezuela, food riots in 1989 and sympathy for the military in 1992; in Brazil, urban delinquency on an unimaginable scale; in Mexico, the eruption of a street-peddler economy--all of these are the desperate cries of the new majority in Latin America: the urban, excluded poor.

For all practical intents, Shining Path is the first guerrilla military organization in the Hemisphere to acquire a mass base among the urban poor on a relevant scale. Many have tried; the only others that succeeded to some degree were the Sandinista Front in 1979, just before their overthrow of Somoza, and the Popular Liberation forces in El Salvador. Partly through coercion, partly as a result of a mass migration from the Ayacucho highlands to Lima over the past 15 years; partly because of the immense misery and lacerating marginalization of the teeming millions of cholos in Lima’s shantytowns, Shining Path has built a constituency of the urban destitute.

The unconstrained intensification of free-market policies will only drive more people into its death grip: It is one thing to impose that type of transformation on a defeated, demoralized opposition, as in Chile after the 1973 coup; it is quite another to attempt it against an armed, self-sustaining, financially independent and extraordinarily disciplined one like Shining Path. In the long term, the unfettered application of those policies might have transformed Peru for the better; thanks to Shining Path and Fujimori’s reckless gamble, there may not be a long term.