Lights Out for Shining Path?

The government of Peru, battered by recession and besieged by political turmoil, scored a major victory with the arrest of Abimael Guzman, the shadowy leader of Latin America’s toughest and most persistent rebel group, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). But it’s only a psychological win, and the impact could easily be lost--even reversed--if President Alberto Fujimori uses it to justify continued rule by the military.

Guzman, a former college professor, organized his ultra-Marxist, ultra-violent group in 1970, in the Andean highlands, playing on the class and ethnic resentment of the many impoverished Indians there. He had been underground since 1980, when Sendero Luminoso began its campaign of assassinations and bombings. Since then more than 25,000 have died in a bloody campaign that has been likened to the “killing fields” strategy of Cambodia’s evil Pol Pot.

Guzman’s ability to avoid arrest for 12 years added to his stature. When Fujimori abolished Peru’s Congress this year and began ruling by decree, with military support, he justified his action by claiming that only a severe crackdown could defeat Sendero Luminoso. No doubt that policy helped in the capture of the rebel chieftain. But even with Guzman in custody, it must be noted that for the last dozen years Sendero Luminoso’s recruiting problems not just in poor rural villages but in Lima’s awful slums have been very slight indeed. And the resentment Guzman so thoroughly exploited has, if anything, exacerbated as Peru’s economic troubles, not to mention the harshly repressive methods of government security forces, have grown.

It is in this atmosphere that Fujimori must now handle Latin America’s fiercest, least democratic leader (Guzman considers even Fidel Castro a wimp) in an open and careful manner, providing the leftist terrorist kingpin with all the legal protections Guzman himself denied Sendero Luminoso’s victims. To do otherwise would be to risk making Guzman a martyr.