Regional Outlook : Rebels Without a Cause in Americas : Latin guerrillas may go the way of the cavalry and Cold War spies as democracy spreads and Marxism fizzles on the continent.

Times are tough for the Latin American guerrilla, that romantic figure who made trouble for dictators, struggled for revolution and stirred the masses with demands for social justice.

Today, there aren’t many dictators left to pester, and Marxist-charged revolution has lost its fizz. Guerrilla war cries, it seems, no longer rouse the passions of bygone years, as when Fidel Castro’s bearded band marched down from the Sierra Maestra and sparked rebellion around the region.

Or when Che Guevara was a living legend, vowing to bring the Yankee-scorching flames of Vietnam to this hemisphere. Or when the Nicaraguan Sandinistas sent Gen. Anastasio Somoza packing to Miami.

In October, 1967, they tracked down and killed Guevara as he tried to start a guerrilla movement in Bolivia’s back lands, the heart of South America. A quarter of a century later, in October, 1992, they convicted Abimael Guzman, patriarch of Peru’s brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, and sentenced him to life in prison.

Guevara’s demise came near the beginning of a great cycle of Latin American guerrilla warfare. Although the cycle has not fully closed, Guzman’s fall certainly comes at a time when guerrillas are faltering and failing throughout this huge region.

Are Latin American guerrillas going the way of cavalry, cowboys and Cold War spies? Maybe not yet, but everywhere you look, armed rebels are biting the dust, riding off into the sunset or coming in from the cold.

The failures of Cuban Communists, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, the Soviets and other Marxists in power have seriously undermined arguments for guerrilla action in Latin America. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba’s Communist government supplied both inspiration and aid to many guerrilla movements. The Soviet Union, in turn, pumped billions of dollars into Cuba, where the socialist economy never prospered on its own.

Castro blames a U.S. economic embargo for his economic troubles, but it has become increasingly clear even to Latin American leftists that revolution is not a panacea for underdevelopment. And the collapse of the Soviet Union has further undermined Marxism as a source of guerrilla inspiration.

Since the triumph of Castro’s 26th of July Movement in 1959, the only other leftist guerrilla group to take power in Latin America has been the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas led a popular insurrection against Gen. Somoza that triumphed in July, 1979.

They ruled for another decade and fought the U.S.-backed Contras, or counter-revolutionaries. Anti-U.S. sentiment helped keep the Sandinistas unified all that time. But Nicaraguans, tired of war, voted Violeta Barrios de Chamorro into the presidency in 1989, and the revolutionary Sandinistas left power peacefully.

Other famous guerrilla movements have dwindled and disappeared without ever tasting success. In some cases, brutal repression by military governments hastened their defeat. Urban guerrilla organizations in Brazil, and Uruguay’s bold Tupamaros, made world headlines with spectacular kidnapings and other operations in the early 1970s. They succumbed by the end of that decade to harsh anti-subversive campaigns that included systematic torture and summary executions.

The People’s Revolutionary Army and the Montoneros of Argentina lost in a “dirty war” that included terrorist bombings and assassinations by the guerrillas, torture and disappearances by the military government. From 1976 to the early 1980s, when the guerrilla action ended, more than 9,000 detained people disappeared.

In Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador and Bolivia, guerrilla bands have cropped up from time to time since the early 1960s but have never really taken root. The Bolivian case is typical.

Ernesto (Che) Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary who fought beside Castro in the Sierra Maestra, tried to repeat the successful Cuban experience in the lowland hills of Bolivia starting in November, 1966. His small band, failing to win recruits or support among Bolivian peasants, was hunted down by the Bolivian army and U.S. advisers. They executed Guevara on Oct. 9, 1967.

In 1970, another short-lived guerrilla movement ended under siege with the deaths of all but a few of its members. The dead included Nestor Paz Zamora, brother of Jaime Paz Zamora, Bolivia’s current president.

The government of President Paz Zamora, elected in 1989, has announced the capture of two guerrilla leaders in the last three months--Johnny Justino Peralta of the Zarate Willka group in July, and Felipe Quispe of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army in August. Those groups, which never posed a serious insurrectional threat, now appear to be verging on extinction.

In other Latin American countries, guerrillas have had much greater impact, but any chances they may have had for armed victory appear to be growing dimmer.

Peru

Abimael Guzman, a philosophy professor in the highland city of Ayacucho, turned his Maoist party into an anti-government guerrilla group in 1980. Since then, violence by both sides has killed more than 25,000 people.

Sendero Luminoso has spread out from Ayacucho through the Andean provinces, growing into a force estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 armed fighters. Guzman’s leadership was intelligent and charismatic, and party discipline was strong, based on a rigid ideology and a ruthless strategy.

But the Sendero’s bloody fanaticism prevented it from winning the hearts and minds of most peasants. “It was growth in breadth but never in depth,” said Carlos Reyna, a researcher with a private think tank who specializes in political violence.

Lacking broad popular appeal in the countryside, Reyna said, Sendero began concentrating on terrorist action in Lima, the capital. The Lima campaign culminated in July with a series of car-bombings that killed scores of people.

Peruvians panicked. “The idea of people moving around at night exploding bombs, and an ineffectual police force--it’s extremely terrifying,” Reyna said. To many, it seemed as if Sendero was about to seize power. But with the capture of Guzman, 57, the image of Sendero now is not nearly so menacing. And in terrorism, the image is paramount, according to Reyna.

“What the capture does is completely, definitively destroy the possibility of a Sendero victory,” he said.

Enrique Obando, a military analyst with another private Peruvian think tank, agreed. “Sendero is going to go downhill,” he said. “I think it can be defeated in four to five years.”

An officer in the anti-terrorist police force that captured Guzman said two women arrested with him were members of Sendero’s “permanent committee,” or national policy-making group. The only member of the committee still at large is Oscar Ramirez Durand, the officer said.

The police still are going through computer files seized in Guzman’s safehouse. The officer said the files contain Sendero strategy, plans and directives, as well as 20 to 30 names of Sendero members. More than a month after Guzman’s capture, police arrested Marta Huatay, the head of a guerrilla auxiliary organization that the officer said was expected to take charge of Sendero’s actions in Lima.

While Sendero’s military structure remains mostly intact in the provinces, analysts say its national organization is severely wounded. Some expect remaining leaders to begin fighting among themselves over power and policy, and without Guzman to settle disputes, the in-fighting could be divisive.

But some other analysts caution that Sendero still has strong discipline and organization, as well as multimillion-dollar financing from war taxes on Peru’s cocaine traffic. And a lesser Peruvian guerrilla organization, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, also remains active.

The bottom line: No one is predicting a rapid end to guerrilla warfare in this beleaguered and impoverished country. But there seems to be little doubt that the heyday of the Shining Path has passed.

Colombia

Two guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) remain active in Colombia.

The April 19th Movement (M19), notorious for its seizure of hostages at a 1980 embassy party in Bogota and its takeover of the national judicial headquarters five years later, made peace with the government in 1990. Although the National People’s Army (EPL) last year followed the lead of the M19, a dissident faction of fewer than 200 men continues activities, mostly kidnapings and extortion.

FARC, the country’s oldest and largest rebel force with an estimated 6,000 combatants, was formed in 1966. The pro-Castro ELN established its first guerrilla front in 1964 with support from Cuba and now has an estimated 2,000 armed members.

Experts who have studied the Colombian groups say that like Peru’s Sendero, they have been able to survive the collapse of Soviet communism by learning to finance themselves instead of depending on foreign aid from Cuba and elsewhere.

For both ELN and FARC, kidnaping officials and wealthy ranchers for ransom is a paramount source of funds, officials say. “When they first began kidnaping people in the 1960s, they made sure the victim had some political significance,” Jorge Melo, the government’s human rights counselor, said in an interview. “Now the guerrillas are targeting anyone whose family has the money to pay.”

Last year’s 1,580 reported abductions in Colombia made it the country with the highest rate of kidnaping in the world. Of the total, FARC carried out at least 370 kidnapings and ELN 240, according to army documents.

Bogota’s Semana magazine reported recently that the army, based on evidence obtained from informants and captured guerrilla files, estimates that FARC and ELN made a combined total of more than $200 million in 1991 from kidnapings, extortion, drug “taxes,” holdups and other activities.

Analysts agree that the guerrilla’s financial clout makes them harder to deal with at the peace table. The government and the guerrillas broke off peace talks last April because of disagreements over the size of the areas where guerrillas would have concentrated to begin the process of demobilization. Since then, combat has been heavy. On Oct. 16, 36 guerrillas and four soldiers were killed in battles around the country.

Still, some officials maintain that there is a chance to reach peace with the guerrillas before national elections in 1993. They argue that older guerrilla leaders such as Manuel Marulanda (FARC) and Manuel Perez (ELN) have seen their political ideology suffer blow after blow. The groups no longer have much influence on Colombian unions and other popular movements, experts say, and their leaders understood a long time ago that the revolution is far from any possible triumph in Colombia.

Faced with such prospects, national guerrilla leaders may decide that the only choice is to enter into the country’s political system by forming a new party, like the M19. “If they don’t take advantage of the opportunity in 1993, they know they will have to wait until 1997, and that by then, their organizations may have deteriorated into mere bands of common criminals” said Melo.

Chile

Police have doggedly pursued Chile’s urban guerrillas since civilian President Patricio Aylwin took office in March, 1990. More than 250 members of the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front and Mapu-Lautaro have been arrested. Among prominent guerrilla leaders in jail is Ramon Escobar, Mapu-Lautaro’s chief of military operations, who was captured in July.

“The fight against terrorism, which the government has carried out together with the police, has been successful, and it has been demonstrated perfectly well that terrorism can be defeated in democracy,” Government Minister Enrique Correa said recently. Interior Minister Enrique Krause said that terrorism in Chile “is practiced by tiny groups in the process of extinction.”

The two Marxist groups sprouted in the 1980s to fight President Augusto Pinochet’s military regime but have lost the support of most leftists under Aylwin’s coalition government, which includes the Socialist Party.

Part of the Manuel Rodriguez Front has given up the armed struggle to participate in legal politics. Other former guerrillas are reported to have left political action behind and taken up criminal activities such as robbing banks. In September, police reported that they had dismantled a splinter group of the Manuel Rodriguez Front called Popular Army of National Liberation.

Guatemala

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) was formed in the mid-1960s of various small, peasant-based rebel groups. They were largely composed of and led by unsophisticated rural people with little support in the cities and with little contact with unions and university intellectuals.

As a result, the Guatemalan guerrillas never had a major impact on national life. They stayed mostly in the mountains and were limited to raids against roads, plantations and isolated military posts.

Still, their hit-and-run tactics kept the military at bay for a decade, but beginning in the late 1970s the military began a brutal campaign that climaxed with the slaughter of tens of thousands of peasants between 1981 and 1983. The army’s drive didn’t so much as kill the guerrillas as destroy any support they had among the Indians and peasants in rural areas.

The guerrillas, who never numbered more than 4,000 to 5,000, began to fall apart as they lost all logistic support of the peasantry. As it now stands, the URNG is little more than isolated bands of bandits, staging occasional raids against bridges and small town police posts. Government officials estimate the guerrilla strength at 1,500 to 1,800, but high army sources say the real figure is about 800.

There have been intermittent peace talks between guerrilla and government representatives, but the discussions have not made much progress. Intelligence sources and members of the political opposition say the army is not eager for an agreement because the military and its right-wing civilian allies need at least the imagined threat of a revolutionary group to justify its budget.

El Salvador

After a coup in 1979, the Salvadoran left participated in military-civilian junta. But right-wingers squeezed out the leftists. At that point, the country’s radical left was still primarily an urban, underground movement, but it quickly spread into the countryside. Paramilitary death squads and military massacres in the early 1980s killed hundreds of people each month.

Guerrillas launched their “final offensive” in January, 1981, which of course, was not final. After that they focused on developing the rural, guerrilla army, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front that fought for another 10 years.

The United States spent about $4 billion in military and economic aid to support Salvadoran governments against the guerrillas. The U.S. aid may have prevented a guerrilla victory, but the war ended in a stalemate.

The war had worn people down, and the public wanted peace and blamed the guerrillas as much as the government for the continued fighting. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc forced the guerrillas to rethink their politics and sources of support.

The electoral defeat of the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua in February, 1989, was another big blow, and Cuba no longer was in economic shape to help.

Since 1989, the Salvadoran guerrillas have gradually abandoned their former Marxist ideology. Leader Joaquin Villalobos now says the FMLN is “closest to” Social Democratic parties.

A peace agreement signed last January included electoral, judicial and military reforms--although it remains to be seen whether they will be completed. About 8,000 guerrillas gathered in cease-fire zones, but perhaps only about half were really armed, experienced fighters.

They are now looking toward elections and talking about running a leftist candidate in the first round of voting, then possibly forming a center-left coalition with Christian Democrats for the second round.

Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in Mexico City and Ken Freed in Miami and special correspondent Stan Yarbro in Bogota contributed to this report.

Whither the Guerrillas?

ARGENTINA--The People’s Revolutionary Army and the Montoneros lost in a “dirty war” in 1980s.

BOLIVIA--Best-known guerrilla was Ernesto (Che) Guevara, executed in 1967. Two current groups, Zarate Willka and the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, have never posed a serious threat.

BRAZIL--Urban guerrilla groups succumbed in 1970s to harsh anti-subversive campaigns.

CHILE--Police have arrested scores in Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front and in Mapu-Lautaro.

COLOMBIA--Two main groups are active: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), about 6,000 fighters, and National Liberation Army (ELN).

EL SALVADOR--Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which fought against U.S.-backed government, signed peace pact in January.

GUATEMALA--Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) consists of little more than isolated bands.

NICARAGUA--Sandinista National Liberation Front took power in 1979, fought U.S.-backed Contras for a decade and then was voted out of office in 1989.

PERU--Top leader of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), Abimael Guzman, was caught this month. Future of Maoist force, estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 fighters, is uncertain.

URUGUAY--Tupamaros succumbed in 1970s to anti-subversive campaigns.