Attacks Show Rebels in Peru Are Still Effective : Terrorism: Recovering from the capture of its leader, Sendero Luminoso seeks to disrupt today’s municipal elections.

Shooting candidates and setting off bombs, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas have carried out a bloody campaign aimed at disrupting municipal elections today and showing that the Maoist group is still fearsomely effective.

A powerful car bomb exploded Thursday outside the Peruvian headquarters of IBM, injuring several people, and terrorists assassinated a candidate for mayor of the important Lima district of Villa El Salvador. A dozen other mayoral candidates have been killed since late December.

The terrorist offensive reinforces the view of analysts who say that the guerrilla group, whose name means the Shining Path, has recovered much of its strike capacity since police captured its mastermind Abimael Guzman and other leaders in September.

Enrique Obando, chief researcher with the private Peruvian Center for International Studies, said guerrilla action undoubtedly will prevent elections today in some provincial districts, as it has in previous years.

“But their capacity today to stop elections is much less than it was two years ago,” Obando added.

Despite the loss of Guzman and other leaders, who have been sentenced to life in prison, Sendero’s guerrilla cell structure has not broken down, according to Obando.

“Sendero has lost its head, but it has kept its body almost intact,” he said.

Newly installed top leaders are still apparently having trouble coordinating logistics and finances, he said, but recent bombings, assassinations and other attacks have dimmed hopes that Sendero will peter out without Guzman.

The municipal elections provide easy targets for high-impact terrorist action around the country. With thousands of candidates running for mayor and council positions, it is impossible for authorities to give all of them protection.

Humberto Pantigoso had none when he and his wife were killed by hooded gunmen Thursday at their house in the shantytown suburb of Villa El Salvador. Pantigoso, 36, the father of 11 children, was the second mayoral candidate assassinated in the suburb during the campaign.

Several candidates for city council in other districts have also been killed. Victor Sincho, a council candidate in the Lima district of Chorrillos, was killed by a terrorist bomb blast at his home early Thursday.

Since the campaign for today’s elections began, at least 100 candidates have resigned in fear, according to press reports. And while Sendero assassinations played on the nation’s nerves, bombings added to the tension.

In the car bombing Thursday in front of the IBM building in Lima’s upscale La Molina suburb, at least four people were injured, according to police.

The blast damaged the building and nearby homes.

Last week, a car bomb at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Lima killed two people and injured four others.

Other terrorist bomb targets have included foreign embassies and offices of Change 90-New Majority, President Alberto Fujimori’s political coalition.

On Wednesday, a bomb damaged the school where Fujimori is to vote today.

In a further attempt to disrupt the elections, Sendero called an “armed strike” for Thursday and today, with the goal of shutting down transportation and commerce.

Terrorists burned several buses Wednesday as a warning.

Fujimori declared Thursday a “non-working day,” defusing the impact of the strike. Most stores were closed and traffic was thin.

The elections are not seen as a test of Fujimori’s popularity. His coalition has almost no national structure and has presented few candidates around the country.

The municipal elections originally were scheduled for last year, but Fujimori postponed them after he dissolved Congress in a military-backed “self-coup” April 5. Under pressure from the United States and other countries, Fujimori held congressional elections in November.

The country’s main parties boycotted those elections, leaving Fujimori supporters to win a majority in the new, single-chamber Congress.