Imprisoned Peruvian Rebel Casts Shadow Over Revolution Birthplace : Shining Path: Violence-racked Andes town lives in terror of former professor Abimael Guzman and his death squad.

Despite his capture five months ago, guerrilla chieftain Abimael Guzman casts a dark shadow over this old Andean town where his Maoist revolution was born.

More than 12 years after the Shining Path began fighting to make Peru a communist utopia, Ayacucho lives in terror of Guzman and his followers.

“If you live in Ayacucho, it’s rare that you don’t know someone who has been killed,” said Juan Jose Flores, a psychology professor at the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga, where Guzman taught philosophy by day and planned his “people’s war” by night.

“Our lives are marked by fear. Our children routinely confront death. It’s in the air. You feel it closing in and you ask yourself, ‘When will my time come?’ ”

On a recent Sunday night, Guzman’s guerrillas blew down two power pylons on Ayacucho’s outskirts, then rocked the town and surrounding hills with 75 dynamite blasts. Two explosions destroyed a health clinic and a radio station that had ignored a rebel call for a 24-hour strike weeks before.

Six people slow to take cover were shot to death by Shining Path squads that raced through the darkened, deserted streets.

Using megaphones, the insurgents ordered a new strike on the following Thursday, this one in Guzman’s honor. They screamed warnings that they would hang the heads of all who disobeyed from the lampposts of the town plaza.

More than an hour passed before armored troop carriers from the heavily fortified army base on the edge of Ayacucho lumbered out into the streets. Guzman’s followers had slipped away.

On Thursday, every store, restaurant, office and school was locked tight.

Nelly Janapa, the white-haired owner of a crafts shop on a corner of Ayacucho’s arcaded, colonial-era plaza, looked around uneasily as she explained what awaits those who disobey the Shining Path.

“They are vengeful,” she said. “Afterward, they will attack us with bombs. They have destroyed our business.

“Tourists don’t come now,” Janapa said, nodding toward her dust-covered ceramic churches and white-stone carvings.

Most people in the town were relieved to hear of Guzman’s arrest in September in Lima, on the Pacific coast 230 miles to the northwest.

“After Guzman’s capture, the whole country, not just Ayacucho, felt optimistic for the first time,” said Juan Camborda, an economics professor at the university.

But hope for a quick end to the bloodshed evaporated quickly. In October, days after Guzman was sentenced to life in prison, his followers attacked two villages within 30 miles of Ayacucho that had formed anti-rebel militias. They slaughtered 58 peasants, including women and children.

Lt. Col. Carlos Romero, a counterinsurgency expert at the army base, said Guzman’s peasant-based rebellion is deeply rooted in the Ayacucho countryside, a hostile terrain of high mountains and lowland jungles ideal for guerrilla warfare.

He predicts that the violence will continue as long as the region languishes in poverty.

“Injustice; corrupt, abusive authorities--that has been the lot of campesinos in the Andes,” Romero said. “They have experienced centuries of oppression, first from the Incas, then from the Spanish, later from governments that ignored their problems.”

Scars left by Guzman’s rebellion are everywhere.

Mud-brick shanties built by war refugees climb the arid slopes above Ayacucho.

The refugees have swollen the town’s population from 70,000 to 200,000. Dozens of villages have become ghost towns as Quechua-speaking peasants abandon their ancestral lands to flee the violence of rebels and soldiers.

An orphanage on the edge of town is home to 167 war orphans. Hundreds more wander the streets, living off handouts.

Because of the war, Ayacucho is less able to support its original residents, let alone the refugees.

Before the Shining Path got a grip on the region, the town was a popular destination for tourists attracted to one of the most famous Easter Week festivals in the Andes.

“The hotels spilled over,” said Rosa Lopez Alarcon, the tourism director. “People had to sleep in the streets.”

One recent day, only 24 of the Hotel de Turistas’ 76 rooms were occupied. Most of the guests were visiting government officials or police commanders.

The xenophobic rebels have killed eight foreign tourists in the Ayacucho area in four years. The last American working here, a Jesuit priest who ran the Caritas food-aid program, left in 1989 after receiving threats.

In the last two years, rebels or soldiers have killed 1,250 people in the area.

“So many times, entire families have been murdered,” said Flores, the psychology professor. He told of a friend, a mathematics professor, who was slain one night along with his wife, their son and a nephew, both 16.

“I, like many men in Ayacucho, tell my wife, ‘Listen, woman, if they come for me, you stay out of it. If they kill me, you can care for our children. But if they kill both of us?’ ”

The university has become a blood-stained battlefield fought over by the rebels and paramilitary groups. Nine professors and at least 50 students have been killed.

Guzman, 58, known to his followers as President Gonzalo, founded the Shining Path in 1970 while at the university, where he taught for a dozen years. He left the school in the mid-1970s, went underground and began his rebellion in May, 1980.

Most professors are reluctant to talk about the rebel leader. One who dares is Pedro Villena Hidalgo, the university rector since 1989.

“I knew him,” he said, then added quickly, “but not well.

“He dominated the university. He controlled the dining hall, the dormitories. He had almost absolute power over the students.”

Revolutionary thinking has declined at the university, but Guzman’s influence remains strong in other ways, the rector said.

He pointed to a rolled-up sleeping bag under his couch. Shining Path guerrillas dynamited his house in December, 1989, and since then have fired on it twice with assault rifles. He finally sent his family to Lima and he moved into his office.

Threats continue. On strike day, his phone rang four times between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Villena did not answer.

Teachers and students in some departments remain loyal to Guzman’s ideas, Villena and other professors say.

“That is especially true in education, which is the Shining Path’s bastion and provides teachers for rural schools,” said Camborda, the economics professor. “Guzman was a professor of that faculty and many of its current professors were Guzman’s students.”

His followers have learned their lessons in terror well.

Early on strike day, 30 government health specialists sent to Ayacucho for a week to treat 6,000 impoverished patients checked out of their hotel and left for the airport after only four days in town.

“A woman came to the hospital yesterday at 4 p.m. and said we should leave now,” a frightened nurse confided to another hotel guest. “She said if we didn’t, we would be sorry.”

At the university, a student said:

“Our beloved President Gonzalo, the leader of world revolution, has shown us the light, the guideposts to follow.”