Influence of Shining Path Guerrillas Fades in Peru : Terrorism: Leader’s capture and other setbacks have taken a toll. But some observers warn that a resurgence is possible.

Warring bands of guerrillas turned the mountains around Churin into a “red zone,” imposing their authority over peasant villages, terrorizing and slaughtering people who stood in their way. Many villages emptied as frightened residents fled. And all but a trickle of tourists stopped coming to take Churin’s famous mineral waters.

Like much of Peru, this area 120 miles north of Lima was seething and suffering under the violent onslaught of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path. But the tourist trade is picking up this year in the town’s two dozen hotels, which were nearly full for Holy Week. The outlying countryside is peaceful: The army is patrolling where Sendero guerrillas once dominated.

“It appears that they have left the zone,” said Father Wilfredo Woitschek, a German priest in charge of the area’s Roman Catholic parish. “There is practically no more Sendero presence.”

The dramatic decline of Sendero in Woitschek’s parish is a symptom of the radical Maoist movement’s worst crisis since it began waging war 13 years ago. Only now is it becoming clear how badly Sendero has been hurt by the capture last September of its patriarch and leader, Abimael Guzman, and by other serious setbacks.

Its attacks have become less deadly, its organization notably weaker and less widespread. Some Sendero-watchers say the movement is in sharp decline.

Others, however, warn that Sendero Luminoso is showing signs of at least partial recovery nine months after the fall of Guzman. And some analysts say Sendero’s crippled hierarchy is reorganizing.

“The central point is that Sendero has the capacity to recuperate,” observed David Montoya, a Lima-based political analyst.

The most ferocious rebel movement in Latin America, Sendero Luminoso relentlessly spread through the Andean hinterlands of Peru in the 1980s. By decade’s end, the guerrillas were closing in on Lima with the strategic goal of throwing the capital into chaos with a popular insurrection.

By July of last year, Sendero posed an unprecedented threat in Lima. Although few people feared that a final rebel victory was near, terrorist bombings and killings sparked a frenzy of insecurity.

It was much the same in Churin. Although the town itself was never hit, Sendero action raged to the north, east and west.

As in other parts of Peru, the guerrillas used mass executions to subdue some mountain communities outside Churin. They massacred six local leaders in the town of Andajes in April, 1988, then executed five more people there in March, 1991. Two months later, the guerrillas massacred five people in Caujul, a few mountains away.

The army opened bases at towns northeast and southwest of Churin and began patrolling the area in 1991. In January, 1992, Sendero killed a captain and 13 soldiers in an ambush on the dirt road coming into Churin from the Pacific coast.

After the ambush, the hotel business here went from bad to worse, said Roberto Contreras, 30, manager of the Hotel Internacional.

But since then, he said, the guerrillas have left the area and business has improved. “People who hadn’t come for years are returning,” he said.

Lucio Quinteros, in charge of maintenance at Hotel Internacional, left his job as a ranch manager in the high country above Churin after Sendero invaded the rural area. “It was left nearly empty,” said Quinteros, 50. “But now people are returning.”

Woitschek, 48, makes his parish rounds among 40 towns and villages. He said the area is now peaceful, partly because of army patrols. In addition, the army has helped organize “civilian defense committees,” known as rondas , to guard against guerrilla incursions.

The rondas in this area had only clubs and hoes as weapons until a few weeks ago, Woitschek said. Then, as part of a national program for arming defense committees, the commander of the Peruvian army helicoptered into the area to hand out more than 100 shotguns.

The army also has won support with a civic action program that includes handing out food and repairing roads. Meanwhile, the peasant population has increasingly rejected Sendero’s violent ways, Woitschek said.

Carlos Tapia, a prominent Sendero-watcher and head of a foundation that works with Peruvians displaced by war, said Sendero’s situation is critical throughout the country. Army-sponsored rondas have replaced Sendero “popular committees” in widespread Andean areas once dominated by the guerrillas, Tapia said. He estimated that 2,800 rondas have been formed with a total of 250,000 participants.

What Tapia called Sendero’s “organizational defeat” began in 1990, when anti-terrorist intelligence agents began a concentrated hunt for Guzman. In June, 1990, agents dismantled Sendero support groups that provided communication links, safehouses, vehicles and other vital services to the guerrilla organization. In later strikes, agents broke up its popular support network, its medical and propaganda departments and its logistic and economic apparatus.

Since July, 1990, Tapia said, Sendero has lost about 80 national officers and more than 100 regional ones. And since the beginning of 1992, about 1,500 Sendero militants and sympathizers have been arrested, he said.

Police Col. Benedicto Jimenez also describes a critically wounded Sendero. “It can now be seen that there is a frank decline in Sendero,” said Jimenez, commander of the top intelligence group in the anti-terrorist police unit that tracked down and captured Guzman.

Jimenez said Sendero’s top echelons, the central committee and the politburo, no longer function. The highest leader still at large is Oscar Alberto Ramirez Duran, or “Feliciano.” But Feliciano, lacking security in Lima, is hiding in the provinces and is unable to run the national organization, he said.

But some Sendero-watchers are careful to emphasize that the organization remains large and apparently determined to recover.

A foreign diplomat observed that since Guzman’s capture, Sendero has opened a new combat front in the northern region of Piura, on the Ecuadorean border. The diplomat said that although Sendero’s national leadership and coordination have obviously been devastated, “its military structure has not been hurt too badly, especially in the countryside.”

Pablo Rojas, director of a human rights organization that monitors the war, said a nationwide “armed strike” called recently by Sendero was less than successful in Lima. But it did shut down commerce and transportation for three days in some provincial towns and cities.

He said Sendero has shown a new and startling capacity to recruit commandos in the impoverished outskirts of Lima during the past two years.

Sendero is leading squatters forming new shantytowns in strategic places near military installations and highways, he added.

Political analyst Montoya said Sendero also is steadily infiltrating youth, cultural and civic groups in the slums. He said the army’s sweeps through shantytowns, aimed at rounding up suspected Senderistas, net few commandos because the guerrillas usually do not live where they work.

Montoya said Sendero continues to recruit new commandos and to rebuild its leadership hierarchy. The new guerrillas are inexperienced and unable to carry out a big, effective campaign of terror as they did last year in Lima. But “Sendero is building up its strength for when it can realize that kind of action,” he said.