Ashaninka Indians: Caught in Deadly Cross-Fire in Peru : South America: The proud native nation has become a pawn in the battle between the army and Maoist rebels.

Rosa Chimanca timidly shows the scars on her head, back and right hand, which is missing a finger. “With a machete they have cut me,” she says in broken Spanish. Blood welled from her many wounds as she fell to the ground, she recalls. “They thought I was dead. Wrong--only fainted.”

While her life was spared, the attackers killed her husband, 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. Other relatives and friends also died in the massacre.

“They cut off heads, arms, everything. They killed them, and the children were screaming. There was much screaming. Grown-ups also were screaming,” says Chimanca, 21.

The terrorists of Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, slaughtered 16 people Aug. 18 in Tahuantinsuyo, Chimanca’s Ashaninka Indian village. The same day, they killed 44 non-native residents in seven nearby settlements, according to the official count of the Mazamari mayor’s office.

Mass slayings by the Maoist zealots are not unusual. In 1992, the anti-government Sendero killed at least 90 Ashaninkas and neighboring settlers, some in groups of 15 and more, according to news reports.

But the most recent carnage was one of the biggest massacres in Sendero’s long, bloody campaign for power. And although only about one-fourth of the 60 victims were Ashaninkas, the shocking episode has focused new attention on these beleaguered Indians in Peru’s rugged, isolated Central Forest.

The Indians probably have suffered no more than Peruvians in other areas or non-native settlers in the Ashaninka region. What makes the saga of the Ashaninkas vs. Sendero seem especially tragic is that the violent struggle has deeply disturbed a proud native nation that has endured centuries of culturally threatening intrusions only to find itself suddenly more vulnerable and threatened than ever.

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As war embroils the Ashaninkas, pressure by outside settlers is shrinking their hunting grounds and eroding their cultural identity, while increasing cocaine traffic threatens to bring more violence and corruption. It all seems darkly ominous, a threat to their once-innocent way of life and their majestic realm of forested Andean foothills, rushing rivers and remote valleys.

The guerrillas have forcibly inducted hundreds of Ashaninka men, youths and even children into their ranks. In fact, most of the assailants in the Aug. 18 massacre were said to be Indians.

Many Ashaninkas fight for Sendero against their will, according to Javier Aroca, a lawyer with a Peruvian Catholic lay group that works with Amazon Indians.

“If they don’t obey, Sendero threatens to kill their wives, their children, their parents,” Aroca said in Lima.

Aroca and others say Sendero holds dozens of Ashaninka communities hostage while the men join in Sendero operations. Women are said to be used as virtual slaves for cooking and other work. Most reports put the number of Ashaninkas in bondage at about 5,000; 6,500 more have taken refuge in provisional camps aided by the Red Cross and Aroca’s group.

The Ashaninkas are one of the largest forest Indian groups in South America, with a population estimated between 20,000 and 55,000.

The imprecision of the numbers reflects the Ashaninkas’ isolation from Peruvian society. They stubbornly cling to their native language and customs, wearing rough-woven robes and ceremonial face paint. In some ceremonies, they drink a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca.

Fried green caterpillars and snails are among their favorite foods. They also hunt forest rodents, small deer and the pig-like peccary with bows and arrows; they cultivate bananas, papaya, peanuts and manioc with primitive tools.

Franciscan missionaries came to Ashaninka territory early in the 1700s, evangelizing the Indians and opening the way for Spanish settlers. But in 1742, a fierce Indian uprising expelled the outsiders, and the Ashaninkas were mostly left alone until the late 1800s.

Since then, outside settlers have continued to encroach on Ashaninka lands. In the 1980s, the government built a highway into the Central Forest, increasing the flood of outsiders. Many recent settlers have been migrants fleeing war-ravaged areas in the Andean highlands.

In the middle 1980s, Sendero also began moving in. At first, the guerrillas used the Central Forest as a refuge next to the highland areas where their guerrilla campaign was concentrated.

Guerrilla cadres co-opted Ashaninka leaders with promises of help to overcome their people’s poverty and protect their lands against settlers. Sendero teachers indoctrinated Indian children and youths. The rebels organized many villages under “popular committees” that enforced strict rules for work and community life.

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Then, as Sendero lost ground in the highlands, it opened a war front in the Central Forest. The Peruvian army responded with indiscriminate repression, and Ashaninkas suffered human rights violations by both sides, according to human rights groups.

In 1991, the army launched a major counteroffensive in the Central Forest, and the Ashaninkas found themselves in the middle of intensified fighting. Some Indians fled populated river areas, seeking refuge in the vastness of more remote mountain forests. Others sought security in Sendero strongholds that covered more than 7,000 square miles, mainly along the Ene and Tambo rivers, where the army has been unable to penetrate.

During the past two years, many Ashaninka and settler communities have formed Self-Defense Committees, also called rondas , to defend against Sendero. The Indian rondas have about 4,000 members. The army has encouraged and sometimes obligated them to join, helping with training and issuing some groups a few shotguns.

Rondas have kept Sendero out of many communities, especially where backup is available from nearby army bases. And this year, they helped the army liberate some Sendero-controlled villages. According to official reports, army and ronda operations freed 150 Ashaninkas from three “popular committees” in late July and 145 from 12 Sendero-controlled communities in late September.

But some concerned observers fear that armed rondas are adding an explosive element to the violent confusion of the Central Forest. They say out-of-control rondas have committed their own bloody abuses against civilians and that others are infiltrated by Sendero.

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On Sept. 11, an Ashaninka ronda from the community of San Fernando de Maritari slaughtered 10 settlers in a nearby hamlet. Some of those arrested said they had been told by army personnel to kill the Senderistas, but relatives of victims denied any Sendero links. The confusion was typical.

“It is a tutti frutti-- you don’t know who’s doing what,” said Father Joaquin Ferrer, the Franciscan priest in Mazamari. “I hope I’m wrong, but this is going to explode.”

The formation of rondas is cited as a major cause of bloody reprisals by Sendero. In the Aug. 18 massacre in Rosa Chimanca’s village, the attackers demanded that residents identify the leaders of the local ronda.

“ ‘Tell who is the president of the ronda , who is the lieutenant, who is the secretary,’ they said,” Chimanca recalls. “ ‘If you don’t tell me, I will kill.’ ”

The terrorists did not find Carlos Quintimari, the ronda ‘s president, because he was outside the village with his family, tending their crops in a forest clearing. Quintimari, 33, says it was just after dark when he heard screaming from the village. When he got there, the terrorists were gone.

“The bodies were all around,” he says. “Wounded children were crying.”

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Quintimari and Chimanca talk about the massacre under a thatch roof in a makeshift camp where their community has taken refuge just outside Mazamari, several miles from their village. People hang around with nothing to do. Some women ask for cigarettes; some men drink cane liquor.

Villagers return to Tahuantinsuyo to harvest bananas and other crops only when the army agrees to send a patrol with them. Quintimari says they have asked officers at an army base in Satipo, 15 miles north, for shotguns to defend themselves so they can go back home to stay.

“They didn’t want to give,” he says. “They said we are going to give to the subversive. They don’t trust.”

Sendero is believed to have infiltrators in many towns and rondas , as well as in the army and other official entities.

But Quintimari says the Tahuantinsuyo ronda proved its loyalty by reporting to the army on the movements of Sendero columns near the village. And the government took Quintimari and nine others to Lima in July to show off in a parade of rondas from throughout Peru.

Of the 10 who marched, two survived the massacre, which Quintimari says probably was a reprisal for informing on Sendero and participating in the parade.

Armando Chimate, the village chieftain, also speaks bitterly about the army. He says the base at Satipo neglected the village area for months before the massacre. “Sendero was advancing because no one was patrolling,” Chimate says, complaining that the soldiers “sit in the plaza.”

Obviously, the Ashaninkas are caught up in a war in which neither side is much to their liking. “We don’t trust anyone, neither army or Sendero,” says Chimate, 28.

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Unfortunately, the war has turned Ashaninka territory into one of the most strategic areas in the country. It is centrally located, almost directly east across the snowcapped Andes from Lima, the capital--only about 120 miles as the crow flies. It is formidable redoubt for Sendero and a logistics nightmare for the army because of its difficult terrain and sparseness of roads.

Sendero uses it as a hideaway and staging area for attacks on important highland areas. It is also an increasingly important area for cocaine traffickers, who reportedly pay Sendero handsome sums for “protection.”

As army and ronda actions have reduced Sendero control in other areas in recent years, the Ene and Tambo valleys have emerged as main rebel enclaves. And since the capture last year of Sendero patriarch Abimael Guzman and other top leaders, analysts say this is a key area in rebel efforts to regain the initiative in the war.

The government is gearing up a counter-campaign in the region. President Alberto Fujimori says Ashaninkas will play an important role, and he has promised them more shotguns for their rondas .

“We are going to wage a war to eradicate Sendero and to liberate the Ashaninkas,” Fujimori vowed in a recent interview.

It appears inevitable, then, that the wooded hills of the Central Forest will ring with yet more wrenching violence. What seems far less clear is how much of the Ashaninka nation and native culture can make it through the continuing bloodshed and despair.