TERRORISM : Recent Attacks Raise Fears of Pre-Election Violence in Peru

A recent bombing rampage by the ragtag remains of a brutal Maoist insurgency is a signal that terrorist violence could increase in the coming months of campaigning for April presidential elections, analysts say.

The attacks by the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) could also shake President Alberto Fujimori’s plans for reelection, as he has focused his campaign on convincing voters of his successes in combatting the terrorist group.

Fujimori has repeatedly vowed to rid the country of terrorism by the end of his term in July.

Sendero Luminoso has traditionally disrupted elections, especially in the hinterlands. The group’s tactics include intimidating voters and assassinating candidates.

The group launched its war against the government during the May, 1980, presidential elections by burning ballot boxes in the small town of Chuschi, near the insurgency’s birthplace of Ayacucho in the southern Andes.

Since then, an estimated 30,000 Peruvians have died in terrorist violence.

In the worst blackout since 1992, Senderistas in early October blew up power poles, plunging Lima and much of the coast into darkness. Insurgents last week tossed makeshift bombs at several banks here.

The recent bombings also came at the same time that an amnesty period for repentant Maoist guerrillas expired Oct. 31. According to the army, about 6,000 rebels have turned themselves in since the law took effect in 1992.

“We will be inflexible until achieving total peace,” Fujimori said in a speech to military officials the day after the amnesty law expired. At the same ceremony, Defense Minister Victor Malca Villanueva warned Senderistas still at large that they now face the “laws of war.”

The amnesty was one of a series of counterinsurgency measures decreed by Fujimori after he closed the Congress and seized broad powers in a military-backed “self coup” in April, 1992. The law grants those who turn themselves in more lenient sentences and, in some cases, exemption from conviction.

Although the law has been called an effective anti-guerrilla strategy, critics say that many of those who turned themselves in are peasants who were forced to collaborate by Sendero Luminoso. And some repentant insurgents--in a bid for more lenient sentences--often provided authorities with false information that led to the arrests of innocent Peruvians.

Meanwhile, as Peru’s inefficient judiciary begins processing their paperwork, the innocent and guilty alike languish in Peruvian prisons.

Sendero Luminoso has been severely crippled by the September, 1992, capture of its leader and founder, Abimael Guzman. Today, Sendero Luminoso watchers say, the group is headed by Oscar Ramirez, formerly No. 3 in the movement’s leadership.

Guzman and several other leaders are serving life sentences in a Lima prison. Ramirez, known by his nom de guerre, Feliciano, heads Sendero Luminoso’s splinter faction Sendero Rojo (Red Path), blamed for the recent bombings.

With Guzman behind bars, Ramirez assumed control of Sendero Luminoso after he and hard-line members rejected Guzman’s peace overtures to the government. Earlier this year, the army announced it was on the verge of capturing Ramirez. But antipersonnel mines thwarted an army offensive, and Ramirez escaped.

Across Peru, attacks have dropped from around 4,000 in the 25 months before Guzman’s capture to about 2,000 in the 26 months since.

Despite the recent resurgence of Sendero Luminoso attacks, few believe that the rebel group or a similar insurgency could rise again. “People have been vaccinated against Sendero Luminoso,” said Enrique Obando, an analyst at Lima’s Peruvian Center for International Studies.

Beginning in the late 1980s, killings in Lima shantytowns of grass-roots leaders who refused to toe the Sendero Luminoso line and a spate of car bomb attacks in the capital alienated those the rebels tried to recruit.