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of tequila, who had rss their chests and their direction. Now

ed at the entrance to rriachis arrive, roared ons along the musi- Iined up facing Juan heir instruments’, and rrt-torn sound of the out how hard it is to g guys sitting acrots lmpanionably to the Behind me, the last

rng a lilting buapango )r chatter. He segued h long medleys, the a trill or two. Then

. Juan Cabriel, alone ;roductory chords of cognizing these, the d return, but out of what is perhaps the

the unbending pride :k, you should have rd there, his Iisteners en rubbed into their vith you, I’ll survive, wo big guys looked eep.

“How diJfcult it is to be God.”

A rouo*o.tsr r KNo\(/ in Ayacucho, where the ultra-Maoist revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining path, got its start, tells a story about the guerrillas that he heard from a Jriend of his, a local military officer. The offfcer had captured three members of the Communist parfy of peru, which is the official name of Sendero, and proceeded to torture them in what is, in this country, routine fashion. Eventually, one of the three cap_ tives died. As a second captive seemed to be struggling for his Iife, the third intervened. ,,1 will cooperate,,, he ,.id. ,,B.rt if you let my compafrero live he will let the word out that I talked, and I’ll be a dead man. Kill him ffrst, and then l,ll talk.,, The officer accepted the deal and murdered the second man, but at that point the prisoner who had promised to talk in exchange for the killing began insulting his captors more fiercely than wer, kick_ ing out at them and provoking even worse treatment. The officer, astonished, reminded him that he had promised to cooperate. ,,l,ll never talk,” the man said. “l’m a member of the communist party of Peru. The other man was just a collaborator, and I saw he *us beginning to crack and would have put our compafreros in dan- ger. Now he won’t talk, and you can kill me.,,

In its harshness, horror, and unyielding fanaticism in the face of brutality, this possibly apocryphal story reflects perfectly what

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260 Tbe HeartThat Bleeds

Peruvians know about the organization that has terrorized their country for the last thirteen years. During that time, the fun- damentalist revolutionaries of Sendero Luminoso have been engaged in a steadily intensifying effort to demoralize and under- mine the Peruvian state, and make it ripe for a violent takeover. Peru, with a population of twenty-three r,nillion, has a standing Army of a hundred and thirty thousand, generous estimates put Sendero’s total of full-time militants at six thousand. Defense and secririty take up forty per cent of the national budget; Sendero attacks with shotguns, revolvers, and even knives. There have been twenty-five thousand or so deaths-mostly civilians-in the viblent struggle between the Army and Sendero; of these, Sendero has been responsible for nearly half. The group operates throughout the country, and has forced the military to stretch itself past any reasonable limit just to patrol-ineffectually- areas challenged or dominated by Sendero, The Army is con- stantly in a reactive, defensive mode, while Sendero has never once been obliged to engage in combat. Instead, it has bombed police headquarters and municipal offices, gas stations and middle-class apartment buildings, think tanks and public schools. It has paralyzed the country with so-called armed strikes, and set fire to bus drivers who defted its orders to stay home on strike days..lt has murdered peasant families and leftist leaders. Most often, the victims are killed in full view of their family or commu- nity. Sometimes they are hanged and sometimes shot, but often an execution-squad member-in many cases a woman-delivers the coup de grice with a knife. Sometimes the tail of a live cat will be set on ffre and then the animal will be let loose’in a fteld of corn ready for picking. Sometimes a man who has just ftnished casting a mandatory vote in a national election will have the fin- ger with the telltale electoral ink hacked off.

Despite its omnipresence, Sendero has until recently re- mained almost entirely opaque in the public mind, and the jour- nalists story about the three captured guerrillas illustrates part of the reason. Besides, for years the war tobk place in the most inaccessible villages of the Andes, and thus had little or no im-

pact in the cities; this was particularly true of Lima, where a quar- ter of the countrys population lives. Beginning in 19g9, however, Sendero moved the war to the capital, first consolidating its holj on the shantytowns and then, Iast year, announcing its presence among the middle class with a series of spectacular car bombings. Still, the organization remained magicaily elusive.

This perception changed dramaticaliy last September l2th. At 8,30 p.m., members of th.e Direcci6n Nacional Contra el Ter_ rorismo, or Dincote, an independent branch of the national po- Iice, arrested Carlos Abimael Guzmdn, the fffty-sev.n_r…_’old Fourth Sword of Marxism and the chairman

“f-,fr. C”__”_riParty of Peru. Cuzmdn is not only the leader and strategiit of Sendero. In his incarnation as presidente Conzalo, u, hJ i, now known, he is its godhead, its creator, patriarch, and single source of inspiration. It is he who moves his followers to sJf- immolation, and he who authorizes the car bombs and the muti_ lating punishments. He is the sole proponent of something called Conzalo Thought, which initiates see as a d,azzling int.-ll.ctJ construct by means of which the wisdom of Mao is adapted to conditions in Peru, and Marxist theory as a whole is further ad_ vanced. There are songs to Gonzalo, and poems.,$/hen he is depicted in murals or in easel paintings, he is shown wearing glasses, as befits a scholar, and rising o,.rt of the mountains o”r shining from the sky like the sun. Hi, upp…nt invulnerability was-central to his mystique; between the day in l9g0 when a small group of university students descended on a voting station in an isolated Andean village and set fire to the ballot boxes, thus beginning senderoi military operations,

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all Lima appeared to be under siege by a force that blew up entire city blocks in fashionable neighborhoods, none of ni, fotto*e* had been persuaded to reveal his whereabouts, On_september 12th, though, he was arrested swiftry and with a minimum of fussin a quiet Lima neighborhood, on the second floor of a house whose ftrst floor functioned as a modern_dance studio. In the days following that arrest, transfixed television viewers feasted on images of the man who in his writings fulminated against ,,re-

LIMA, I993 261

LtMA. 1993 263 TheHeartTbatBleeds262

actionaries who unleash their bloody claws upon the people and

,t..1 ,tt.t, flesh,” who claimed to speak with the people’s “voice

of angry thunde/’-tntltt”tgt of Peru’ the exterminating angel’

There is Guzm6n on tht Ltttn at the moment of his deten-

,,o”-o*f On, bearded, riddled with p-soriasis-in 3 tape that was

not intended for public .onru*ptio.’ but got leaked anyhow’ Sit-

tin’g next to his companion’ Eltn” Iparraguirre’ in the book-lined

stpdy where he was “t”‘ttd’ he addresses his captor’ General

Antonio Ketin Vidal, tttt tt tht htud of Dintote’ “You can kill a

;;;;t;;;.un’t tiil tt’i’,’he declares emphaticallv’ tapping his

head. “And when we Jtt, tt”‘ will ‘live on'” Vidal’ a character

straight out of Simeno”,’i’ tttu’ly not listening Dressed casually

in a leather hunting ;uitttt una’aark-gray slacks’ slightly built’

with an intelligent, beuktd face’ he is standing next to his prey’

looking down on him in amazement, trying to comprehend the

fact that he, Vldal, has just bagged the Minotaur’ Still blinking in

similar shock, viewers st’ckedinformation off the screen’ veering

dizztlybetween a sense of historic moment and a recognition of

absurdity, Look at f i’ puu”tftr Look at how calm he is! Look at

how much tlt. u nu”ilnu Iparraguirre looks’ and how defiantly

she stares ut tht tarne'”r n”a f””ft at the little red flag with a

hammer and sickle that she keeps waving protectively over Cuz-

m5n’s head! Look at how comfortable the room they are sitting

in seemsl There were other tapes’ these willingly

released by the gov-

ernment: GuzmSn ‘”ftit! “tatts from- his captors’ removing his

clothes, so the p’o’iu’i-i’ showed’ then methodically getting

dressed again. And iftt ttry ftrst one’ the one in which Guzm6n

and seven persons arrested with him were presented to-lhe press’

O r.t”* woman I know was called out of the shower tttat morn-

ing by an urgent “lJu* f’o* her mother’ Rushing to the tele-

vision set, she arrived in time to scream’ too’ “Maritzital” she

cried, staring at the screen’ where her high-school chum Maritza

Garrido Lecca, tht ‘tu’ pt’pil’ the lervent Catholic’ the ballet stu-

dent turned Uoi’t-i* und *odt’n dancer’ was being identified

as a terrorist u*tni *tto taught Nickolaus-technique alignment

exercises on one noot of her iented house and kept Cuzm6n hid-

den on another. Maritza, it turned out, was the niece of an ex_ nun of Velsh descent, Nelly Evans, who had been captured two years earlier. The aunt is reported to have handled Sendero,s siz- able bank accounts abroad, and is presumed to have given over some of her other housekeeping activities to Maritza. Maritzitat friend tried to recognize the nice girl she knew in the blazing- eyed woman with the set jpw who, with a fist clenched in the air, kept shouting “Long Iife to Presidente Gonzalo and the Commu_ nist Party of Peru!,” but the images of Maritzita past and present did not add up.

Really, none of it does, still. The startled, mildly ironic Cuz_ m6n on the leaked arrest tape, who oblCits to his captors,request to pat him down (“Vhat do you think I have on me, a gun?,’), is hard to reconcile with the barking maniac who was presented to the world twelve days later, dressed in cartoonish prison stripes and confined in a Silence of tbe lanbs cage in the Lima police court_ yard. And the image of the man who has inspired thousands to suicidal struggle hardly meshes with the performer in the cage, either. The speech he delivered there was a model of retro revo- lutionary rhetoric and structural incoherence, swerving crazil5, from exhortations to his adherents to follow up the u.hi*.-.ni, of the Third Central Committee plenum with the launching of the Sixth Military Plan, to a cursory account of imperialism in Peru, and then to dire warnings that unnamed forces were trying to divide the country. Having ftnished with a throaty ,,Hono,

“nJglory to the Peruvian peoplet” Guzm6n marched toward the door of his cage, obviously expecting to be led away in oratorical tri- umph. Instead, his captors refused to open the door. Glaring at the horizon with his ftst raised, Guzm6n stuck stubbornly bylhe door while an increasingly frenzied crowd of local ..porr.., jeered and then, in a ftt of patriotism, burst into the national an- them. Guzmdn responded by llghting into the ,,lnternationale,l, but he either forgot the words or rearized too late that he had missed a unique opportunity to look patriotic. Silent once more, he stood with weakly clenched fist until his captors tired of the circus and ordered the journalists out of the courtyard.

Some days later, I discussed the Guzmdn tapes with a bright,

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264 Tbe HeartThat Bleeds LtMA, 1993 26s

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ambitious young woman from the provinces who is here in Lima

trying to make a career for herself in marketing’ “There is such

wisdom in everything that man says!” she said. “l have no sympa-

thy for Sendero, but I got goose bumps in the scene where he taps

his head and says you can’t kill a mans ideas. In just a few words

he’d said all that is importantl” Maritzitai friend, having taken

her ftrst good look at Presidente Conlalo, responded similarly’

“sendero is a terrorist organization, but one has to acknowledge

fhat he is an incredibly well-prepared man,” she said’ Ciovanna

Pefraflor, who runs a poll-taking organization that is small but

asks interesting questions, found that twenty per cent of her re-

spondents felt “compassion” when they saw the caged Cuzm6n’

THE vETRDLY POSlrlvE RESPOT’rse of ,o.nany Peruvians to a

man who traffics in brutality, whose writings are few and unim’

pressive, and who in the flesh turns out to be flabby, splayfooted,

and solemn, says something about the desperate state of Peruvian

politics. President Alberto Fujimori himself is said to have come

up with the idea for Cuzm6n’s cage and stripes, but the attempt

to make his top prisoner look foolish was at best a mixed success’

In order to appear really foolish to Peruvians, Presidente Conzalo

would at the very least have had to equal the performance of the

members of Congress who in the summer of t gg t famously spent three days in a rowdy discussion of whether the offtcial spelling

of an ancient city in the Andes should be “Cusco” or “Cosco'” At

that time, Peru was having one of those weeks in which the ftnal

breakdown of the ruling order seems barely hours away’ Sendero

had stepped up its terror campaign against the cities; every single

one of the countryi teachers and nurses was on strike; police

were threatening to go on strike, too; and the chronic water and

electricity shortages that keep Lima in a state of unshowered, refrigeratorless stress were worse than ever.

President Fujimori cites this episode whenever he feels com-

pelled to explain why, on April 5, 1992, he suspe nded the writ of

habeas corpus, announced a complete purge and restructuring of

the judiciary, and closed down Congress-an autogolpe that left

him, in effect, with dictatorial powers. Fujimori, who shares with

Presidente Gonzalo an extreme contempt for peruvian politi- cians, has a hunger for revenge and a pronounced authoritarian bent-most vividly expressed in the April coup_along with a popularity that many ffnd inexplicable. Having leaped out of no- where to gain an astonishing electoral victory over the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa two years ago, Fujimori went on to enforce a drastic package of neoliberal reform measures. He can claim, with justice, that the reforms have been effective: no on. b._ lieved that it would be possible to bring yearly inflation down from more than seven thousand p., ..niin I 990 to a mere fifty per cent and keep it there; but he has. He has also restored the nationi reserves to almost two billi6n dollars. He has renewed payments to the international banking community, which were suspended by his predecessor, and, by successfully concluding negotiations with hundreds of private banks that had Iawsuitl pe nding against Peru, he has opened up the international money flow again. He has balanced the budget, primarily by dismissing thousands of employees from a fat bureaucracy, putting dozens of state-owned enterprises up for sale, and reducing gou-.rn*.n, investment to nearly zero.

The President is less forthcoming when it comes to dis- cussing the incidental expenses of what is knownlas the Fuii_ shock. Two and a half years ago, the number of ‘people-li;i;g below the poverry line-unable to afford rent, utilities, and fooJ staples-wa5 seven million. Today, the number is twelve mil- lion-about half the population. The number of government_ assisted soup kitchens has risen from one thousand to four thousand in Lima alone-a ffgure that does not include many thousands of communally operated kitchens, where a majority j shantytown residents get their only real meal’of the day. A chol_ era epidemic that broke out after the Fujishock left thousands dead in r99r. Last year, the incidence in-peru of tuberculosis_ a disease directly related to poverty_was for the first time higher than that in any other country in Latin America, and re_ cently even cases of bubonic plague have been reported. The .c

N.P keeps shrinking, Comparabre statistics ersewhere in the hemisphere have caused riots and brought governments to their

The HeartTbatBluds LIMA, 1993 267266

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knees, yet Fujimori, though he has lately begun to subside in the

polls, neuerth.l.rr r.t”in, a high overall popularity rating’ and

th. .l.u.r.rt political analysts and newspaper columnists are hard put to it to give reasons’ There are at least some partial

explanations. His hatred of politicians helps a great deal; the

more or less unbroken record of offtcial cornrption’ cynicism’ and

incompetence here makes for embarrassing reading’ The loath-

i”g fot him expressed by an increasingly disoriented and impo-

q”it *hit. establishment also helps; the President’s outsider status as a descendant of Japanese ihopkeepers and as a former

agron-

orny prof.rror is much appreciated by the brutally marginalized

o”L’*fl” suffer a burden of racism and exploitation rarely equalled in Latin America.

After the April dictatorial decrees, Fdjimori’s opponents

thought that they had more than enough moral ammunition with

*f,i[ to bring him down, but it turned out that most people liked the autogitpe, because Fujimori closed down Congress’ The

coup has b..n follo*”d by a series of increasingly arbitrary Presi-

dential statements and measures, and by a sweeping campaign

against virtually every national politician-a grab bag of people

who detest each other but whom the President now accuses’ un-

convincingly, of conspiring with dozens of military officers who

appear to have wanted to ovsrthrow him and’ Fujimori says’ as-

,urinur. him. One result of all this heavy-handedness is that Fuji-

mori, who used to be known everywhere as El Chinito-the

Little China666-i5 now referred to, more respectfully’ as El

Chino. Even among his opponents, there is an unaffectionate but

steady conviction that, unlike his predecessors, he at least gets

things done. Fidel Castro used to say that revolution is like a

bi.ycle, if you stop pedalllng, it falls down ln that sense’ El Chino knows how to ride a bike’ He issues decrees with great

frequency, keeps a firm hand on the economy’ overturns institu-

tions at th. drop of a hat, and delights in the kind of effrontery

that, for .*u*pl., led hlm recently, at graduation ceremonies for

Navy cadets, to point out to the new officer corps just how cor-

rupt their institution is. Of course, Fujimori has the other Presi-

dente to thank for a good part of his popularity’ Guzmdn’s arrest

may have made him politically unassailable for all time. yet, in what Guzmdn would no doubt leap to point out as a dialectical unity of opposites, it can also be argued that Fujimorit economic program-the pauperization he has enforced on th. ul..udy u.rypoor-accounts for a good part of the measurable support for Presidente Conzalo, and for Senderos swift growth in’the last couple of years.

AyACucHo, an impoveiished town surrounded by bare rocks, dry streams, and empty ffelds, is where it all began

” qu..t.r of a

century ago. I flew there in,November on the day before nation- wide elections, scheduled by Fujimoti, for a Constituent Assem_ bly that has replaced the closed_down Congre* f .,u”, ,;i;;; travel light, for Sendero traditionaily protests erections by cailing armed strikes, whose most immediate target is public transportal tion. On such days, Ayacuchanos who have to travel know thatit is preferable to wark the mire or so between the town and the airport, luggage in hand, rather than risk a Sendero reprisal. In the event, the strike either was not called or was only feebly en-forced-no one seemed to know which_and I was able to take a taxi to the Hotel de Ti:ristas, which these days is inhabited mostly by local officials, who live in the heavily guarded hotel because they do not feel safe from Sendero i” ,f,.i, i”..,

Carlos Abimael Cuzmdn was hired as a philosophy professor by the University of San Crist6bal of Huamang”, ,j*rr.a ,” ,i. Ayacucho town square, in i963. He had earned a doctorate inphilosophy and practiced law in his home to*n of Areq*., ;lovely and prosperous city a world away from the upper Andes, and then had travelled around the country teaching here and there, until fate delivered him to the one town in peru where backwardness and an eagerness for modernity, and vast social rancor of poor against rich, Indians against whites, and provin_ cials against Limefros, were most poisonously concentrated.

Cuzmdn harbored some rancor of his own. He was the po_ lite, studious, and illegitimate son of a prosperous importer, who he appears to feel slighted him-treatment he is said to resent to this day. He was also a prooinciano, which meant that in Lima,

268 Tbe Heart Tbat Bluds LIMA, I993 269 despite his doctorate and a weighty thesis on Kant, he was con-

demned to remain always a scrofulous outsider, a hick in a funny

suit and a bad haircut trying to make it in the world of people who count. In Ayacucho, however, it was he who was from the big towfl: oo one at the university had read more books or

could quote from them more impressively. The current rector of

Huamanga, Pedro Villena Hidalgo, who in the mid-nineteen- seventies played a significant Part in the ouster of Sendero Lumi-

noso from its academic power base, was among the few who were

not star-struck. Late one afternoon,’I talked to him in his office,

which is presently his home as well, because, like everyone else

who has crossed Guzmdn in the past, he fears for his life; he lJaves the relative safety of his guarded administrative compound

as seldom as possible, ]t was a holiday, and was nearly dark; every

time the outside door creaked, he shifted uneasily in his chair’

Vhen Villena arrived from Lima, in 1973, to teach chemical engineering, Ayacucho had just acquired its ftrst air link to the

capital, in the form of two rattletrap commercial flights a week’

He found temporary living quarters near the plaza, in a run- down, ancient house with a dirt courlyard and no running water,

where the owner felt it necessary to place one of her indentured

seryants, ot pongos, at Villena’s disposal. Until Villena protested, the pongo slept on the slag-stone floor outside his bedroom every

night, ready to bring a glass of water or empty a chamber pot’ In

these and other ways, Ayacucho struck Villena as semifeudal’ In

reality, however, it was undergoing drastic changes’ electricity, water-treatment plants, and television-transmission stations were

finally being put in, along with a stadium and a cultural center,

and changes were being made in the universily itself’ Headed by

a progressive rector and with bright young leftist teachers hired,

like Cuzmiin, largely from around the provinces, Huamanga ac-

tively recruited students from among the sons and daughters

of the pongos-students who were first-generation literates, put through school, at huge sacrifice, by their families.

Villena dldn’t think much of the academic level’ “CuzmSni

second-in-command used to teach that’communism’was a deriv’

ative of ‘commune,’ and that was about as far as theory got,” he

recalls. Yet for the proud, ambitious new sfudents the lessonsabout dialectical materialism, evolution, una matter in motionwere world-changing events. ,,you have to realize that until thedav we graduated from high schoor ., o’;; berieved that the ffrstman was Adam and the first woman was Eve,,,a former ,rua.n, oiCuzmiin’s told me. ,,Once we had l.urn.J that the Bible could bewrong, everything was up for grabs.,, Cuzmdn taught this studenithat Marxism was the.culminaiion of fift..n billion years of evo_lution, Ieading from tiie ffrst gestation oi rnuu.. to the amoeba,the dinosaurs, pithecanth.op*-, und th. F.in.h Revolution, rightthrough to dialectical materialism una ,t. uniry of opposites.And he reminded him and the othtr rtua.ni, constantly that thefact that they were at the univerri,y;;; them privileged butthat, this man added, ,,in Lima ,1,.v *o*lJ ulways look down onus, because we were from the p.o,rinaar,,- –

Cuzmdn at the time was no more radical than any of thecither teachers who were convinced that socialist revolution wasthe only way to dynamite peru out of lt, .*.1, idiotic stupor, buthe was the only one equipped with such gravitas or with such acomely, intense, and fervently ideological irife. August;4.;;;.; who graduated from th6 Ayacucho l.,i,nr, ,.hool, was the daugh-ter of the local Communist party leader, urrJth” legend that sur_rounds her speaks of her mad determinution to escape thesuffocating provincialism of Ayacucho by *rging war on it. Sheis said to have had herself sterilized, ,o thut she would neverbe distracted from her revolutionary ;.rk ;; succumbing to thetemptation to have children. And she also made other crucialdecisions in her rife based solery on their-revorutionary worthi-ness, according to a man who loved her so much that he stillcatches his breath ar the mention of h.r. ,Si. tola me that shewould not marry me, because Cuzmdn was the one who was des_tined to carry/ our revolutionary task to completion,,, he said tome . “He was the one with the theoretic.l g.ounaing. She wantedto keep on seeing me anyway, but that wa’s something I couldn,tdo as a man.” The frustrated lover became *,r,f”f . ,,\ilZhat I knowabout Augusta is that she was f”lnff.Jp”liti.”lt, Uu, she wasn,thappy as a woman.,, Like other o;.olJ; l;.cucho who knew

270 Tbe HeartTbat Bluds LIMA, 1993 271

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the couple well, he is convinced that Guzmdn would never have

propelled himself and his group of followers into armed struggle

if h. hua not been constantly urged on by La Tone’ She was the

group’s most persistent and most successful organizer, and work

ihut ,h. did in the nationwide teachers’union provided the base that has allowed Sendero to influence, and even recruit, school-

children, whom Senderistas see as the only noncorrupt force in

society. Five years ago, after she began to suffer from a serious

heart condition, La Torre committed suicide rather than leave

l,h. .oun,ry for treatment. She is the greatest hero in Sendero’s

pantheon.

,The road from the university to revolution was long’ there

*.r. y.”r, spent by Guzm6n building up a power base in the Revolutionary Federation of Students, or rcft, which was essen-

tially a Communist Party front organization, there was the 1963

sino-soviet split, which in Peru took the form of a long discus-

sion at a secret meeting of the Partido Comunista Peruano, Sec-

tor Ayacucho, in which Cuzmin doggedly refused to back down

from a demand that, as Mao would have wished, Stalin be in-

cluded in the list of honorary members of the presidium, along

with Marx, Lenin, andJos6 Carlos Mari6tegui, a Peruvian social-

ist visionary. (This split gave rise to the name by which the Com-

munist Party of Peru is now,generally known’ the ren split also’

and Guzm6n’s followers, to distinguish themselves from the revi-

sionists in the pro-Moscow ren, appended the tag line “Down the

Shining Path of Jos6 Carlos Mari6tegui” to their name’) After the

split came a long trip by Cuzm6n to China, sometime between

1965 and 1968, followed by an even longer, comfortable stint as

head of personnel for Huamanga University For six years, from

a tiny office that sat like a guard post directly opposite a fig tree

in the university’s cobbled patio, cuzmSn determined staff ap-

pointments, kept a close watch on who taught what, and super-

vised the school cafeteria and dormitories, with their vitally

important subsidies for the campesino students lt was during these glory days that Sendero Luminoso, in all seriousness, came

up with the theory that Huamanga Universfty was “objectively”

destined to be the seedbed of the Peruvian revolution

There were setbacks; in 1969, Cuzm6n and his disciples were expelled from the pro-Maoist Communist parry he had helped create. Then, in the mid-seventies, they were ousted from the university bureaucracy by a coalition of anti-Maoist, anti-‘Cuzmdn leftists, and had to take their organizing work into the surrounding countryside, where some Sendero anthropologists and schoolteachers had established contacts.

Even in the bad years, though, the cult of Cuzmdn continued to grow. Carlos Tapia, who was then another Huamanga ftre_ brand and,is now one of Cuzmdns most perceptive critics, recalls that one day he was invited by a friend to a baptismal celebration. Refening to cuzmdn by his nickna.itie, which reflected his ac- knowledged brainwashing skills, the friend said, ,,Shampoo Cuz_ m6n is the godfather, and there will be lots of food and drink.,, Tapia found that the chicba andbarbecue were indeed prentifur at the parry but he saw no sign of a baptized baby. Evlnrually, it was explained to him that the host, a man named Juan Albe.to, was celebrating his own baptism: in honor of the man he admired more than any other, he had gone to the civil regisrry and had his name changed from Juan Alberto to Juan Abimael. ,,And Cuzmin seemed to think that this was an unremarkable and entirely ap_ propriate thing to do,” Tapia says.

“From the day I met Abimael, I knew that he was incapable both of walking a whole city block and of killing u rn.n, und when I saw him on television the other day I knew I had been right.” Thus the man who loved Augusta La Torre stumbled on what is probably the principal source of Shampoo Cuzm6n,s ap- peal: the Cuzmdn of the leaked arrest tapes, like the Cuzmdn of Ayacucho memory is placid and solicitous of his inferiors; pos- sessed of great book learning and a dense, professorial self_ esteem, incapable, in his monumental dignity, of causing hurt of any kind. But this unthreatening, physically lax side of Cuzmiin, while attractive, would not account for his ability to hypnotize if it were not for an added element of danger. In Ayr.u.ho, h. was not only ponderous and courtly; he was.also a nisti_a pow_ erful white man. In Lima, he was quite literally invisible until the day of his arrest’ throughout the broody decade that foilowed

TheHeartTbatBluds LtMA, 1993 273272

Sendero’s armed d6but, in 1980, the organization released no photographs of its leader, and, with one lengthy exception’ he

gave no interviews-not to the local press, not to influential in-

t-ernational media, and not to any of the friendly publications

from the many solidarity groups that were springing up in Europe

and the United States. In this void, a private, monstrous image

of Cuzm6n took shape in each Peruvian’s mind-an image that

was powerfully reinforced when the caged madman in prison

, rrrip., was finally put on dlsplay’ { psychotherapist friend of ‘ mine confessed that following the caged press conference’ she’

too, like her patients, was having nightmares about him’ Then

tb4t image was blurred, contradiited, and made inftnitely more

p*.n, bV the leaked arrest tapes, which showed Guzmdn gravely

“rklng aiout the welfare of his fellow-prisohers, and guarded by

the love of his compafrera. That Presidente Gonzalo was able

to combine in his single person the attributes of GuzmSn the

Avenger and Cuzm6n the Kindly Uncle is without a doubt the

luckiest thing that ever happened to Sendero’

By 1980, Sendero was ready to go to war’ In May’ the group

trashed the ballot boxes in the Ayacuchano village of Chuschi

during the first democratic elections held ln the country since

1964. By 1982, it was a presence in the Andean countryside’ In

the years since, Peruvians who once scorned Sendero as simply

another mad leftist organization, and Peruvians who once paid it

no mind, have spent many painful hours examining its formative

period, ,if,ing through the record of its failures and of Ayacucho’s

..ntu.i., of neglect, compiling anecdotes on the Srowth of Cuz-

m6n’s ego and the parallel increase in his resentment-all in an

attempt to explain the transmutation that took place in a group

of university radicals in the nineteen-seventies and caused them

to emerge from the Ayacucho crucible as a band of fundamental-

istjusticieros, ready to tear Peru apart in order to save it

cARLOS rvAN oEcnrcoRl, a senderologist whose essay titles

make good reading in themselves (one, on Guzm6n’ is called

“How bifficult It Is to Be Cod”), in attempting to account for

the bloodthirsty fundamentalism of a movement that began as

a backcountry intellectuals,revolt, once described Sendero as a phenomenon in which the claustrophobic density of the nfu- cucho environment generated a concentration of en.rgy und mass out of all proportion to the group,s apparent size or merit. The black hole created by this concentration of energy, the logil goes, devoured the Senderistas,reason/ s€nse of proportion, Jnd basic respect for life, whether their enemies, or their own. per- haps this is enough to explain the years of rage and insane murder that followed-the disembowelling of chiljren, the gouging outof young women’s eyes, the castrations and hangingr,- th. human bonftres.

In Peru, the years between 19g3 and l9g6 are outstanding chapters in the world annals of war and desolation ,hi.h h.ul been compiled by organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Vatch. Thousands were butchered_by the peru- vian military or by Sendero. Entire villages emptied out. Hun_ dreds of thousands of euechua-rp.uking-.r.pesinos descended on the provincial capitals and then on Lima, fleeing Sendero,s terror and the Armyt horriffc forms of blanket revenge. In Aya- cucho, on the day after I talked to the rector of Huamanga Uni_ versity, I asked to be taken to a nearby village. All the nearby villages were abandoned, I was told, and no one was willing to take me as far as an inhabited one, because of fear of being ien on the road with a foreigner and ambushed by Sender”.i,*”, always ilysfunctional, is now virtually paralyzed by overload. Ag- ricultural production has undergone trauma, and so has the na- tional culture. One day in November, I went to an open_air ‘/sele55ss6″-four back yards fenced together*in a poor Lima neighborhood where the Andes, greatestl,scissor dancers,,, or rit_ ual acrobatic performers, were competing for a prize. All the au- dience members I talked to were from thJAndean region, .na

“tthad come to Lima fleeing the war. So had the dancers. Sirnit.rtf, the country’s best weave.rs, retablo artisans, and carvers aaa naarly all in Lima now, and only the luckier ones can continue to make a Iiving at their craft.

From Senderot singular point of view, the apocalyptic years in the mid-eighties were a triumph; by l9gg, it was ready to stage

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27 4 TbeHeartTbatBluds LIMA, I993 275

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a Great Party Congress to celebrate its successes and ponder the

next move. A captured videotape of that meeting has allowed

Peruvians a brief glimpse of Presidente Conzalo at the moment

of his crowning glo.y. His theories have just been elevated to the

category of Gonzalo Thought, on a par with Maos’ Criticism

and ielf-criticism have taken place, and although a de facto tenet

of self-criticism is that the leader neyer engages in it, there has

been, at the conclusion, an implicit acknowledgment by the presidente that mistakes have been made, that perhaps the un-

ending violence has been off-putting to people Sendero would

like to consider fiasas, or followers. ln the future, the goal will be

to “broaden s1355 1ve1[“-that is, build up support organizations

ind kill more selectively-and move the focal point of the strug-

gle from the country to the city ln the meeting room of the Party

Longr.rr, the floor is littered with cigarettes’ On red-bunting-

.ou.i.d tables there are empty glasses, and Presidente Gonzalo’

sitting at the center of the main table, is cleariy a little buzzy’ as

huppv as any of his comrades, a surprising number of whom are

women. They are severe, nunlike in their dark Mao suits’ but one

is glowing radiantly, alight wlth love She is Elena lparraguirre’ a

,nild.-rg.a, middle-class widow and longtime militant whom

Guzmdninstalled as his companion following Augusta La Torre’s

death. In the video, their relationship seems brand-new’ Teas-

ingly, she asks him to dance and, muttering “Let’s see if I remem-

b.-. ho*,,. he follows her onto the cigarette.strewn floor as the

theme song from Zorba tbe Greek begins to play’ There are little

exclamations of surprise and pleasure from his audience as he

moves into the music with the fluid solemnity of a walrus’ He

dances with great conviction and good rhythm while lpanaguirre

encircles him with dainty steps and a shower of glances that are

at once flirtatious, tender, and protective His followers watch

adoringly. One could almost wish them well’

Vithin months of this htppy evening, Sendero’s campaign against the cities began in earnest, and a self-effacing, sombre

p-oli.. .olonel who would have preferred to be a psychiatrist’

Antonio Ketin Vidal, joined the Direccion Nacional Contra el

Terrorismo, a seven-year-old agency that was being given greater

power by the government of Alan Garcia on the ,cff chance that it might have better luck against Sendero than the rampaging troops who were earning Peru such a dismal human-rights repu- tation abroad but accomplishing little else. Vidal had been fasci- nated by Sendero for years-ever since, as a young intelligence officer, he had met one of the groupt high command and realized how different the man was from the average leftist revolutionary. But when Vidal arrived at Dincote he discovered that the agency was equipped with only fwo telephone Iines, a handful of opera- tives, and not a single computer to keep.track of its ftles. Vidal was obsessed with ftles. Night after night, he sifted through them, updating and correcting, tracing networks and interrela- tionships. His admiration for CuzmSn-for his commitment, for the efficiency with which he used scarce resources, for his learn_ ing, and for his disciplined attention to security–grew apace. Vidal slept little, ate little, and listened to Vagner and Chopin for relaxation. He might have made progress, but three months after he joined Dincote he was abruptly-and inexplicably- dismissed.

It might have been possible to capture Cuzmdn back then, For years, he had been living much as he was living at the mo- ment of his arrest: in Lima, shuttled between safe houses in the trunk of a car, usually driven by one of the women who so loved to take care of him. Investigators who traced Guzm6n,s steps for years confirm that, contrary to rumor, he neither drank heavily nor womanized-he worked. Although, as the organization grew, he had increasing difftculty overseeing as many aspects of it as he would have liked, he appears to have been responsible for its general strategy and specific plans throughout. He read newspapers/ received reports/ and, occasionally, urrote tracts_ although, if the pubhshed record is any indication, he is neither an inspired nor a perceptive theoretician.

Oddly, a long slog through hi-s collected writings and speeches does not reveal even any instinctive feeling for or empa- thy with Peru’ the countryi ethnic diversiry its racism, its heart_ stopping mountain vistas, its maddening bureaucracy are no- where mentioned. Nor is the word “Quechua,,, or the unflinching

27 6 TbeHeartTbatBluds

industriousness of its people. Just as the attempts at art produced

by Sendero look like copies of old propaganda photographs from

Cbina Reconstructs, so the texts of Presidente Conzalo read hke bad

Mao. He always begins his expositions with an imitation of the

neutral, pedagogical tone that Mao mastered, but he has none of

Maoi epigrammatic gift, and his rhetoric is alarmingly, perhaps

even psychotically, inconsistent. Jus! minutes after beginning a

calm exposition of the state of the nation, he will lapse into the

barking, bloodthirsty mode for which he is best known’ “The

people, enraged, arm themselves and rise in rebellion ‘ ‘ tear the reactionaries’flesh to shreds, and these black tatters it will sink

into the bog, what remains it will set on ftre and throw the ashes

i’nto the wind.” In practice, these exhortations translated into the murder of

a woman I once met briefly, Maria Elena Moyano, and the take-

over of a series of organizations that she and other members of

the nonviolent left had built up painstakingly over the years’

Moyano was an original member of Peru’s largest squatter settle-

ment, Vlla El Salvador, which currently has a population of about three hundred and fifty thousand and a place in the history

of social movements as a brilliant example of gTass-roots organiz-

ing. Moyano was active in the \Zomen’s Federation in Villa, as it

is known, whose members organized soup kitchens and ran day-

care centers and health clihics, and she was also a founder of the

Vlla branch of the Vaso de Leche, or Class of Mllk, movement’ Vaso de Leche depends on donated food supplies-milk, primar-

ily-to provide a nutritious breakfast for children who would otherwise eat very little, but supplies, and particularly those do-

nated by the government, are fitfuI. Vaso de Leche’s members

have become expert at persuading the government to cooperate:

whenever the authorities get negligent, the *omen take to the

streets of downtown Lima, and, after a fairly well-established rit-

ual involving tear gas, high-pressure water hoses, and police

clubs on the part of the authorities and much jeering and dodging

on the part of the women, the supplies are usually resumed’

The last time I saw Maria Elena Moyano, a forceful, strongly

built black woman with a golden smile, was at one such demon-

stration a couple of years ago. She was too busy yelling into a megaphone about the obscene, scandalous increases in the cost of staying alive, and about the governmenti bald attempts to co_ opt her organization, and about the rage that every mother tak- ing part in the march felt at watching her children go hungry to pay much attention to me and my questionr. It i, ,t.ung. no- ,o see this militant, radical woman proclaimed a heroine, and ,,one of the best generals in the war,,, by the very establishment that used to despise her and her fellow-activists as rabble and curse them for tying up traffic. But she is an offfcial hero now, because the powers that be havetcome to-,”gnderstand with urgent clarity that the only thing separating the vast mass of the poor from Sendero Luminoso is the radical but nonviolent left represented by the likes of Moyano. This conclusion is so unassailable that even Sendero agrees with it.

I recently went to the place in Vlla where, Iast February, Moyano was murdered. My guide was a nun who h”ppen.d to be about a block away when Moyano, returnjng from a rare day at the beach with her two small sons and a twelve-year-old nephew, stopped for a meeting with fellow-members of the Voment Federation. The women were gathered in one of the communal halls that are a feature of all of Mlla,s carefully de- signed “social 31s15”-31id, graceless spots that nevertheless in- clude a playground, a clinic, a soup kitchen, arrd a day-care center, as well as the meeting hall. From the playground, an un- known woman approached, gun in hand and U”&.a by several youths, who were also armed. Moyano’s friends tried to form a protective circle around her when they saw the intruder, but she said, “This is for me,” and stepped out to deal with the armed woman. She was shot. Her weeping nephew tried unsuccessfully to prevent the murderer and her accomplices from igniting a stick of dynamite they had tied to Moyano,s body. Vhen th*e nun I spoke to arrived on the scene, a few minutes later, there was nothing to be done except say a final prayer.

At the time of her death, Moyano was deputy mayor of the Villa municipality and was considering running for mayor of Lima. Last month, the man who succeeded her as deputy mayor,

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Ram6n Galindo, was himself slain-shot six times as his family looked on. Today, the current mayor of Vlla lives surrounded by bodyguards and in fear of his life, and someone who is close to him told me, in a voice strained by months of tension, that virtu- ally all the community organizations that used to be a part of Vlla’s exemplary politlcal structure are under Senderista control. “Co visit them,” she said, “but don’t tell them you’ve spoken to us, or you’ll be the enemy.” I did as she suggested, and found myself travelling through Villa in the company of a woman who claimed to have no connection with Sendero but made sure I cleared every checkpoint in the slum where youths stopped our taxi and demanded to know my business there. “All the old politi- cians have failed us,” the woman said. “Like Moyano, they lied and stole from us and acted as informants for the government, saying we were Senderistas. She deserved to be killed, and now we have taken power into our own hands.”

sHoRTLy AFrER MoyANo was killed, Cuzmdn changed safe houses for the last time, to the comfortable quarters directly above Maritza Carrido Leccat modern-dance studio. It is not clear whether Maritza was originally recruited by her aunt, Nelly Evans, who used to do community work in shantytowns like Villa El Salvador, and who, practically from the day she left the con- vent, some twenty years ago, began recruiting for a nonviolent Maoist group with links to Sendero. Perhaps Maritza was re- cruited instead by her husband, a tense young architect who, around the time he began his relationship with her, is said to have approached a friend, full of anguish because he wanted to leave Sendero but didn’t know how. It is unlikely that Maritza, who, as a dancer, had a demanding life of her own in what might be considered a frivolous and self-centered occupation, was a very high-ranking Sendero member. More probably, she was simply a young woman looking to make sense of the mindless chaos that is Peru, taking up Senderismo as acquaintances of hers took up herbal medicine or massage therapy, and being used eagerly by Sendero, which saw her occupation as an excellent cover for Cuzm6n. There is another videotape-of Maritza in her studio,

giving an introductory lesson in Nickolaus technique to an un_ seen student, and then crossing the dance floor on the diagonal, in a Craham-technique pli6 run. Her shoulders are too tense and high, the spiral of her back has little flow to ft, and instead of looking up and out into the distance she seems to be staring straight up at the ceiling, toward the room overhead where cuzl mdn is hiding.

Ceneral Vidal, who three years after his removal from Din- cote had been appointed to head the agency by the Fujimori gov_ ernment, is said to have had no idea that it was cuzm6n himself he was tracking down in the’littre dajrce studio in the Surquiilo neighborhood, just off a small p”rk ilh.r. mothers bring their children to play. On his return, Vidal had found a *o.. prof.r- sional agency with a slightly bigger budget, a few more phone lines, and even a computer. vithin weeks, he raided a house in which Cuzmiin had been hiding only minutes before, and a few months later-last August-he acquired several more comput- ers, as a result of his ftrst major strike against Sendero, his men raided a college and captured several members of Sendero,s Cen_ tral Committee, in charge of logistics for the entire organi zatior,, along with several of its computers and dozens of diskettes Ioaded with Sendero ftles. As Guzmdn himself admitted later, this was a stunning blow, from which the organization was still recov- ering at the time of his own arrest. Dincote has a reputation for avoiding what are known here as ,,scientific interrogation,, tech_ niques. Its success is due instead to its reliance on investigative procedures that in hindsight s’eem obvious: Dincote offfcers fol- lowed the relatives and friends of captured senderistas on their way back from jail visits; they sifted through trash, and studied discarded reading material, they networked, and, inspired by Vidals single-minded dedication, they refused to take b.ibes.

There is some confusion regarding the precise sequence of events that led to the moment on September l2th when some forty Dincote agents crashed into Maritza Garrido Lecca,s studio and arrested her, her husband, two terrified family visitors, and, upstairs, Cuzm6n and Iparraguirre along with two other high_ ranking Senderistas. The National Intelligence Service, which

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has been made to look somewhat ineffectual by the arrests, would like to take some credit for them, and sources close to the sewice insist that its office had captured and “scientiffcatly interrogated” Elena Iparraguirre’s brother, and that his testimony

led to the discovery of Guzmdn days later. This seems unlikely’ Vhy would the intelligence service have handed the information over to a rival agencyz Vhat definitely did happen is that minutes before the raid on the Surquillo house a separate detachment of

Dincoie agents raided anothgr, and found in it large quantities of

Sendero documents and other sources of information. Minutes later, the detachment led by Vidal himself burst into Garrido Lec-

ca’srhouse and seized Guzm6n, who, seeing them, commented

mildly, “Yes, it was my turn to lose. Congratulations'”

rr usED ro ae that journalists in Lima who wanted to interview Senderistas had only to hail an ancient VV taxicab-the Peru- vian national vehicle-and head for Canto Crande prison, where a special cellblock was reserved for captured Shining Path mili-

tants. The prisoners kept the floors there spotless. In the women’s

pavilion, little curtains of neatly patched-together newspaper hung between the cots. In the courtyard, murals decorated the clean walls. Smiling compaieras offered biscuits. Others ex-

plained the revolution’s goals. Songs were sung. Chants were

chanted. Praise was voiced for the universal struggle of the prole-

tariat. The world and its disasters were explained in simple para-

graphs. Otten the women performed a song-and-march routine

straight out of the Cultural Revolution, with red caps, Mao suits, and red flags, and one could understand how powerful was the

dream of perfect order which fuelled the Senderistas, how great

their need to create a utopia as much unlike the disrnal real Peru

as possible.

Today, such easy access to the revolution is no longer pos’

sible, Sendero, which lately began to express a new eagerness foi international publicity and press contacts, is in hiding’ Much of

the Central Committee is in prison. Last May, a government at-

tempt to retake the Sendero wing of Canto Crande prison was successful only after thirty-six Senderistas were killed.

. A great many people have been lulled into the conviction that Sendero is as dead as it is out of view, but this i, ,o ignor. one of the most interesting problems the organization faced inthe last couple of y”ars, which is that, as of iis moue ,”;i;;; Sendero grew at a phenomenal rate_so much so that the rig; control the central Committee had normaily exercised u..ui.. difffcult. In the shantytowns and at all levels of the education system, Sendero is-if not exactly the mass organization its members aspire to-very definitely a force to contend with. IIooked for Sendero cadres all over Lima, and probably found them.

In a highly poriticized squatters’ settlement prunked in themiddle of an expanse of sand dunes, I talked with an anxiousyoung woman whose husband, hauled in by the Army several times_ for questioning, had finaily been surrounded on ,h. ,r…, one day by men in uniform and never seen again. Other people were in the room where the woman told her story: there was the compafrero head of the local block organization, the compafrera head of the food kitchens, und u cornp”frero who slipped into themeeting halfway through, offered a memorably sw.eaf hand- shake, and kept his face turned away, an ear cocked toward me,for the rest of the session. There was a compafrero lawyer who came to me with information about human-rights violations against suspected Senderistas, who had an equally damp hand_ shake, and who worked himself into a froth when I askedhim about certain gruesome murders committed by Sendero. “Human-rights organizations care only about the rights of the bourgeoisie,” he said, biting on each word. ,But what about therights of the thousands of children who die of malnutritir” ;r;;year in Peru?” And ther un i o n orga n i ze r, wh o ;,:1i-::1t:l:’ilyiff ;il: :ff T:;reacted with fury at the sight of a few scribbled undlorn-up no,.- books her students had left lying about the schoolyard. ,,Even children so young are corrupted by the system and show no re_ spect at all for our effortst,, she exclaimed in disgust. I gave her aride downtown, and on the way we passed a recreation center forthe national police whose walls \Mere covered with Coca_Cola

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282 Tbe Heart That Bleeds

signs. The schoolteacher, barely able to contain her enthusiasm, told me that the walls were a Sendero victory of sorts. Despite the best efforts of the police, she said, Senderistas used to cover the walls of the center with grafftti night after night. In the end, the red-and-white Coca-Cola logos were the only way the police could insure that Sendero’s slogans, which are always ,painted in red, would at least not be visible. Because of the cir- cumstances in which we met, and what I knew about her already,

i’there was no doubt in my mind that she was a Senderista, but, like the others, she would not reveal herself in that role to me,

Juliiin,’when I made contact’with him, was pleasingly dlf- feient. Ve talked in a cafeteria in San Marcos University, the nation’s largest, which is currently surrounded by tanks and con- stantly patrolled by soldiers. A couple of years ago, this campusr which is operated on a skeletal budget by the government, looked like a nightmare set in the New York City subway system. Revolutionary posters and grafftti covered every wall of over- crowded classrooms and hallways. Periodically, Sendero would

stage mass rallies, which sometimes would take place in the eve- ning, in coordination with the dynamiting of electrical pylons, so that while the city was plunged into darkness torches set out in the shape of a hammer and sickle on the campus hillside would

shine in the night. Now that the Army has come, San Marcost walls are clean, there are no demonstrations, and Juliiin and I were free to chat comfortably while I took notes and he made no effort to keep his voice down. He was cheerful and dry-palmed, was obviously intelligent, and, despite his teen-age looks, was endowed with self-conffdence and an unmistakable gift for lead- ership. He wished to be identifted only as a compafrero democr6- tico, who could not speak for the Parry, but soon “we”s and “our”s

were flying through his conversation, particularly when he ex- plained how truly democratic Sendero is. “Ve all coexist here peacefully,” he said. “And even though we’re the majority, we re –

spect everyone else. They say we beat the students up, but we don’t just beat up anyone. Say someone from the opposition wants to put up one of its posters next to one of ours. Thati pluralism, and we tolerate it. But say they tear dowl one of our

posters to put up one of theirs. That is an attack against our or_ganization, and it must be punished. And if they persist, then they must be annihilared.,,

He talked on and on, full of conftdence in the perfect.logic of everything he said. Could I disagree.that in peru the vast ma-jority live lives that are an affront to human dignityr or that whether dictators ruled or whether elected d.r”gogu., *.r. *power has made little difference to the poorl CoulJanyone ob_ject to the sacrifice he himself was making, Iiving on the run and in virtual certainry of a honid early death;urr ro the people could at last be free? Yes, undeniably, peiS.ple were afraid of Sendero at ffrst, but once the masses became familiar with it they acceptJ Senderos work. “The left in this country has always promised everything. My father himself was involved in the union move- ment for a long time,.but where did that get himl Through ourvery radicalism, people understand that we are here until ffnal victory. And they come to understand that our justice i, .i;;;. Everyone here knows someone in the Class of Mili oro*.urn it,o is- stealing the supplies, everyone now understands that Maria Elena Moyano was an enemy. Didn,t the establish;;”;;;.;;’..i; her one of its best generals? \Zhat more proof do you need of her miserable nature?,,

I asked him whether, now that Guzmdn had been captured, he remained convinced that his leader was infallible.

Juliiin hesitated. ,,perhaps as a person he may have made mis_ takes,” he finally said. ,,That,s only human. But in his thinG Presidente Gonzalo has shown a magisterial interpretation of ourreality. People say that wF repeat phrases like parrots, but what is wrong with repeating scientific truth? If his theory hadn t beenproved in practice over and over again, would it have been ele_ vated to the category of Conzalo Thought: Of course hi, .rptur. has been a blow for us, but it was not ,”rurpr,r., we always knewthat he- could be captured, or rhat he coult J,., t,k. any humanb;ing. Vhat is important is that the party is in place. presidente Conzalo once said that as long as a single member of the Central Committee remains alive, as long as u jngl. Co.nrnunirt remains alive, victory willbe ours. Now,h..y., i th.,’orlda;;;b;;

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are anxiously on us, waiting to see how history is being made. As Presidente Conzalo said, we are condemned to win.,’

rovARD THE BECtNNlnc of Presidente Gonzalo’s caged pre- sentation in September, there was a moment when he interrupted himself to address his press audiencet demand that he answer questions instead of making a speech. “lf you want an interview, put in your requests with the government/ and then we,ll see,,, he shouted back. Twelve days earlier, at the time of his capture, he had congratulated General Mdal on his skill and, as the video camerras rolled, delivered a short stafement to the effect that fate can make enemies of two men who pursue different paths in life, but that “this does not mean that they can’t rdspect each other.,, One can guess what he was thinking as he addressed his extra- ordinarily polite and deferential captor: in the future, there would be captivity, yes, but there would also be time to read, and reflect on the great events coming to pass, and-why notr-to indulge Vidal in a little fireside game of chess, rwo geniuses facing each other across the board.

A few weeks ago, the newsletter PeruReport published an ac- count of Cuzmiins current situation. Fifteen days after Guzmiint arrest, the military won a frenzied bureaucratic skirmish with Vi- dal’s Dincote for custody of Pirus most illustrious prisoner, and made it clear that in Guzmiint future there would be no room for press interviews or civilized respect for one’s enemies. Following a three-day military trial, Cuzm6n has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a windowless basement cell at the San Lo- renzo Island naval base, off the coast of Lima. presidente Gon- zalo has no access to books or newspapers and is under constant surveillance. He has grown irritable, the newsletter says, and suf- fers from the psoriasis now left untreated and compounded by the stress of his imprisonment. He may die soon. One of the ftrst priorities for the newly elected Constituent Assembly-in which Fujimori has a majority-is to authorize the death penalfy. It would be unconstitutional to make that penalty retroactive in or- der to apply it to Cuzm6n, but the Constitution, after all, has been suspended by Fujimori, who is known to be very keen on

Cuzmiin’s death. In fact, there were widely circulated rumors that he was irritated with Generar vdar for iavrng faired to kiil his captive on the spot, which may help explain why Vdal was sum- marily relieved of his post on January +th.

There is a rare video portrait of Sendero in a documentary that was broadcast last year by Englandt ihannel 4, and..h;i is now distributed in holnl video format by Senderot solidarity committees in the UnitedStates. In the film, a few dozen;;.1 sinos are shown marching through the countryside, carryring a red banner,’in one of the guerrilla group s And.ean ,,support 6″r;.;; The peasants are native euechua ip.ui.rr, desperately poor, ;; ditionally dressed, unsmiling, and slightly’stooped. As the peas_ ants approach on the screenr the ftrst words the audience hears from them are “Long live the Strategic Equilibriumt,,in heavily accented Spanish. One can imagine the dizzying thrill of em_powerment that lies in pronouncing such scientiftc, modern words, and in explaining that they reier to the balance of force achieved under presidente Gonzalot leadership in Senderot battle against a corrupt and rotten state.

._- Strictly speaking, of course, they should be shouting not “Vioa” but “Muera’, to the Equilibrio Estrat6gico, since it. is not meant to perdure. In the beginning, the Senderistas ,pok. ,ug.ly of a struggle that might take generations, and, ..tting forih’i#- ages of the millenarian patience of the peasantry stated that they were in no hurry. But the very real urgency of their *oro, iu overtaken Sendero, as have their own siriking successes and the stubborn inclination of the peruvian state to keep heading for thevoid. That Sendero may be able to triumph, now or in the nextgeneration, remains an inconceivable thought, but every aspect of Peruvian reality seems inconceivable. In his sombre prison cell,the Fourth Sword of Marxism continues to imagine things thatcannot be, and his children_the multiplying squadrons of Juliiins spawned by Conzalo Thought_strain to catch his dreams and obey them.

LIMA, I993 285

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