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Peru Guerrillas Insurgency, 1980-92
The SL launched its peoples' war with the burning of
ballot
boxes in the provincial Ayacucho market town of Chuschi on
May
17, 1980, the eve of national elections. Unlike the
short-lived
guerrilla movements of the mid-1960s, the SL extended its
range
of activities and actions over the course of the 1980s and
contributed to the expansion of violence by other
guerrilla
organizations, as well as by common criminals. By mid-1992
political violence accounted for over 25,000 casualties.
The SL
insurgency also caused some US$22-billion worth of
property
damages from direct destruction and indirect loss of
production
and employment.
The SL's success in comparison with earlier
insurgencies'
failures had at least seven explanations. First, the
movement
organized and developed over a fifteen- to seventeen-year
period
before it launched its "armed struggle." Second, the SL
began and
grew in a provincial university (San Cristóbal de
Huamanga)
beyond the regular purview of central government
authorities and
in an isolated highland department (Ayacucho). In 1990
Ayacucho
Department was still one of the most sparsely populated
(with
less than 3 percent of the country's population, mostly
Quechua-
speaking native Americans) and economically deprived
departments
(generating a meager 1 percent of Peru's GNP). Third, the
SL was
organized from the outset and directed by a single
individual,
professor Abimáel Guzmán Reynoso, who had the capacity to
impose
an iron discipline, attract many of the university's most
able
students and faculty, and build a strategy of
revolutionary war
in Peru drawn from Mao Zedong and other leading Marxist
thinkers
and practitioners. Fourth, the government response was
delayed
for years because it refused to take the SL seriously.
When the
government did act, it was often on the basis of strong
and
sometimes indiscriminate military action rather than
through a
combination of military and economic activities to respond
more
effectively to the real problems of the provinces that the
SL was
trying to exploit. Fifth, continuing and often increasing
economic difficulties during the 1980s made it harder for
the
political center at Lima to respond effectively to the
growing
needs of the periphery and gave the guerrillas more
opportunities. For example, the SL moved into the Upper
Huallaga
Valley and became involved in the coca production and
cocaine-
paste trafficking business, which generated resources
estimated
to be as much as US$30 million per year that were used to
pay SL
salaries and strengthen the SL's domestic infrastructure.
And
sixth, the SL's insistence on autarkic autonomy took it
out of
the mainstream international communist movement, with all
of its
uncertainties, and gave it a greater sense of its own
significance.
As of mid-1992, the SL was believed to have between
3,000 and
4,000 armed cadre and some 50,000 supporters in various
civilian
support groups. Although the SL began in Ayacucho, the
movement
consciously expanded to other departments, so that by 1992
most
of its actions took place in other areas--particularly
Lima,
Ancash, Junín, and the Upper Huallaga Valley. The movement
was
organized into a Central Committee and Politburo and six
regional
commands, all of which had a certain degree of autonomy to
be
able to adjust to special local circumstances. A strict
hierarchy
of commitment obtained: from sympathizers to activists to
militants to commanders to the Central Committee and
Politburo.
The militants formed the armed cadres and the
assassination
squads; the sympathizers and activists operated in the
SL's
Popular Aid (Socorro Popular) organization to help the SL
prisoners or families of fallen comrades, to assist in
legal
defense or recruitment, to march in demonstrations, and to
undertake other activities. There were believed to have
been
nineteen Central Committee members and five Politburo
leaders who
made the decisions for the organization and who were
replaced as
needed by the most qualified of the militants and so on
down.
Assassination squads had backups to increase the chances
of
successful operations.
The SL recruitment took place primarily among the young
and
the marginalized; the organization included large numbers
of
fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds and women. Sympathizers
gradually
proved themselves by their actions and advanced to the
status of
militants. Visits by journalists to prisons where captured
SL
militants were housed suggested that indoctrination was
intensive
and total, with songs, marches, plays, and skits
manifesting a
training both ideological and personal. Members appeared
to be
transformed by their experience, adopting a new, more
aesthetic
life-style, total subordination to the cause of the
revolution,
and an apparent utter conviction, inviting comparisons
with
religious fundamentalist converts. For the individual, it
could
be an uplifting, liberating experience; at the same time,
the
person put himself or herself in a situation of complete
subservience to the organization and its leadership.
Guzmán and his colleagues were convinced that they had
unlocked the secrets of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and
were
pursuing the correct revolutionary course even as
communist
movements and governments collapsed around the world. To
Guzmán,
or "Presidente Gonzalo," as he was called in the SL, the
failure
of world communism resulted from its unwillingness to
apply the
purifying orthodoxy of China's Cultural Revolution to
return
regularly to the movements' essential proletarian
foundations.
The PCP was to Guzmán the new beacon of hope for world
revolution; the SL's advance worldwide depended first on
its
slow, methodical, and above all "correct" movement forward
in
Peru. It was a movement that took the long view, building
and
progressing slowly on its own terms. Organization and
cadre were
more important than territory at this point, particularly
among
the urban proletariat; hence, the greater focus after 1988
on
building the movement in the cities, particularly Lima.
Terrorism and intimidation were part of the strategy to
neutralize those key individuals whom the SL could not
co-opt,
but almost always on a very selective basis, not
indiscriminately, and usually for political, not military,
reasons. Key targets were local officials, especially
candidates
and elected officers of communities, towns, organizations,
and
unions. Targets also included selected government
employees and
key foreign technicians in rural development projects.
Occasionally, a national figure--such as a general, an
admiral,
or a deputy to Congress--was assassinated to drive the
message
home that no one was safe, that central government and the
military were unable to protect their own.
The 1989 municipal and 1990 national elections went
ahead as
scheduled despite SL threats, but over 400 local districts
(out
of some 2,016) remained bereft of elected officials. Most
foreign
development projects, including those of France, the
Netherlands,
and Japan, with between 500 and 1,000 specialists in the
field,
pulled their people out of rural areas or quietly withdrew
from
Peru entirely after one to three of each group's members
were
killed in 1989-91, and the Peruvian government could not
guarantee the safety of those remaining.
Attacks on Peru's infrastructure sent a similar
message--electrical pylons were toppled, bridges and
railroad
tracks blown up, roads catered, factories bombed. Through
such
actions, the SL was unable to paralyze the country, but
did
impair its function. Living in Lima became more difficult
with
electric-power cutoffs and rationing, water-use limits,
and spot
shortages of key foodstuffs. About 150,000 Peruvians
migrated
each year in 1988 and 1989, according to official
statistics; in
1990 the figure was 328,000.
The expansion of violence by the SL also took its toll
on the
armed forces. Thirty-one military and forty-five police
members
were killed in political violence in 1985; in 1990 there
were 135
military fatalities and 163 police deaths. The expansion
in the
number of provinces under a state of emergency owing to
the
insurgency forced the deployment of an estimated 15
percent to 20
percent of the armed forces, predominantly the army, to
these
areas. Because most of the military's equipment was
originally
purchased for more traditional border defense purposes
rather
than for combating insurgency, there were continuing
shortages of
matériel. In addition, the economic crisis of the late
1980s and
early 1990s reduced the defense budget substantially,
making such
fundamental activities as provisioning and maintaining
troops in
the field quite difficult at times. Helicopter maintenance
was a
particular problem. Under those conditions, human rights
violations by the armed forces and police increased
substantially
in the late 1980s after marked improvement in 1985 and
1986.
In spite of the multiple challenges posed by the
insurgency,
the armed forces also experienced a number of important
successes. These included the June 1988 capture of several
important SL leaders, including Osmán Morote Barrionuevo,
believed to have been the organization's number-two figure
and
chief military strategist. There were also major raids on
SL
safehouses in Lima in 1990-91 that yielded key documents
and
computer files of the organization; one raid reportedly
came
within minutes of capturing Guzmán himself. Significant
military
operations in the Upper Huallaga Valley in 1989 under the
command
of General Alberto Arciniega Huby, the political-military
chief
of the region, restored government control to most of the
area,
at least temporarily, with many SL casualties. Guerrilla
fatalities nationwide increased markedly, from 630 in 1985
to
1,879 in 1990. These military successes were attributed to
a
number of factors, including improved intelligence
gathering and
coordination with the military units in the field, as well
as the
overextension of the SL organization in some parts of the
country
and the SL's use of larger military units in the field. In
addition, the SL met with greater civilian resistance as
peasant
communities organized armed peasant patrols (rondas
campesinas) that served as volunteer defense
forces.
The most dramatic government success was the September
1992
capture in Lima of Guzmán himself along with other
important SL
figures, including at least three members of the Central
Committee. This police Dincote operation resulted from
painstaking intelligence work. Guzmán's capture helped
restore
the tattered prestige of Peru's police forces and gave the
Fujimori government a significant psychological boost at a
critical juncture. Guzmán was tried in a military court
that
October and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
He
began his imprisonment in solitary confinement in a
military
prison on San Lorenzo Island. Documents seized in the
September
safehouse raid led to the subsequent capture of other
important
SL militants at the regional and local levels. Many,
although far
from all, analysts believed that this was the beginning of
the
end for the SL, especially if the government could take
advantage
of the movement to begin implementing local development
projects.
The military and police forces also experienced
considerable
success against a much smaller and more conventional
guerrilla
organization, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement
(Movimiento
Revolucionario Túpac Amaru--MRTA. Organized in 1985 by
disaffected members of the youth wings of several of
Peru's legal
Marxist parties, the MRTA began to compete with the SL for
support, primarily in Lima, parts of the Upper Huallaga
Valley,
and the adjacent jungle. Some of its members were killed
by SL
forces and by the military. A number were captured,
including, in
1988, the MRTA's head, Víctor Polay Campos. By early 1990,
much
of the organization had been disbanded and its jailed
leadership
was trying to work out a negotiated settlement with the
government for the ending of hostilities. But the MRTA got
a new
lease on life in July 1990 when some forty-seven jailed
members,
including Polay, tunneled their way to a mass escape from
Lima's
Canto Grande Prison. The crowning indignity for the
outgoing APRA
administration was that the escapees videotaped the entire
operation.
In the months to follow, the MRTA resumed operations
with
expanded military activities in the Upper Huallaga Valley
and
adjacent jungle, and elsewhere. The MRTA appeared to be
more
willing to consider conversations with government
authorities
than the SL, which adamantly refused any contact. However,
because they were responsible for only between 10 and 20
percent
of the incidents of political violence, it was not likely
that
any settlement that could be reached would significantly
diminish
Peru's insurgency problem. In any event, with Polay's
recapture
in 1992, along with a substantial number of his
lieutenants, the
MRTA appeared to be close to elimination as a significant
guerrilla threat. The same careful police intelligence
work that
brought in Guzmán enabled Peru's government to advance
against
the MRTA.
Data as of September 1992
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