HMM oo SHINING PAT es ra ot ee SIMON STRONGSHINING PATH Terror and Revolution in Peru Simon Strong rime 8 Oe ook seCopyright © 1992 by Simon Strong All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This book was originally published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers, London, in 1992. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strong, Simon. Shining path: terror and revolution in Peru/by Simon Strong.—Ist ed. P. cm, Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-0-8129-2180-1 1, Sendero Luminoso (Guerrilla group) 2. Peru—History—1968-1992 3. Government, Resistance to—Peru—History—20th century. I. Title F3448.2.$77. 1993 985.06'33—de20 92-27404 BOOK DESIGN BY SUSAN HOOD Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free paper 98765432 First U.S. EditionFor LucianaThe force of revolutionaries is not in their scholar- ship; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. It is the force of the Myth. José Carlos Maridtegui, 1925Acknowledgments ‘This book is based on hundreds of interviews carried out be- tween 1988 and 1991, as well as on documents, articles, and books. In particular I should like to acknowledge my debts to Gustavo Gorriti and his excellent book, Sendero, Historia de la Guerra Milenaria en el Pert (vol. 1), which mainly covers the years 1980 to 1982, and the late Alberto Flores Galindo, whose classic work, Buscando Un Inca, traces the history and spirit of Indian resistance in Peru. John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas was also invaluable. Among the many people to whom I offer my great thanks for providing me with the benefits of their knowledge and expertise in diverse forms are: Jean-Marie Ansion, Luis Arce, Armando Barreda, Héctor Béjar, Enrique Bernales, Bishop Augusto Beuzeville, Rolando Brefia, Manuel Burga, Humberto Cam- podénico, David Chambers, Edmundo Cruz, Iban De Ren- teria, “Elva,” “Enrique,” Colonel Bob Froude, Father Robert Gloisten, José Gonzalez, Ratil Gonzalez, Manuel Granados, Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, César Hildebrandt, General Adrian Huamén, General Sinesio Jarama, General Héctor Jhon Caro, Michael Kenny, Nelson Manrique, German Medina, Caleb Meza, “Miguel,” Mario Munive, Enrique Obando, Adolfo Olaechea, Juan Ossio, James Painter, Salvador Palomino, Mi- guel Angel Rodriguez. Rivas, Julio Roldén, Father Michael Smith, Francisco Soberon, Janet Talavera, Carlos Tapia, Al-x Acknowledgments fredo Torres, Jimmy Torres, Bill Tupman, Colonel Christo- pher Van der Noot, Fernando Yovera, Elvia Zandbria, and Enrique Zileri. I would also like to express my deep gratitude for their sup- port to the library at The Independent, James Blount, Nick Law, Tony Daniels, Bill Hamilton, Sally Bowen, Tony Cava- nagh, Jonathan Cavanagh, and my industrious and eternally unflappable assistant, Ana Maria Diaz. The Peruvian publications of which I have made abundant use are Caretas, Si, Oiga, Que Hacer, Expreso, El Comercio, La Republica, and El Diario. A full bibliography may be found at the end of this book. Organizations that have provided their assistance include the Association for Human Rights (APRODEH), the National Library in Lima, the Library of Social Sciences at the Catholic University, the Centre of De- velopment Studies and Promotion (DESCO), and the Andean Commission of Jurists.Preface Miguel swung the black Saab Turbo 900 over the arched bridge towards Gamla Stan, the old island city at the heart of watery Stockholm. The Italianate facade of one of the biggest palaces in the world reared up in shadow ahead. “That's the King's house,” he said and, nodding with a wrinkling of the nose to the columned bulk on his right, added, “That’s Parliament.” The disdain was so slight it was almost unconscious. Miguel’s fine Latin features and well-groomed mane of dark hair glowed with a cultivated but rather fragile sense of self-assurance. He was bordering thirty yet still a mother’s boy; warm, presentable, considerate, and honest, but burdened with a dream that clouded his good-natured gray-tinted eyes. That dream—in the age of glasnost and perestroika—was Communist revolution, thousands of miles away in Peru. For Miguel, who was committed to the overthrow of not just his own state but of all others as well, Stockholm’s statuesque sym- bols of European monarchy and democracy were quaint relics of history. The worldwide collapse of Communistic regimes was, for him, nothing but a brief interlude in the march of time. They had strayed from the paths of Marx, Lenin, and Mao and thereby brought about their own downfall. The rev- olution would triumph one day as surely as day followed night, as surely as monkey became man. And the revolutionary flame was now burning in the mountains, coast, and jungles of South xixii Preface America. The word was being spread by the Communist Party of Peru, nicknamed Shining Path, which was led by one man: the brother-in-law of Miguel, Abimael Guzman. Thad last seen Miguel four and a half years earlier, when he was visiting Bolivia with his rather earnest but beautiful Swed- ish girlfriend, Kristina. We met in a Chinese restaurant in Cochabamba during Carnival in February 1986. The two pre- vious days had been spent avoiding water bombs and traveling from Oruro, the heart of a mining zone and host to a magnifi- cent Carnival procession that had ended triumphantly, as everybody said it did every year, in blasts of lightning and a torrential thunderstorm that cleansed the fruits of excess, washed away the old agricultural year, and baptized the new. Among the multitude of colorful masked and costumed fig- ures were the ragged characters representing contemporary In- dian peasant life; draped in dirt-brown sacking, their neck labels read DYING OF HUNGER, WIFE OF THE DEVIL, and TODAY IS LIKE, THIS; TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY. While the Cochabamba bus weaved among the Andes, an Indian dietitian had lectured on the Tibetan Book of the Dead before discussing parallels be- tween Oriental religion and subatomic physics. Amid the ubiq- uitous presence of the Far East—there was spirited public concern about plans to let five thousand Chinese families mi- grate from Hong Kong—a large, white American had boasted in a restaurant called the Gandhi International of how, after he had been soaked by a Carnival water bomb, he had promptly punched the culprit’s face in—“His teeth went all over the floor.” The Carnival, the Indians, the poverty, the odd kinship with the Far East, the aggrieved and contemptuous superiority of the North American: It was all a foretaste of Peru. So, too, was Miguel. The first I had read of Shining Path was in a Chilean newspaper article the previous December, and there I was eat- ing wun tun with a man near the heart of the party. Everything I had heard about the revolutionaries had prompted cravings to interview Guzman, and the fortuitous meeting with Miguel seemed a step in the right direction. Miguel—a pseudonym I have given him for his protection— spent the evening praising his brother-in-law and justifying thePreface xiii party's cause, eagerly backed up by Kristina, who was younger than he and at that time even more vigorous a defender of the faith than he was: Where he was soft-spoken, she was strident. They outlined how Shining Path received no help from the Soviet Union or China; how it “confiscated” its weapons from the “genocidal” forces of order; how the atrocities it was ac- cused of were mostly committed by the government and that, when there were excesses, they were sacrifices for the greater good—although Miguel did not always agree with them; how farmers tilled their land by day and bombed electricity pylons by night; and how he had lived with Guzman and his sister, Augusta, for several years. He blasted the popular myth that the rebels trafficked in cocaine; nevertheless, he had some on him and we snorted a little in a dark corner. Almost inevitably, the violence of the ideology preached by Miguel seemed to spill over into his life as an exile. He and Kristina were holidaying in Brazil and Bolivia and unable to cross into his home country in case Miguel was arrested. As it was, they had suffered problems: They were in a fight when she was nearly raped, and on a separate occasion were detained for a day because they had forgotten to carry their passports. How- ever, their visit was very possibly more for business than plea- sure purposes anyway. According to the Peruvian embassy in Stockholm, the passports of several exiles with Shining Path sympathies are laden with stamps for Bolivia and Ecuador. It is presumed that they make contact with the party in order to convey funds and correspondence. By the time of my next meeting with Miguel, in Stockholm in 1990, I was living in Peru, and Shining Path had dramatically expanded, much as Miguel had foretold. It was autumn and, as the dewy concord between the superpowers of the Eastern and Western blocs was being marked by a joint military march through the city by the Moscow Marine Band and the U.S. ‘Army band, Pershing’s Own, Miguel confessed that Kristina, whom he loved deeply, had left him because she had taken against the revolution. “She rejected the violence and felt I dedicated too much time to the party,” he said, as he ate apple strudel on the edge of a tiny, cobbled square on the medieval island city of Gamla Stan. He had had to choose between hisxiv Preface love for her and the revolution. One woman or the masses. Kristina now lived a couple of hundred kilometers away, and they had last seen each other two years earlier. Possibly torn apart deep down by his own doubts about Shining Path, doubts that were smothered by loyalty and love for his family, he nevertheless insisted it would not be long before he returned to the Andes to join the fight. Even as he spoke, Kristina stepped into the square, clutching a baby. The color drained from Miguel’s face as he recognized her and muttered who it was, his eyes transfixed. I was shocked, too. But for me, their paths would not have crossed, and the last time I had seen Miguel was the last time I had seen her. 1 remained seated as he made his approach, hoping it would be over fast. It was. Mutually amazed, they greeted each other nervously, she keeping her distance. After a few minutes of strained conversation, during which, at the behest of Miguel, 1 popped up like a jack-in-the-box before returning to my chair, she backed away, swung her head from his gaze, and vanished down an alley in’a swirl of woolen scarves. Miguel returned to the table. “It wasn’t her baby, it was her sister's,” he murmured, looking down at the empty plate. Personal tragedy would strike him directly a few months later: Shining Path announced that his sister, Augusta, was dead. She died, childless, on November 14, 1988, according to the Peruvian police, although the death was kept a secret by the party's central committee until the police raided a safe house in Lima in early 199] and uncovered documents and a video suggesting she died neither in action nor of natural causes. The video showed Guzman, after asking if the camera angles were right, approaching what was evidently his wife’s body and kiss- ing her on the forehead. Augusta La Torre, or Comrade Norah, was covered up except for her face, which bore a serene expression as if she were asleep. During Guzman’s rambling homage over the corpse, he said: “Her passion, her feelings, and her courage storm against my face. . . . How powerful is the power of the masses, how indis- pensable the party. With the magnificent Marxist-Leninist- Maoist ideology it is capable of generating beings such as Comrade Norah, who prefer to destroy their life rather thanPreface xv damage the Party. . . . In her lamentable confusion of nervous solitude she preferred to be annihilated, to wipe herself out. . . That was what she said. . . . Without the comrade I am in a lesser place; but that shows the death of the comrade; because we have to understand that we are or we are not Commu- nists. Despite Guzman’s implication that, for some unexplained reason, his wife had committed suicide for the sake of the party, repentant letters allegedly confiscated by the police indi- cated that one faction of the core leadership originally accused Guzman of her murder. Simon Strong November 1991Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1 Rise of the Red Sun 3 2 Down the Inca Trail 32 3 In the Flare of the Chinese Lantern 63 4 Gunning for the White Goddess 96 5 Under a State of Terror 125 6 Enter the Church = 159 7 Peru in the Time of Cholera 187 8 AWorldto Win 224 Epilogue 260 Afterword 264 Bibliography 271 Index 277SHINING PATHa PERU Departments Under States of Emergency 1981-90 LORETO TUMBES AMAZONAS CAJAMARCA ‘APURIMAC Fl 1080 23) 1985 rn 1981 . MOQUEGUA TACNA AREQUIPA LE TE TERise of the Red Sun Miguel had left Peru as the guerrilla war heated up in the early 1980s. The direct involvement with Shining Path of his elder sister, Augusta La Torre, who had married Guzman in 1964, made it impossible for him, his other sister, his five brothers, and his parents to remain. Their names were known to the government and they were likely to be persecuted. They fled to Sweden, having long ago abandoned the family hacienda in the Andes along with its tennis court, swimming pool, and serfs, It was eventually attacked by the rebels; Miguel’s uncle, a German-trained dentist, watched it burn. The hacienda had served its purpose. Miguel's father, Carlos, a celebrated lottery winner, bank clerk, and provincial Communist party leader, had allowed it to be used for guerrilla training. Carlos, who had a tendency to name his sons after Soviet leaders—which be- came awkward once the household spurned the Soviets as “re- visionists”—had married off his beautiful daughter Augusta to Abimael Guzman in what was regarded by some of the latter's Peers, albeit with envy, as an adroit piece of social climbing by a semifeudal family on the slide. Despite his nickname, Spar- tacus, other Communists saw Carlos as a carefree drinker and womanizer, a sly operator who did not take the revolution se- tiously, preferring to live among the jaded colonial furniture and tatty carpets of his house near the Plaza de Armas in the city of Ayacucho rather than take to the mountains for the4 SHINING PATH armed struggle. The nearest most Communists of his genera- tion expected to get was the hiss and crackle of Moscow Radio. The family was served by pongos, or house servants, excess to the hacienda’s needs. It was there in the city, at The Three Masks, that Augusta, a teenager, was wooed by the stern, book- ish lecturer who had mesmerized the university since his arrival in 1963. Abimael Guzman became part of the family, a second father to Carlos’s younger children. He brought Christmas presents, smoked, drank beer, preached revolution, and was never with- out a book. He appeared to study almost all the time. The family adored him. “To know him is such a tremendous pride,” said Miguel. “To remember him is to make me cry. What luck I have had! He knew everything; you did not want the time to pass because he spoke so beautifully, with such wisdom and logic. I would do anything for him. But Mama would some- times be mistaken; people would get angry with her and she would cry. Abimael would then explain everything until she felt better. He once told her that her problem was that she was too good. This made her weep all the more. He loves her as a mother.” The polite, bespectacled lecturer who had taken over the reins of the philosophy department at the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga, in Ayacucho, an isolated, decaying city eight thousand feet above sea level and populated mainly by undernourished, poncho-clad Indians, had two doctoral dis- sertations under his belt: “The Kantian Theory of Space” and “The Bourgeois Democratic State.” They were the beginnings of an ideological journey that over the next decade would orig- inate an idiosyncratic form of Maoism given an explosive po- tency by the Indians’ latent, bitter hatred of the state. Guzman was born in the village of Tambo near the old southern port of Mollendo on December 3, 1934, the illegiti- mate son of a prosperous import wholesaler. His father lived with another woman above his store in front of the market. They sold rice and sugar. His mother, Berenice Reynoso, moved in with her infant down the road in a humble wooden house boasting two rooms and a yard where they cooked. When Guznfan was five years old, Berenice died and he wasRise of the Red Sun 5 left to some uncles to care for; eventually, he was sent to live with his father at the Lima port of Callao, where he spent his first year in secondary school. Once more his father moved, this time to the aristocratic, pearl-white southern city of Are- quipa, which rests at the foot of the cone-shaped, snow-capped El Misti volcano. Guzman was now ensconced in a spacious, elegant home in a smart neighborhood; the building has since become a school named the College of the Divine Master. Remembered as a wealthy young student who had ten times as much pocket money as his classmates, Guzman excelled at the exclusive La Salle College, run by Jesuit priests. A teacher recalled him showing off his money and spending it lavishly on ice cream. But at the same time, he was aloof and obscure. He was a loner. He never asked questions in class, never attended parties, and never had girlfriends. Instead, he worked. Guzman was the top pupil in the third year, the third in the fourth year, and the second in the fifth. He consistently won top marks for behavior and tidiness. And he showed a peculiar talent and zest for organizing. In the 1952 school magazine he wrote a report on dividing students into groups to study culture, sports, reli- gion, journalism, and economics: “At the head of each group there will be a leader,” he specified. “The group leader will appoint four assistants . . . there will be a central committee made up of nine member: Aged nineteen, Guzman went on to study law and philoso- phy in Arequipa at the National University of San Agustin. It was there that he came under the spell of a formidable logician who provided the backbone of his education. The friendship was so strong that Guzman dedicated to him the very disserta- tion that marked their intellectual watershed. He called Miguel Angel Rodriguez Rivas his “dear friend and master.” Rivas was his role model. According to his pupils, the philosophy lecturer was a rigorous, even masochistic disciplinarian who was in his office by six o'clock in the morning because he believed too much sleep wasted brain cells. Inflexible and authoritarian, he had a mystical desire for truth. His lectures were theatrical and erudite; they captivated and subjugated. He would sacrifice anything on the sacred altar of reason. Guzman was his prize pupil. Rivas, who was alienated from