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The Real War in Peru
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17051 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1990 |
2,447 Words |
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Gregory Grant
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While all eyes in Washington on stemming the flow of cocaine from South America's Andean region, the Peruvian government is engaged in a violent and desperate internal war that so far shown few signs of abating. Guerrillas operating in the central Andean highlands as well as in the urban areas continue to stymie government counterinsurgency efforts. As the government founders, unable to develop an adequate response to the guerrillas, the death toll from the fighting continues to rise.
A Peruvian Senate Commission reported at the beginning of this year that 18,000 Peruvians have died since May 1980; the death rate reached 8 people per day in 1989, a 61 percent increase over the previous year. The high rate of killings so far this year indicates that figure will climb even higher. At least $16 billion worth of damage has been inflicted on Peru's brittle economy.
The extremist Maoist insurgency Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) remains the largest and most effective of Peru's five known insurgency movements. Sendero Luminoso was founded in 1970 by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy and Maoist activist at the University of Huamanga in the city of Ayacucho. Guzman used his position as personnel director at the university to ensure that only those with a like ideologic bent worked there. Establishing a dedicated cadre at the university, Sendero soon began to expand its efforts into the surrounding countryside, recruiting heavily among the peasant Indian communities that dot the central Andean region. The hyper-dogmatic movement went underground in 1978 following an ideological clash with the mainstream communist party at Huamanga University, only to resurface in violent fashion on May 17, 1980, during the presidential election in a series of dynamite attacks on government polling places in Ayacucho.
The Peruvian government has vacillated between a repressive military response to Sendero and social, economic, and political initiatives pursued halfheartedly since 1985. In the first years of the conflict, counterinsurgency operations were handled primarily by police forces. Local commands of the Civil Guard were given responsibility for security inside the city of Ayacucho as well as in the surrounding highland areas. For more than two years, from its arrival on the scene in May 1980 to December 1982, the government of Fernando Belaunde took virtually no action against Sendero, enabling the nascent guerrilla movement to consolidate its operational base in Ayacucho Province.
The government initially sent into the conflict zone only small police units. These included the brutal Sinchis, a counterinsurgency unit under police command originally trained with assistance from the U.S Green Berets in the 1960s. Responsible for torture, rape, mutilation, and murder, the Sinchis and their vicious and ineffectual tactics drove many of the region's militant young into Senderista ranks.
On December 21, 1982, President Belaunde and his cabinet finally approved Supreme Decree 068-82, ordering the security forces to take control of the Ayacucho/Apurimac region and restore order. On the afternoon of December 23, 1982, air force transports carrying the first two battalions of army troops landed in Ayacucho. The Ayacucho emergency zone was placed under the command of Army General Noel Moral. The period that followed is known in Peru as the "dirty war" and was accompanied by all the characteristics of such episodes in Latin America-mass
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