NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9741

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From: [e-mail] (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: The Reactionary Shining Path (part 1 of 2)
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Topic 241    THE REACTIONARY SHINING PATH (Artic    Response  1 of  2
harelb
reg.andes     8:30 pm  Jan  2, 1993
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From: [e-mail] (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: THE REACTIONARY SHINING PATH (Article)

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             Full Article Follows
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         ********************************************
          Peru's Shining Path uses terror to impose
           reactionary policies on working people.
         ********************************************
               By Martin Koppel
          From The Militant, April 24, 1992

        On February 15, members of the Shining Path organization
assassinated the deputy mayor of one of the largest
neighborhoods in Lima, the capital of Peru. Maria Elena Moyano, a
leader of the United Left coalition, was blown to pieces by a five-
pound charge of dynamite while attending a barbecue.

        Moyano was killed for opposing Shining Path's call for an
"armed strike" in Lima the day before. Fearing reprisals, many
city bus drivers stayed home during the so-called armed strike.
At the same time, the government responded with a show of force
by deploying 30,000 troops on the streets and flying military
helicopters over the capital.

        Shining Path has stepped up its armed attacks throughout
Peru. Based in the south-western rural regions, it has gained
ground in recent years, extending its activities into the huge
shantytowns surrounding Lima. It has recruited members
primarily among residents of rural towns, peasants, and
slumdwellers.

        Shining Path, known in Spanish as Sendero Luminoso, has
waged a decade-long war against the government. It is a
reactionary organization that uses terrorist methods to impose its
policies on working people and to attempt to restrict their ability
to engage in political activity.

        Sendero Luminoso appeals to the most impoverished and
desperate layers of society that have been ravaged by the
economic and social catastrophe in the country. The group has
gained a hearing because of the crisis of the major capitalist
parties as well as the discrediting of parties that claim to speak
for workers.


=============================
Economic and social calamity
=============================

        Peru, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, has
been devastated by the world economic crisis. Six out of 10
working-age Peruvians are unemployed or underemployed.
Today 94 percent of workers in Lima are earning less than the
1970 minimum wage. More than half of the 22 million Peruvians
suffer from hunger.

        A cholera epidemic has swept the country since the
beginning of last year, killing 2,500 people and afflicting another
quarter million, with no end in sight. The easily preventable
disease spreads because of inadequate sanitary conditions and
lack of access to medical care for the majority.

        Meanwhile, the wealthy businessmen and bankers who
control Peru's economy have further squeezed working people. In
August 1990, just two weeks after his inauguration, President
Alberto Fujimori decreed a series of brutal austerity measures to
meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund for the
repayment of Peru's $22 billion foreign debt.

        The government cut subsidies and lifted price controls,
leading to a 30-fold rise in gasoline prices and a 7-fold increase
for rice, sugar, cooking oil, and other staples. Further sharp price
hikes were imposed in December 1990 and February of this year.
These blows have pushed down workers' incomes even further
and driven small businessmen to bankruptcy.

        Conditions are even worse for peasants, who are almost
half the population and are exploited by wealthy landlords. Many
peasants are forced to grow coca leaf, the raw material for
producing cocaine, because they cannot survive on other crops.
The prices they get for beans, corn, and rice are so low they
cannot afford to plant. The 250,000 coca farmers in Peru account
for 60 percent of the world's coca production, which enriches the
small handful of drug-trafficking capitalists who control the
business.

        Miners, electrical workers, teachers, health workers, and
other unionists have carried out strikes and protests to fight these
oppressive conditions. Peasants have also organized stoppages
and strikes in many areas.

        The regime has responded with ferocious repression. Under
the banner of combating terrorism and drug traffickers the
regime has placed almost half the country, including Lima, under
a state of emergency. Last December the Fujimori government
issued emergency decrees granting the military sweeping powers,
such as the right to requisition property, draft individuals, freely
enter universities and prisons, and jail civilians for treason if they
refuse to cooperate with security forces. These repressive
measures were greatly extended with the government crackdown
that began April 5 (The Militant also has an article in the same
issue reporting on Fujimori's suspension of the constitution,
dissolving of the Congress and the restriction of civil liberties. The
issue also contains an editorial denouncing the U.S. military role in
Peru).

        In Lima, a New York Times report noted, "factories in the
industrial zone look like maximum-security prisons" with
watchtowers, armed guards, dogs, and sometimes army units
standing ground.

=====================================
Government tortures, jails opponents
=====================================

        Torture, jailing, and summary executions have become a
regular feature of the government's so-called antiterrorist
campaign. Peru is the country with the highest number of people
detained and "disappeared" in the wold, In some cases the army
has massacred the entire male population of a town where the
guerrillas operated, claiming the villagers were Sendero Luminoso
supporters.

        Right-wing death squads linked to the armed forces have
targeted journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, and peasant
and trade union leaders. In addition the government has pressed
peasants into "civilian defense" groups under army command in
500 towns.

        The U.S. government has stepped up its military
intervention in Peru under the guise of fighting drugs. Since 1989
U.S. Green Berets have trained 800 Peruvian police in "jungle drug
interdiction." U.S. Marines have secretly trained Peruvian forces
in river and jungle warfare and Drug Enforcement Agency officers
are stationed at the Santa Lucia army base in the Upper Huallaga
Valley, a Shining Path stronghold.

        The White House and U.S. Congress reached agreement last
fall on a $24.9 million military aid package to the Peruvian
regime.

        A recent New York Times editorial proposed setting up a
U.S.-led military force with other Latin American governments to
intervene in Peru and elsewhere on the continent.

        Since 1980 some 20,000 people have been killed and tens
of thousands have fled the countryside as a result of the political
conflict in Peru. The crisis has torn the political fabric of the
country and undermined the regimes' ability to govern.

        The 1990 election of Fujimori was itself a result of the
discrediting of the major capitalist parties. A little-known figure
whose main campaign theme was honest government, Fujimori
defeated President Alan Garcia of the ruling American Popular
Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) as well as the right-wing
candidate, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Once elected he began to
apply Vargas Llosa's "shock therapy" economic policies and allied
himself closely to the the hated military.

        Most of the parties in Peru that call themselves socialist
and communist, grouped in the United Left and the Unified
Mariateguist party (PUM), have also been seriously discredited.
They supported Fujimori in the elections as a lesser-evil
candidate. The United Left then broke up as some of its wings
accepted ministerial posts in the new government. These parties
have been further undermined politically by their support to the
regime's "antiterrorist" campaign of repression.

        These are the conditions that have led to the growth of
Shining Path.

        This group began its guerrilla war in 1980 in the
southwestern city of Ayacucho. The organization was founded by
a group of university professors and students led by Abimael
Guzman, a philosophy teacher. It originated with a split in the
Stalinist Peruvian Communist Party in the mid-1960s between
supporters of the ruling bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing.
Guzman's faction then split from the pro-Chinese group and took
on the name Communist Party of Peru - Shining Path (PCP).

        Shining Path wraps itself in the Stalinist phraseology of
what it calls "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and principally
Maoism." The cult around Guzman, known as President Gonzalo, is
called "Gonzalo Thought."

        While using a lot of rhetoric about fighting on behalf of
workers and peasants, Shining Path is thoroughly anti-working-
class in its political perspective and its actions.

        In a recent pamphlet the group explains, "The war being
conducted by the PCP is mainly a peasant war. Although it also
includes combat and other work in the cities, it is based in the
countryside and its fundamental strategy is to surround the cities
from the countryside." Lima, where on third of the country's
population lives, is viewed along with other cities as "bastions of
reaction" to be strangled from the outside.