‘We Walk With Fear’ : Peru: Terror Coming Out of the Hills

ANDAJES, Peru — This is a village near the clouds. Until 20 years ago, the only way to enter its narrow lanes was to ascend thousands of feet from the valley below by foot or burro. A dirt track was gouged into the Andean mountainside to Andajes in 1968, but the local farmers managed to stay out of Peru’s tortured politics. Andajes never even had a policeman.

Early this year, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas entered the district for the first time and spread the word in 27 villages: All elected peasant leaders must resign.

Most of the mayors and judges and clerks stepped down. Andajes’ community leaders chose instead to travel to Lima and seek protection. They asked the interior minister to send a police unit. None arrived.

Six Are Slain

On the night of April 13, about 30 Sendero guerrillas drove into the village in stolen trucks. They surprised the Andajes officials while they met in the one-room village office to discuss local projects and the Sendero threat.

The masked guerrillas sought out six people by name--five “collaborators” and one cattle rustler--and killed them with single gunshots to the back of the neck, in the dusty open space that passes for a square.

The people cowered in their homes, but the terror pursued them. Over a loudspeaker system meant for village announcements, the rebels harangued them on the virtues of Maoist revolutionary thought and the danger of siding with the “reformist” Peruvian government.

“We will be back,” they said, “and call to account any further treason.”

10,000 Dead in 8 Years

Two months too late, Andajes has its police guard. But few villagers feel safe and most are embittered, as much over the government’s inability to meet a simple request for help as over the guerrillas’ efficient brutality. The village is nursing an acute collective depression as it confronts its incomprehensible initiation into a conflict that has left more than 10,000 dead in the last eight years.

“We are terrified. We walk with fear,” said a 53-year-old peasant woman who would not give her name. A young man at her side added: “We need a doctor or a nurse. We need help. Many children are traumatized--they don’t understand what has happened.”

From its base around Ayacucho in the south-central Andes, Sendero Luminoso has steadily expanded its insurgency across Peru. Areas like Andajes, 175 miles by road north-northeast of Lima, and the coca-growing Upper Huallaga Valley--even the shantytowns of the capital itself--have become battlegrounds. As Sendero’s strength grows, the movement is abandoning the shadows and coming down from the hills.

An organization so secretive that no one is sure whether its leader is still alive has begun orchestrating street protests in the capital. Sendero supporters are known to be infiltrating trade unions and universities. A Marxist newspaper in the capital, El Diario, now openly serves as Sendero’s mouthpiece.

The rebels still seem unlikely to achieve outright victory anytime soon, but they are deliberately exacting a heavy price in areas that had long felt immune from the suffering.

Andajes is a place that seems unripe for revolutionaries, precisely because it is already in many ways an exemplary “communist” community, Andean style. The guerrillas appear to be trying to achieve with violence what has been a way of life for generations.

The robust peasant woman, chatting with a foreign reporter, said with pride that in Andajes, “We don’t have any landowners, we are comuneros (communalists). No one here tends more than one hectare. We don’t have any rich people here with six or seven hectares of land.”

‘Sick With Fear’

She paused to shoo her wandering cow back into its stone corral and added: “We aren’t people who have anything, so we are all equal, we all help each other. When someone needs a house, we all help build it.”

Now, she said, many in the village “have become psychologically ill with fear. Some have gone to Lima to escape.”

Populist President Alan Garcia’s hopes of undermining the guerrillas’ support through rural development programs are withering. Peru is broke and such ventures seem hopelessly ineffectual. The frustration has persuaded many officials that there is no option but to respond to rebel brutality with army brutality, often directed against the peasantry--precisely what Sendero hopes for to galvanize popular disaffection.

Government intelligence forces did achieve a significant tactical victory in May. They arrested Roberto Osman Morote Barrionuevo, believed to be the No. 2 leader in Sendero, in a Lima hide-out a few blocks from the Palace of Justice.

Maoist Strategy

Morote, known as “Comrade Remigio,” was considered to be one of the staunchest supporters of the original Sendero strategy: to follow the late Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s example of patiently building the revolution in the most remote hamlets, and ever so slowly to advance toward the cities.

Now, with Morote in jail, experts on Sendero expect the movement to place less emphasis on that unbending philosophy and to build on its increasing organizational flexibility, evident since 1985. That means intensified urban conflict, particularly in Lima, the capital and home for one-third of Peru’s 20 million people, and more hit-and-run strikes in the countryside.

In May, a captured Sendero member, Victor Acuna, who identified himself as a political officer of the terrorist organization, gave a chilling vision of single-minded commitment to destroy the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

Speaking to the news magazine Caretas, Acuna said that a Sendero congress in February agreed on “a new phase in the struggle: that of armed insurgency in the cities.” If that provokes a coup, all the better, Acuna said, because “it would open the possibility of open confrontation.”

Drug Trafficking Alliance

He said that the movement’s “alliance of convenience” with drug traffickers in Upper Huallaga is now providing money for modern weapons. In the past, Sendero eschewed outside help and relied only on stolen guns and dynamite. Although Sendero prohibits use of cocaine by its militants, Acuna said that foreign sales are fine because the cocaine is consumed by “the American elite” and thus undermines imperialism.

Attacks such as that in Andajes, Acuna said, in which common people die, are “part of the social cost that we have to accept.”

Andajes is six hours from Lima by healthy four-wheel-drive vehicle, but the trip can take two days by public bus and truck. The route spans Peru’s two worlds, north from the capital up the six-lane Pan American highway along the desert coast, and then inland through the rainless Huaura River valley, made verdant by vast irrigation projects. The paved road fades into gravel and begins climbing the empty western slopes of the Andes. It rises out of the mist that envelopes the coast all winter and emerges into a fierce highlands sunlight.

Perilous Switchbacks

Then begins the road that brought the world to Andajes, covering more than 20 miles of perilous switchbacks to travel the four nearly vertical miles that separate Andajes from the village of Churin at the foot of the road. Two-wheel-drive sedans need not apply.

Around the final ridge, Andajes appears, its mud-brick homes clustered together on the dome of a 9,000-foot-high mountain, commanding a perfect defensive vista in traditional Inca fashion. On steep slopes below and above the town are narrow fields of corn, wheat and vegetables, improbably supported by ancient stone-wall terracing. Each day the villagers go out from the town to tend the fields.

At the entrance to the town, a stone plaque salutes the road: “The People Made It.”

Andajes, which means “ancient” in the Inca language, Quechua, might be said to represent the best of rural Peru. Its people, with little help from anyone, built the irrigation aqueduct that brings water to the fields and the drinking water canals that carry fresh water under the cobblestone lanes to each home.

Sharing the Telephone

The people also raised the money for the power lines that provide electricity to the homes, a rare luxury in the Andes. And through their commune’s periodic sales of excess produce, they raised the money for the single telephone that the villagers now share.

The 230 household heads who make up the commune also recently built a small medical post and a simple community hall, but both remain unused for lack of supplies and personnel promised by the government. The people want a sewage system but have not yet been able to get regional government officials to help with the engineering. Now, with the elected village leaders all dead, few residents are hopeful for that or any other project in the future.

“We never made demands to the government, but we were progressing. Now that has stopped. Now we are very demoralized,” said Sotero Bernabe, a 61-year-old farmer wearing a felt hat, intricately patched plaid pants and sandals cut from car tires.

“We have always had a tradition of working communally, cooperating; we didn’t need much money. President Garcia hasn’t helped us. To the contrary, he is destroying us. He took no interest in us, he didn’t answer our request for protection,” Bernabe added.

“And the Senderistas: If they want to come and explain their position, and let the people decide what they think--fine; but (they should) not just come here and kill people.”

‘We Are Afraid’

A relative, Cesar Bernabe, said: “We are going to keep doing our work. But if people keep dying, what will happen? We are afraid. We are between two sides. We have no help from anyone.”

The Sendero guerrillas had carefully laid the groundwork for the incursion. Villagers said rebels had confronted farmers out in the fields in previous weeks, asking for the names of the council officials and of those who belonged to Garcia’s center-left party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance.

On the night of the attack, the tall, thin guerrilla leader had a list identifying the five officials he wanted. They bore titles far grander than the town merits: Mayor Heraclio Segundo, Deputy Mayor Deza Cornejo, Gov. Alejandro Torres Zuniga, Judge Falmer Tito, council secretary Javier Chavarria and suspected cattle thief Juan Segundo. Another half-dozen commune members who were at the meeting were let go.

In a community that cherished its spirit of cooperation, the attack spawned a bitter new emotion: suspicion. People now wonder who gave the names to the Senderistas, or whether it was informers from the neighboring village of San Benito. There, the elected officials quit and a four-man pro-Sendero council was created. All four were detained after the Andajes killings.

Self-Styled 4th Sword

The guerrillas were in the village for about two hours, much of it spent screeching over the loudspeaker at a volume so high that the words were distorted and unintelligible to many residents. They also dynamited and burned the village office, after removing the birth and marriage records. They painted slogans on the walls of houses: “Viva El Presidente Gonzalo,” a reference to the nom de guerre of Sendero founder Abimael Guzman, the self-proclaimed fourth sword of Marxism after Marx, Lenin and Mao.

Residents said the victims never protested or tried to escape, realizing it would be futile. They died quietly, and their bodies lay in the sun for nearly 24 hours until police arrived. The villagers were too terrified to leave their houses and retrieve the corpses.

About 10 families soon fled to Lima, a customary exodus after a Sendero attack. Some Lima slums are virtually transplanted rural villages.

Life in Lima may be safer, but it is desperately poor and often lacks the traditional support networks of the villages. Furthermore, newly arrived Andean peasants soon confront strong racial and class barriers. Peru’s white aristocracy itself is wilting under inflation of 300% to 400% a year.

‘They Have No Hope’

“Until the last decade, people could flood to the cities, children could get an education and hope for a better life than their parents. But now they have no hope of doing so,” said Fernando Rospigliosi, an analyst at the private Center for Peruvian Studies. “This is true in all social classes, from the lowest to the highest.”

“In this climate, you have a terrain of enormous potential for Sendero,” he said. “The degree of decomposition is terrible.”

Raul Gonzalez, a journalist and prominent Sendero watcher, says the rebels have resolved to exploit that decay through urban organizing and rural attacks over a far wider area. Their aim is to polarize the country, he says.

“Now, it is not the long war of Mao, but a war to produce a coup today,” Gonzalez said. “They now see a two- or three-year deadline to produce a coup, through confrontations like that in Andajes.”

After the killings, the village was immediately declared an emergency zone, where civil rights may be curtailed, and a 16-man police detachment arrived a few weeks later. The garrison is still temporary, however, and the people are fearful that it may be withdrawn.

25 Fatherless Children

Ana Rojas, 31, the widow of council secretary Javier Chavarria, has been appointed school cleaner to help her survive. She has just one child, a 10-year-old daughter. In all, 25 children were left fatherless by the six killings.

“What has happened has affected everyone. There’s not much spirit anymore,” said high school director Santiago Avalos. “There is a great deal of apathy, a lack of attention. The students still haven’t calmed this psychosis that has developed. The same is true for the workers in the fields.”

“We don’t know if we can save this (school) year. The people are disoriented--they don’t know whom to blame,” Avalos said. “The government promised a lot but did nothing. Many villages like this have been forgotten. But the armed struggle also has offered no benefits to the people. And some people think they will return, that it will happen again.”