Terror on the Left

On September 12 in Lima, Peru, a special SWAT team captured Abimael Guzman, head of the Peruvian terrorist organization, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). For 12 years Guzman, a former university professor, had capitalized on the centuries-old economic and racial divisions in that country, brainwashing and militarizing an organization which grew to an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 members.

Pictures taken of him after the arrest dispelled the romantic notions many people had regarding Guzman, whose overthrow of Peru's government seemed inevitable only months ago and whose ability to evade police entrapment was legendary. The newspapers ran photos of an overweight, dissipated, 57-year-old man, behind the bars of a jail cell, not at all the image of a heroic liberator. The pictures serve also as a metaphor for the organization headed by Guzman.

Sendero Luminoso is nothing more than a rigid, unscrupulous group of ideologues bent on the violent reordering of Peruvian government and society in their own image and likeness. In these 12 years, the Senderistas first terrorized peasants in the Andean highlands, then Mestizos along Peru's coast, and in the last many months rich and poor in Lima. Sendero's atrocities and no less draconian countermeasures by government security forces have resulted in approximately 27,000 deaths.

The economic costs of Shining Path sabotage have run somewhere in the neighborhood of $22 billion - six times the value of Peru's annual exports. People from every strata of Peruvian society have nothing but scorn and fear for the Senderistas. They call them terrucos--a term of opprobrium, roughly translated as "little thugs." The vast majority of the poor--to whom Guzman might be expected to appeal--see Sendero as one more threat in their lives.

THERE ARE NO redeeming qualities about Sendero Luminoso, despite a strong and somewhat successful national and international propaganda campaign. Its suggestive slogans (advocating "people's war" to be "fought by the masses themselves" for a "planet free of all oppression") are contradicted by Sendero's own tactics. According to the Canadian Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America, thousands of Sendero's victims have been defenseless civilians; Sendero frequently seeks to justify the practice of murdering those whom it views as political or class enemies; it has repeatedly threatened and killed popular leaders such as Maria Elena Moyano (see "She Lives in Us," page 16). The leftist propaganda set forth by Sendero must be seen for what it is--lies and half-truths, cloaked in the rhetoric of a revolution that is indeed needed in Peru. It is true that such propaganda holds a certain attraction for anyone who is justice oriented. But Abimael Guzman's violent solution to his country's problems is simply unacceptable for people of faith and good will. The capture and sentencing to life imprisonment (Peru does not practice capital punishment) of this dangerous criminal and 200 of his cronies holds promise for an end to the scourge of Sendero. As one Peruvian said, "This is the first of a hundred steps we have to take in order to redeem our country." Economic, racial, and above all, moral restructuring must come nonviolently in Peru. But at least the cancerous spread of Sendero Luminoso may finally have been halted.

Joe Nangle, OFM, was outreach director of Sojourners when this article appeared.