After the Ayacucho riots, one of Peru's leading experts on Sendero, Carlos Tapia, had endorsed the official view that the radical faction of Sutep led by Huaynalaya is a 'front' for SL - an exponent of what Tapia calls neosenderismo, vocally dissociated from the armed men in the jungle while promoting such actions as the blocking of highways and the seizure of public buildings. SL, he said, had become active in the takeover of unions and social organisations. Tapia also said that the largest faction of SL, the 'unarmed' one led by imprisoned party founder Abimael Guzmán, and comprising about 600 members within jails and about 1,200 on the outside, is involved in 'political work', much of it in universities. The recent launch of a book presenting SL's current outlook under the guise of a novel (La otra versión, by Gabriel Uribe) was held at Lima's Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, without the prior knowledge of the university authorities. Tapia says that the organisers were actually from two other universities, Enrique Guzmán and La Cantuta. He adds that this dovetails with reports he has received about SL reactivating its 'study circles' at the Universidad Nacional del Centro. The Guzmán faction, he claims, has been stepping up its political proselytising 'in Aucayacu, in Comas, within several universities, continuing the discourse of the 1970s.' They have, he says, entered the fourth stage of the 'people's war', aimed at strengthening the ideology and 'attracting the masses'. Under Reátegui's predecessor, Fernando Rospigliosi, the interior ministry claimed to have detected SL 'infiltration' in seven universities: Universidad Nacional del Altiplano (Puno), Universidad de Huánuco, Universidad José Faustino Sánchez Carrión (Huacho), Universidad Nacional del Centro (Huancayo), La Cantuta, Universidad del Callao, and Universidad San Marcos. Francisco Delgado de la Flor, former chairman of the national assembly of university rectors, has said that lecturers who had been dismissed ten or twenty years ago for advocating 'SL ideology' were being reinstated - particularly at San Marcos and La Cantuta. A suspicious June incident portrayed as a senderista raid on a small bivouac of military engineers in Huanta, Ayacucho, prompted one senderólogo, retired General Eduardo Fournier, to proclaim that this confirmed fears that Sendero had embarked upon a process of 'political and military reorganisation'. Not all experts agree with this view, at least in its entirety. Former interior minister Rospigliosi recently told a seminar on the 'resurgence' of SL organised by the Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos, 'I don't believe Sendero Luminoso wants to return to fighting. It is very unlikely that they should regroup and produce a resurgence of the movement.' The bulk of the senderistas, he said, are in contact only with their imprisoned comrades and devote themselves wholly to legal activities. He concurs with Tapia that neither of the two remaining armed groups of senderistas is capable of acting beyond their present zones of influence (the Ene and upper Huallaga valleys). Tapia cites the arguments presented in Uribe's novel as proof that SL 'has not abjured armed struggle'. In the wake of the Ayacucho riots, though, Tapia suggested that the government's attention should focus on the ideological work being carried out by the senderistas. The new generations, he said, have abandoned the old strategy of attacking the civilian population, and while the security forces have the experience to defeat SL militarily, they could be caught unawares by the shift in political strategy. Old weapons for new challenge?
Reátegui's response looks much like using the old weapons - the antiterrorism legislation of the Fujimori era - to confront a new problem. It is worth mentioning that the charge mentioned by officials, inciting terrorism, has come under attack recently in connection with the retrials in civilian courts of the SL and MRTA members convicted by military courts. It has been the practice to charge captured guerrillas with both terrorism and inciting terrorism, as this allowed the imposition of longer prison terms. In the case of the new batch of detainees, the big question is whether the authorities will be able to prove that they were actually promoting terrorist acts, based chiefly on the fact that the new radicals use language and rhetoric that has points of contact with that of the senderistas when they were up in arms. We have not been able to locate any legal expert who, on the strength of what has been revealed to the public, believes that the government has much of a case. The one truly puzzling component of Reátegui's announcement was the reference to some of the detainees being members of the MRTA, which apart from having been long inactive has not been seen as involved in any attempted comeback. The minister did make an allusion to some people 'with outstanding arrest warrants against them', but he did not link this explicitly to any of those arrested over the past half-month.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 1095 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
