mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2009 10:01 am Post subject: Shining Path rebels stage comeback in Peru |
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(CNN) -- A brutal Maoist guerrilla group that terrorized Peru during the 1980s but pretty much disappeared when top leaders were captured in the 1990s is making a resurgence.
Police in Lima, Peru, carry coffins of officers killed in a November ambush by suspected Shining Path rebels.
In the latest of several recent attacks by the Sendero Luminoso, known in English as the Shining Path, 14 government soldiers were killed in an ambush this month. It was, a Sendero leader said afterward, "the strongest blow" against the government in quite a while.
It also was not an isolated incident.
"It's like that horror movie, 'Friday the 13th,' " said Bernard Aronson, President George H.W. Bush's assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989 to 1993. "You think you've killed the beast, and the beast returns."
Sendero declared war on the government in 1980, carrying out bombings and assassinations that by official accounts killed more than 30,000 Peruvians during the next 20 years. Another 30,000 Peruvians died at the hands of the government and paramilitary groups in the fight against the Sendero, a government commission determined in 2003.
In the countryside of central and southern Peru where the rebels were strongest, Sendero waged an assassination campaign against government officials, the heads of state-owned farming collectives, business owners and even peasants who opposed the guerrillas. Political rivals, including other Marxists or leftists, were not immune either.
Sendero also conducted daring attacks in Lima, the capital. Rebels blew up electrical transmission towers to cause citywide blackouts, bombed factories and set off explosives near government offices and inside the ruling party's political headquarters. Assassinations were carried out with seeming impunity on the streets of Lima.
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"I've been watching them reappear now with a sense of dread ... like dying embers that have been brought back to life," said retired four-star Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was drug policy director for President Clinton.
Yonah Alexander, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and director of its International Center for Terrorism Studies, said, "The left-wing terrorists are still alive and kicking."
Aronson, the former assistant secretary of state, said he wonders whether Sendero is as strong as it was 20 years ago.
"It's unclear whether this is just a localized version of Sendero or a movement that has some legs," he said. Nonetheless, he added, the situation is "worrisome."
Although Sendero was never popular with Peruvians, Alexander sees an ideological bent to the resurgence.
"You can arrest someone," he said. "You can kill someone. But you can't kill an idea."
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http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/04/21/peru.shining.path/
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The CNN report on the re-emergence of the Shining Path rebels (Sendero Luminoso) almost buries the most important element of the story. The terror unleashed by Sendero (massacres of civilians, the desire to carry out Pol Pot's dream of decapitating the urban and creating a utopian rural society, targeted assassinations, infrastructure destruction etc.) is financed by their access to drug money.
It is easy to forget that Sendero was among the most brutal and merciless the Western Hemisphere has ever seen. The arrest of the movement's mastermind, Abimael Guzman, sent it in a downward spiral. It almost disappeared. And now it is back.
The cocaine corruption and accompanying terror of Latin America knows no ideological stripe. It fuels the FARC in Colombia and the paramilitaries (see this latest indictment of the Colombian paramilitary leader to see the role cocaine plays in that movement).
There are several things of concern here, beyond the immediate danger Sendero poses in Peru. One is that is shows how badly beaten groups (such as the FARC) can survive and revive, given the right economic conditions (access to coke money) and political conditions (deep disillusionment with the government, government corruption etc). They don't simply disappear. |
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/04/the_return_of_the_shining_path_1.php |
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