Bloody Sunday

Terrorism in the Andes

The inhabitants of the rugged village of Santiago de Lucanamarca were preparing to celebrate Easter Sunday with music and drink. But all of a sudden about 30 masked men, brandishing axes and hatchets, swarmed into the dusty Andean settlement, setting fire to the municipal hall and pillaging local shops. As the terrified residents scrambled for cover, the intruders rounded up scores of villagers, including wizened old women and barefoot children, and proceeded to stone, hack and shoot many of them to death. After less than two hours, the attackers vanished back into the hills, leaving at least 66 corpses in their wake.

The massacre was a direct affront to the liberal government of Peru's President, Fernando Belaunde Terry. Ever since Belaunde's election in 1980, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a shadowy group of self-styled Maoist guerrillas, has tyrannized the area around the picturesque Andean town of Ayacucho, some 350 miles southeast of Lima. Under the pretext of defying capitalism and central authority, the insurgents have attacked isolated police stations and assassinated villagers suspected of informing against them. In January, Belaunde sent a 3,500-man task force to Ayacucho to deter the rebels. But the guerrillas continue to pick off their enemies. In he past three years 545 people have been killed in the fighting.

Why the most recent attack? Probably because elders from Lucanamarca traveled 90 miles to Ayacucho last month to petition the government for police protection against the Senderistas. Nothing came of the appeal except savage retribution from the very men the villagers feared. Sums up Enrique Zileri Gibson, director of Lima's leading newsmagazine, Caretas: "It is a strategy of terror designed to show the weakness of the army."

Founded in the early 1970s, Sendero Luminoso claims as many as 1,000 members, most of them peasants and students from the mountains. Their eccentric ideology is mingled with a curious form of messianic tribalism. The Senderistas use Inca slingshots, for example, to fling dynamite sticks at targets. The guerrillas' atavistic tactics have evoked a similar response from the Andean villagers. When eight journalists were killed near Ayacucho in January, a government commission concluded that villagers had perpetrated the crime using Senderista methods. The bodies of the newsmen were carefully stripped, washed and turned face down, while their clothes were burned, in accordance with the traditional rites of Andean exorcism. The investigating commission called attention to a fundamental difference between "a Western judicial system and another--archaic, traditional, hidden and sometimes in conflict with the other--which rules the lives and customs of the high Andes."

Such hoary superstitions do not seem to interest Belaunde. The President wrote off the Easter massacre as "an insanity perpetrated by people who are psychologically unhinged." Although he has deployed his troops, Belaunde will need a more detailed and determined policy if he is to save Andean villagers from their ruthless oppressors. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.