Peru Behind Bars with the Senderistas

By Laura Lopez/Lima

Cynthia McNamara is not your typical tourist. For more than 15 years, the 39- year-old Philadelphia-born anthropologist has prowled the back roads of Africa and Asia and lived for stretches in Spain and Iran. Last December, however, as McNamara was finishing up a two-year trek through South America, she stumbled into a nightmare involving Peruvian officials and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the shadowy, Maoist-oriented guerrilla group committed to overthrowing the Lima government. Her terrifying sojourn ended two weeks ago, as abruptly as it had begun, but not before she had spent four months in a prison, where she lived alongside members of one of the world's most secretive rebel groups.

McNamara's brush with horror began Dec. 4, when four policemen stopped her as she strolled through the southern Peruvian town of Ayacucho. At first they claimed they were conducting a passport check. Then, according to McNamara, the police searched her hotel room and confiscated "suspicious" articles -- medicine, vitamins, a ball of string and tourist maps. In the local jail, McNamara got a hint of the problems to come. "No one told me what was going on," she said. "But the word terrorismo drifted down the staircase."

Within two days the Peruvian authorities charged McNamara with the murder of two government officials who were killed in a 1987 Sendero Luminoso attack near the Andean town of Vilcashuaman. The evidence against her was flimsy: the two survivors of the assault said it was led by a tall gringa, local slang for any non-Indian woman from the Peruvian coast. Both victims met McNamara and said she was not the killer, but to no avail. Though McNamara claimed she was in Puquio, a town more than 200 miles away, when the murders occurred, records from the hotel where she had been staying on that fateful day had disappeared.

According to McNamara, she was interrogated for a week by Peru's counterterrorism police and Interpol before she was allowed to call a lawyer ( or the U.S. embassy. On Dec. 28, McNamara was transferred to Canto Grande, Peru's maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Lima. She was housed in a cellblock where some of Sendero Luminoso's most notorious leaders are kept, awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes ranging from sabotage to assassination.

Considered one of South America's most secure jails when it opened in 1986, Canto Grande no longer deserves that reputation. Its closed-circuit televisions and searchlights are broken. Inside the four-story women's cellblock, the inmates have taken over and turned it into a Senderista training camp, complete with red felt and tinsel banners that proclaim LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!

When the daily chores are done, the prisoners attend political-education classes or learn to knit and sew. Whenever possible, they smuggle the goods to the outside for sale, donating the profits to the Senderista cause. Several times a week around noon, the 63 Senderista women and 120 men in a nearby cellblock break for an "agitation," in which they rattle the bars and hurl earsplitting insults at their guards. For recreation, there is volleyball in a pavilion's patio, under red-painted panels that pay homage to Marx, Lenin and Mao. Close to the top of the walls the Senderistas have daubed, in red paint, a paraphrase of the Chairman's poetry: NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THOSE WHO DARE TO SCALE THE HEIGHTS.

In an interview with TIME inside Canto Grande two weeks ago, McNamara was careful to refer all questions about Senderista politics to the smartly dressed, unfailingly polite "delegate" inmates who run the cellblock. Delegate Dalila claimed that all the pavilion's inmates belong to the "authentic" Peruvian Communist Party, which is how Senderistas see themselves. These true believers disdain both the Soviet Union, which they consider to be as imperialist as the U.S., and today's China. Their goal is to establish a workers' state along the lines of Mao Zedong's China. "We believe in armed struggle to take power," said Dalila. "We will fight generations to take it, and we are ready to die if we have to." They are also ready to kill. The Senderistas are said to have murdered thousands. While many of their targets are government officials and police and military personnel, they have also carried out "summary trials" of villagers and have bombed a train carrying tourists to Machu Picchu.

Constantly demanding their rights, the inmates have gained free passage within the cellblocks and have pressured authorities to let visitors bring food and other goods. But the rebels believe the only reason the government allows them to operate this way is to provide a pretext to kill them all, in a repeat of the massacres that occurred when authorities put down Sendero uprisings in three penitentiaries in 1986. More than 250 rebels died in the incidents. Those fears were fanned last Easter, when, according to prisoners, paramilitary troops attacked the men's pavilion at Canto Grande with fire bombs and heavy weapons, wounding eight.

In the midst of McNamara's interview with TIME, orders for her freedom suddenly arrived. The lower-court judge investigating her case decided to drop it because of insufficient evidence. That decision must be ratified by a superior court, however, before the matter is closed. Minutes after receiving the good news, the prisoners gathered downstairs to bid the American farewell. "Goodbye to Canto Grande," they sang in Quechua, exchanging the traditional Andean lyrics for revolutionary rhetoric. "I am going to fight for justice . . . for the peasants and the poor, armed with a gun and a flag . . . I will fight the fascists."

So far, the government has refused to comment on McNamara's case or explain why she was arrested. Free once again, McNamara will stay in Peru until her name is cleared. "It is outrageous that one can be a completely innocent tourist and be thrown into a dangerous situation like this," she said. "But I have many wonderful memories of Peru. Nothing can change that."