Violence returns to Peru's remote jungle
By Simon Romero
Published: March 17, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/17/america/peru.php
CANAYRE, Peru: First the soldiers came to Río Seco, a coca-growing village in the lush mountain jungles of southern Peru.
"They called us subversives and they opened fire," said Benedicto Cóndor, 55, a coca farmer.
They shot and killed four people at close range, including a woman who was five months pregnant, witnesses said. Two children, ages 6 and 1, disappeared and are believed dead.
Four months later, the guerrillas arrived, accusing the villagers of collaborating with the military. They abducted the village leader, who has not been seen since.
The harrowing tales of violence trickling out of the jungle, as dozens of families have fled their villages in recent months, sound as though they were plucked from the worst days of the war against the Shining Path rebels two decades ago. The war, which terrorized the country and took nearly 70,000 lives, supposedly ended in 2000.
But here in one of the most remote corners of the Andes, the combination of a renewed military campaign, a resurgent rebel faction and a lucrative cocaine trade may be bringing it back to life.
The drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley, nine hours by four-wheel drive along switchbacks from the Maoist rebels' Andean cradle of Ayacucho, is Peru's largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.
The Shining Path controls a large part of the cocaine trade here, and as Peru's production has thrived, the rebel group has used its profits to rebuild.
And the reports of rising body counts and civilians killed in the crossfire, as the military and the rebels battle for control of isolated coca-producing hamlets, are rousing ghosts most Peruvians thought were long gone.
"The soldiers think we are all terrorists, and with that idea they believe they can destroy anything that moves," said Alfredo Pacheco, 45, a coca farmer who fled his village of Nueva Esperanza in September, after soldiers torched the huts there in pursuit of the rebels.
Military officials contend the huts were used for processing coca leaves into cocaine.
Coca, the mildly stimulating leaf chewed raw here since before the Spanish conquest, is largely legal; cocaine is not.
A hallowed symbol of indigenous pride, coca is ubiquitous here. Qatun Tarpuy, a pro-coca political party, paints images of it on mud huts. Women harvest coca along the winding dirt road and children dry the leaves in the sun.
It is also nearly impossible to find a coca farmer here who admits his crops are sold for anything other than traditional use, but somehow, studies have found, as much as 90 percent of it goes to produce cocaine.
In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, coca cultivation in Peru increased by 4 percent, reaching the highest level in a decade, according to the United Nations. At the same time, estimated cocaine production rose to a 10-year high of about 290 tons.
Since the Shining Path retreated here after the capture of its messianic leader, Abimael Guzmán, in 1992, it has taken a page from the Colombian rebel group FARC, a leftist insurgency that transfigured itself into an illicit drug enterprise. According to military and antidrug analysts, the Shining Path is now in the business of protecting drug smugglers, extorting taxes from farmers and operating its own cocaine laboratories.
"The guerrillas now operate with the efficiency and deadliness of an elite drug trafficking organization," said Jaime Antezana, a security analyst in Lima who estimates the Shining Path employs about 500 laborers in the cocaine trade, in addition to about 350 armed combatants.
Concerned about the resurrected rebels and mounting cocaine, the government intensified the counterinsurgency campaign last August, and the killings spiked.
The guerrillas killed at least 26 people in 2008, including 22 soldiers and police officers, the bloodiest year since the late 1990s, according to security analysts.
Human rights groups, meanwhile, are seeking inquiries into claims of at least five killings by Peruvian soldiers, the disappearance of two children and the displacement of dozens of families from far-flung villages.
Military officials chafe at the reports of abuses.
"Human rights people say, 'some civilians have been killed, how horrible,"' Defense Minister Ántero Flores Araóz said in an interview in Lima.
As for Rosa Chávez Sihuincha, the pregnant woman killed in Río Seco, he suggested she got what she deserved.
"What the hell was she doing in Vizcatán?" he said. "Was she praying the Rosary? No way. Either she was transporting coca leaves for processing or she was taking chemical products or she was part of the logistics of this Shining Path group."
Officials admit they were slow to recognize what they were up against when Mr. Guzmán, a former philosophy professor, unleashed his peasant revolt in the 1980s, an experience they ponder as they try to decipher today's rebels.
"There are those who say, why worry about a few hundred fighters in the jungle?" said Alberto Bolívar, a counterinsurgency expert. "But they easily forget the Shining Path began their armed struggle in 1980 with just a few hundred guys. Two decades later, 70,000 people were dead."
But the Shining Path appears to have learned lessons, too.
Coca farmers here describe today's Maoists as a disciplined, well-armed force, entering villages in groups of 20 in crisp black uniforms. Little is known about their leaders, though two brothers, Victor Quispe Palomino, with the nom-de-guerre José, and Jorge Quispe Palomino, alias Raúl, are believed to be at the helm.
Soldiers speak respectfully of the rebels' command of the jungle terrain and of their ability to constantly harass with gunfire the forward operating bases, numbering more than a dozen, established in recent months.
"Their columns seem to melt into the jungle," said Maj. Julio Delgado, an officer at a base in Pichari, one of the largest towns in the valley.
A resupply mission from that base on a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter offered a glimpse into the counterinsurgency's challenges. For half an hour, the helicopter flew over what Peruvians call the "ceja de selva," the eyebrow of the jungle, where green canopy on jutting peaks provides impenetrable camouflage.
The helicopter landed at a tiny special forces base in Sanabamba, where commandos pointed rifles at the surrounding terrain, waiting to hear from their hidden quarry. Once it took off again, green jungle quickly swallowed the mountaintop outpost.
Coca harvesters below did not even bother to glance up.
The rebels contend that they no longer assassinate local officials or sow terror with tactics like planting bombs on donkeys in crowded markets, atrocities the group was infamous for in the 1980s. This metamorphosis was confirmed by testimony from villagers who have come in contact with them, interviews with imprisoned rebels and a 45-page analysis written by the rebels, tracing the group's evolution, that was captured by military intelligence here in December. According to the document, they consider Mr. Guzmán a "revisionist" traitor.
Perhaps the most notable difference between the new Shining Path and the old is their relationship with the villagers, which ostensibly favors paternalism over terrorism.
The villagers refer to the guerrillas as "los tíos," the uncles, although any familial affection is enforced by the threat of violence.
It is a volatile arrangement well understood from the highest generals to a fruit peddler like Maria Auccatoma, 48, who sells mangoes near the village of Machente at a spot marked with crosses for the three civilians and five policemen killed by the guerrillas in an ambush.
"We can live in peace," she said quietly, "as long as we obey the uncles."
Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima.
By Simon Romero
Published: March 17, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/17/america/peru.php
CANAYRE, Peru: First the soldiers came to Río Seco, a coca-growing village in the lush mountain jungles of southern Peru.
"They called us subversives and they opened fire," said Benedicto Cóndor, 55, a coca farmer.
They shot and killed four people at close range, including a woman who was five months pregnant, witnesses said. Two children, ages 6 and 1, disappeared and are believed dead.
Four months later, the guerrillas arrived, accusing the villagers of collaborating with the military. They abducted the village leader, who has not been seen since.
The harrowing tales of violence trickling out of the jungle, as dozens of families have fled their villages in recent months, sound as though they were plucked from the worst days of the war against the Shining Path rebels two decades ago. The war, which terrorized the country and took nearly 70,000 lives, supposedly ended in 2000.
But here in one of the most remote corners of the Andes, the combination of a renewed military campaign, a resurgent rebel faction and a lucrative cocaine trade may be bringing it back to life.
The drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley, nine hours by four-wheel drive along switchbacks from the Maoist rebels' Andean cradle of Ayacucho, is Peru's largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.
The Shining Path controls a large part of the cocaine trade here, and as Peru's production has thrived, the rebel group has used its profits to rebuild.
And the reports of rising body counts and civilians killed in the crossfire, as the military and the rebels battle for control of isolated coca-producing hamlets, are rousing ghosts most Peruvians thought were long gone.
"The soldiers think we are all terrorists, and with that idea they believe they can destroy anything that moves," said Alfredo Pacheco, 45, a coca farmer who fled his village of Nueva Esperanza in September, after soldiers torched the huts there in pursuit of the rebels.
Military officials contend the huts were used for processing coca leaves into cocaine.
Coca, the mildly stimulating leaf chewed raw here since before the Spanish conquest, is largely legal; cocaine is not.
A hallowed symbol of indigenous pride, coca is ubiquitous here. Qatun Tarpuy, a pro-coca political party, paints images of it on mud huts. Women harvest coca along the winding dirt road and children dry the leaves in the sun.
It is also nearly impossible to find a coca farmer here who admits his crops are sold for anything other than traditional use, but somehow, studies have found, as much as 90 percent of it goes to produce cocaine.
In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, coca cultivation in Peru increased by 4 percent, reaching the highest level in a decade, according to the United Nations. At the same time, estimated cocaine production rose to a 10-year high of about 290 tons.
Since the Shining Path retreated here after the capture of its messianic leader, Abimael Guzmán, in 1992, it has taken a page from the Colombian rebel group FARC, a leftist insurgency that transfigured itself into an illicit drug enterprise. According to military and antidrug analysts, the Shining Path is now in the business of protecting drug smugglers, extorting taxes from farmers and operating its own cocaine laboratories.
"The guerrillas now operate with the efficiency and deadliness of an elite drug trafficking organization," said Jaime Antezana, a security analyst in Lima who estimates the Shining Path employs about 500 laborers in the cocaine trade, in addition to about 350 armed combatants.
Concerned about the resurrected rebels and mounting cocaine, the government intensified the counterinsurgency campaign last August, and the killings spiked.
The guerrillas killed at least 26 people in 2008, including 22 soldiers and police officers, the bloodiest year since the late 1990s, according to security analysts.
Human rights groups, meanwhile, are seeking inquiries into claims of at least five killings by Peruvian soldiers, the disappearance of two children and the displacement of dozens of families from far-flung villages.
Military officials chafe at the reports of abuses.
"Human rights people say, 'some civilians have been killed, how horrible,"' Defense Minister Ántero Flores Araóz said in an interview in Lima.
As for Rosa Chávez Sihuincha, the pregnant woman killed in Río Seco, he suggested she got what she deserved.
"What the hell was she doing in Vizcatán?" he said. "Was she praying the Rosary? No way. Either she was transporting coca leaves for processing or she was taking chemical products or she was part of the logistics of this Shining Path group."
Officials admit they were slow to recognize what they were up against when Mr. Guzmán, a former philosophy professor, unleashed his peasant revolt in the 1980s, an experience they ponder as they try to decipher today's rebels.
"There are those who say, why worry about a few hundred fighters in the jungle?" said Alberto Bolívar, a counterinsurgency expert. "But they easily forget the Shining Path began their armed struggle in 1980 with just a few hundred guys. Two decades later, 70,000 people were dead."
But the Shining Path appears to have learned lessons, too.
Coca farmers here describe today's Maoists as a disciplined, well-armed force, entering villages in groups of 20 in crisp black uniforms. Little is known about their leaders, though two brothers, Victor Quispe Palomino, with the nom-de-guerre José, and Jorge Quispe Palomino, alias Raúl, are believed to be at the helm.
Soldiers speak respectfully of the rebels' command of the jungle terrain and of their ability to constantly harass with gunfire the forward operating bases, numbering more than a dozen, established in recent months.
"Their columns seem to melt into the jungle," said Maj. Julio Delgado, an officer at a base in Pichari, one of the largest towns in the valley.
A resupply mission from that base on a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter offered a glimpse into the counterinsurgency's challenges. For half an hour, the helicopter flew over what Peruvians call the "ceja de selva," the eyebrow of the jungle, where green canopy on jutting peaks provides impenetrable camouflage.
The helicopter landed at a tiny special forces base in Sanabamba, where commandos pointed rifles at the surrounding terrain, waiting to hear from their hidden quarry. Once it took off again, green jungle quickly swallowed the mountaintop outpost.
Coca harvesters below did not even bother to glance up.
The rebels contend that they no longer assassinate local officials or sow terror with tactics like planting bombs on donkeys in crowded markets, atrocities the group was infamous for in the 1980s. This metamorphosis was confirmed by testimony from villagers who have come in contact with them, interviews with imprisoned rebels and a 45-page analysis written by the rebels, tracing the group's evolution, that was captured by military intelligence here in December. According to the document, they consider Mr. Guzmán a "revisionist" traitor.
Perhaps the most notable difference between the new Shining Path and the old is their relationship with the villagers, which ostensibly favors paternalism over terrorism.
The villagers refer to the guerrillas as "los tíos," the uncles, although any familial affection is enforced by the threat of violence.
It is a volatile arrangement well understood from the highest generals to a fruit peddler like Maria Auccatoma, 48, who sells mangoes near the village of Machente at a spot marked with crosses for the three civilians and five policemen killed by the guerrillas in an ambush.
"We can live in peace," she said quietly, "as long as we obey the uncles."
Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima.
