Andean Air Mail

Specter of Shining Path dragged out ahead of Fujimori trial

Jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori is scheduled to face his first human rights abuse trial Dec. 10 to answer for his regime’s brutal excesses to tame the Shining Path insurgency during his 10-year rule.

Coincidently, members of his political party spent all last week trying to muster support for a vote of censure against President Alan Garcia’s Cabinet chief, Jorge Del Castillo. They accuse Del Castillo of failing to stem attacks on police by suspected Shining Path guerrillas, now in the employ of cocaine traffickers.

Guerrillas armed with grenades and machine guns stormed a police outpost last month in a remote Andean village in Apurímac, killing one officer. Two weeks later, four more officers were killed in an ambush on a jungle road in Huancavelica.

“On this issue, our presence signifies the clearest and healthiest intention to seek an accord between all political groups to act in unity to combat subversive violence, the violence of terrorism, the violence of narcotics trafficking, or of narco-terrorism,” Del Castillo said in an address to Congress.

“No one should try to seek political points on this issue, let alone over the bodies of dead police,” he added.

Del Castillo maintains that Fujimori’s supporters are trying to pressure Garcia’s Aprista government to lean on the judiciary to benefit Fujimori in his legal battle.

Undeterred, Fujimori’s longtime spokesman, Congressman Carlos Raffo, told CPN radio that Del Castillo is “lying” to Peruvians about the significance of the attacks. He said by foolishly persecuting Fujimori and downplaying the resurgence of the Shining Path, Del Castillo and the Aprista government were perpetrating negligence, and he predicted dire consequences.

For emphasis, he cited an article in that day’s edition of El Comercio.

On page a8, the headline read: “According to the National Police Counter Terrorism Division, remnants of the Shining Path are carrying out several actions of agitation and propoganda in Lima, the Huallaga Valley and the in the jungle of Ayacucho.”

Wait a minute…. Sorry… That wasn’t the headline. That was the headline from El Comercio’s March 29, 2006, edition, a few days before Peruvian general elections.

The headline Raffo was citing on page a8 in that morning’s paper read: National Police Counter Terrorism Division Detects 18 Shining Path members who operating in legal arena, politics and with the masses in Lima.”

Part of the mystique and power of the Shining Path’s terrorism was the constant uncertainty about who the agents of Gonzalo’s “Fourth Sword” were. It could be a colleague at work, a dance teacher up the street, or your child’s math teacher. No one was ever sure. One of the hallmarks of Fujimori’s government — honed to a social science by his defacto intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos — was manipulating that fear for the sake of political control.

And the practice didn’t disappear with Fujimori’s cataclysmic divorce from Montesinos after Montesinos plotted an aborted coup against his boss and was exposed on video bribing an opposition congressman — the latter act precipitating the fall of their government.

Fujimori’s followers hope to stir nostalgic loyalty for the fallen leader, whom many Peruvians consider their savior from a decade of assassinations, car bombs and endless nights plunged into darkness by dynamited electric towers, says Fernando Rospigliosi, a former interior minister and staunch critic of both the Fujimori and Garcia camps.

It is a logical image to conjure for their leader before he steps into the courtroom for live, televised proceedings. It will be the longest look Peruvians have gotten of the 69-year-old on Peruvian soil since he high-tailed it out of country in November 2000, ostensibly to attend the APEC summit in Brunei, but quickly detouring to Tokyo to claim political asylum.

Rospigliosi believes the real threat in the posturing is complacency in the face of Peru’s booming cocaine trade, which now employs remnants of the guerrilla movement for protection, and is carrying out increasingly brazen attacks on the country’s police.

Peru is the world’s second largest cocaine producer after Colombia. In 2006, Peru’s estimated cocaine producing potential amounted to 280 metric tons — an 8 percent increase over 2005 — and it staked a solid 28 percent of the world’s cocaine market, according to this year’s UN World Drug Report.

“It is a tremendous danger to confuse who the more important enemy is,” Rospigliosi recently told Enlace Nacional. “The Shining Path has existed 20 years and continues to exist, but they have turned into criminal thugs for the drug trade, and are not growing or expanding. They are simply salaried employees of drug traffickers.”