The return of terrorism? Peru debates massacres, drugs and politics

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Sendero Luminoso (SL), known in English as Shining Path, the brutal terrorist group that marked Peru’s recent history, reappeared in the country’s political life with an attack that left 16 dead and the doubt, with important political repercussions, as to whether terrorists still exist under that acronym.

The dead, including four minors whose bodies were burned, are the target of a ruthless attack committed just fifteen days before the most controversial and polarized elections in the recent democratic history of the country.

Authorities, politicians, analysts, and citizens disagree, however, on whether SL, of dreadful memory, is really behind this attack whose timing, objectives, implications, and story itself are questioned and add to the already tense political situation.

REAL TERRORISM

For the Peruvian right wing, represented by candidate Keiko Fujimori and her main advisor on Interior issues, former minister Fernando Rospigliosi, the attack is categorically the responsibility of SL.

With a campaign focused on linking her rival, leftist Pedro Castillo, to past political violence, the events in the isolated and conflict-ridden area known as Apurimac, Eme, and Mantaro River Valley (VRAEM) would seem to reinforce their position.

Their claim is that terrorism is a real danger, that Maoist communism is still lurking and that if Fujimori does not win, indiscriminate ideological violence will be the order of the day.

The right-wing is joined by the Armed Forces and the Police, whose Anti-Terrorism Directorate confirms the “certainty” that “Shining Path” and not “drug traffickers” were responsible for the attack, an assertion made almost two days before the first agent arrived in Vizcatán del Ene, where the attack took place.

“SL” DOES NOT EXIST

For many terrorism experts, investigative journalists, and even – until last Monday – for law enforcement, SL no longer exists.

“They are facts based on evidence: SL, as an ideological, political, and military structure, is finished with the fall of “Comrade Artemio”. And what is left now in the VRAEM? An organization that, under the paramilitary structure of the subversives, has become a group of mercenaries at the service of drug trafficking,” Alberto Otálora, former defense minister, told Efe.

That thesis is the one used by the forces of law and order, which for years have linked this armed group to drug trafficking in the VRAEM, and categorically called their actions “narcoterrorism”.

The VRAEM area produces approximately 70% of the more than 400 tons of cocaine exported each year, mainly to the United States, Europe, and Brazil.

“There are veterans of armed subversion who now call themselves the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP) and who work in favor of drug trafficking routes,” Otárola insisted.

“COMRADE JOSÉ”

With no political ambition to take control of the state, there remains only a group of some 100 to 200 people who follow Victor Quispe Palomino (“comrade Jose”), the last survivor of the three brothers who has led this criminal gang.

Before the attack, Fujimori adviser Rospigliosi had warned of imminent SL actions, and even hours before the attack he spoke of Vizcatán as a hot spot.

He was also the first to disseminate, together with Pedro Cateriano (former Minister of Defense, an ally of Fujimori), crude photos of the massacre on social networksm along with open questions to Castillo about his capacity to confront “terrorism”.

In Otálora’s opinion, all this controversy only revolves “around the favoring or not of one of the electoral candidacies”, something “wrong and that attempts against the lives of the thousands of Peruvians who lost their lives due to terrorist violence”.

THEORIES

From the place of the facts, a village where drug trafficking is the main economic activity, the population does not dare to venture who is behind the massacre.

The attack in fact bears little resemblance to historical Sendero Luminoso actions: neither speeches, nor uniforms, nor tactics, nor political practices (they stole the corpses) are the usual ones.

“This has been a criminal massacre, plain and simple. And it has two possible explanations. One is that it was an express attack by the Quispe Palomino family to benefit Fujimorismo,” Jaime Antezana, one of the country’s leading investigators on drug trafficking and terrorism, told Efe.

“This week Castillo is leading the polls, and the right-wing is getting desperate. There were already spokesmen for Keiko talking about terrorist threats, car bombs, red flags, messages that ‘terrorism’ asks not to vote for Keiko…. That is why they want ‘Sendero’ to be the one to perpetrate the massacre, a self-fulfilling prophecy”, the analyst indicated.

He supports this thesis by pointing out the clear pattern, repeated in 2011, 2016 and 2021, between attacks in the VRAEM and elections in which Fujimori has something at stake.

Antezana’s other hypothesis is that they were members of Quispe Palomino’s gang acting on their own as hitmen to carry out “a tailor-made assault” to put terror on the country’s political agenda. “In any case, either they are Quispe or they are hired killers, but it is not terrorism,” he said.

Between 1980-2000 Peru lived through a bloody conflict unleashed by the Shining Path and the Marxist group Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which caused some 69,000 deaths, according to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR).

Source: efe