E-Notes

The Return of Shining Path

by Alberto Bolivar

April 5, 2002

Alberto Bolivar is an Associate Scholar in FPRI’s Center on Terrorism and Political Violence and a professor of Revolutionary War, Geopolitics, and Intelligence in Lima.

On March 20, 2002, three days before President Bush’s arrival in Peru, a car bombing near the American embassy in Lima killed nine people. Peruvian interior minister Fernando Rospigliosi has said that the government believes the attack was meant as a message for President Bush, not Peru’s President Alejandro Toledo, and that it was related to the September 11 attacks.

Although Peru’s National Counterterrorism Directorate (DINCOTE) and what remains of its intelligence community are following several leads to determine who is responsible, all indicators point to Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), the Maoist organization founded in 1970 that has caused 35,000 deaths and $25 billion in damages since it turned to violence in May 1980.

Over the 1980s Peru’s response to the new threat was political inaction. It lacked any comprehensive or coherent counterinsurgency strategy and had no legal framework to support the political, intelligence, and military actions needed to defeat first Shining Path and then the pro-Cuba Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA). This inaction allowed the insurgents to advance their political, military, and psychological goals, destroying and displacing Peru’s state presence in the hinterlands and carrying out several bombings in Lima. By the early 1990s, Peru seemed to be at the brink of total collapse. When Alberto Fujimori took office as president in July 1990, Shining Path was talking of “strategic equilibrium.” Knowing that without defeating the insurgents the country could not develop, Fujimori used the intelligence service as the most handy tool to root out both insurgent groups. He made sure that DINCOTE was provided ample support from the intelligence community as it led efforts that targeted the leadership structures of both Shining Path and MRTA.

These goals were achieved between June and September 1992.After the leaders’ capture, the organizations crumbled. But while defeated at the strategic level, they remained tactical nuisances. Thus while Fujimori asserted in 1995 that both groups had been defeated, in December 1996 the MRTA took the Japanese ambassador’s residence in a standoff that lasted for 124 days and ended in a spectacular hostage rescue operation by Peruvian special forces in April 1997. And in another attack prior to March 2002, in October 1999 Shining Path managed to ambush a high-ranking military delegation that was stated to be negotiating the surrender of an active column in the central jungle. Shining Path’s comeback was facilitated by the critical errors made in the last decade by three Peruvian presidents.

Alberto Fujimori

After the capture of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman in 1992, Fujimori began to believe his own propaganda: “Sendero has been defeated. I defeated it.” This kind of statement was very useful in elections, as his landslide victory in 1995 demonstrated. He mistakenly disbanded the Peruvian National Police’s National Counterterrorism Directorate in late 1992, not appreciating that Shining Path was an adaptable virus that could quickly reemerge if not vigilantly controlled. It proved to be far too soon to dismantle the police intelligence effort that had been so effective over his first two years in office. DINCOTE’s chief was sent to a bureaucratic post, and the National Intelligence Service—headed by Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s shadowy national security adviser— absorbed many of DINCOTE’s personnel, including Colonel Benedicto Jimenez, author of Peru’s operational intelligence strategy. With ambitions of winning another presidential term in 2000, Fujimori permitted 90 percent of the intelligence effort to be devoted to harassment of the political opposition. The outcome was, first, the colossal intelligence failure of early 1995 in the brief war with Ecuador, where Peru lacked knowledge not only of Ecuadorean intentions but also of its capabilities, and second the MRTA standoff at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in late 1996.

Fujimori’s actions were all the more irresponsible given that intelligence indicators had warned since 1993 of a new Shining Path in terms of ideology, appeal to the population in the countryside, and extensive “silent propaganda” and political indoctrination activities, mainly in Lima’s shantytowns. He knew that Shining Path was entering into a stage of “strategic hibernation” that could allow it to return with a certain degree of strength, but acknowledging this fact would have been a concession to those critics who had warned that the country could not lower its guard against the insurgency and admitting to the politicization and misuse of the intelligence service. Following Fujimori’s downfall, corruption and abuse scandal after scandal has surfaced, pointing mainly to Montesinos and the intelligence community, which was disbanded by Fujimori himself.

Valentin Paniagua

Paniagua took office as transitional president in late November 2000 with the principal mandate of ensuring free and clean elections in April 2001 and uncovering and rooting out the corruption of the previous regime. The dissolution of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) was completed, notwithstanding new early warning indicators pointed to some degree of accelerated restructuring of Shining Path. This exemplifies the risk that the late French spymaster Count Alexandre de Marenche identified and wrote of: that if intelligence services are allowed to enter into domestic politics, then when regimes change, the new administration gets rid of both the bad and the good aspects. In practical terms, Peru became a country without eyes and ears.

Even more important, the transition president changed the legal and administrative standing of the imprisoned terrorists, including in particular the leaders. After reforms meant to adapt the prisoners' living conditions to new “international standards,” prisoners were able to read the news, watch TV, gather in the prison yards, receive frequent visits from lawyers, relatives, and friends, and have access to a public pay telephone. Shining Path’s leaders now had the opportunity to hold high staff meetings, assessing what was happening politically on the outside, and to communicate their comments and decisions to their people in the outside world. This is significant because the March 20 car bombing, like all Shining Path’s past military actions, responded to a specific political goal when the sociopolitical environment was propitious. Meanwhile, Shining Path began to talk of reaching an accord that would allow it to reinsert itself into the legal political life. Meanwhile, in intelligence, during Paniagua’s time in office Peru’s Congress passed a law that eliminated the one positive Fujimori legacy: the tight centralization of all intelligence efforts.

Alejandro Toledo

Toledo, who had fought valiantly against Fujimori and Montesinos, defeated former president Alan Garcia Perez (1985-90) in the run-off election. But since taking office in July 2001, he did little until recently to assess and face Peru’s domestic threats, including the new Shining Path threat within and another potential threat from without, Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). Again, the few remaining intelligence channels began to inform of Shining Path’s organizational efforts in several parts of the country. Meanwhile, Toledo faced several problems. First, he lacked authority given that his own party, Peru Possible, lacked the unity and clarity required to meet the ideological demands posed by the new Peruvian Left. Second, the government’s plans lacked programmatic and ideological coherence, thus favoring the Left. Third, he had the economic recession to deal with. Finally, his attempts to reform the armed forces have gotten off poorly. All of this has led to a dismal 25 percent approval rating.

With a government preoccupied with all of these sociopolitical distractions, an attack by Shining Path was inevitable, just as a major terrorist attack should have been predictable in late 1996, when Fujimori’s government was preoccupied with all the problems it had created for itself. And MRTA indeed took the moment to strike. Shining Path’s imprisoned leaders clearly must have decided the time was right and given the instruction to strike again to the new operational teams. Surely a better moment could not be found than the eve of the first official visit of an American president to Peru, with Toledo’s legitimacy already imperiled.

Addressing Congress after the attack, Toledo announced as an immediate measure the “accelerated reconstruction of the national intelligence system,” implicitly acknowledging that after eight months in office he, like Paniagua before him lacked basic intelligence information. He also announced that he would increase by 100 percent the budget for counterterrorism and anticrime activities in the interior ministry and reinforce DIRCOTE. Two months ago, Interior Minister Rospigliosi announced the reorganization of the counterterrorism unit, and since he took office Col. Benedicto Jimenez has been one of his main advisers. Rospigliosi and Jimenez want to regroup the teams that were disbanded in 1992 by Fujimori and Montesinos, and retarget Shining Path’s new leadership. Among other measures, he announced the reinstallation of several counterinsurgency bases in the countryside that had been closed by Fujimori and Paniagua; reinforcement of the repentance law; maximum penalties for those who commit acts of terrorism and narcotrafficking; and engaging the general population in the fight against terrorism.

If all indicators point to Shining Path as responsible for the March 2002 attack, it is a new Shining Path that must have learned from the mistakes of its earlier years. Peruvian security forces must, in turn, adapt themselves to a new situation, overlooking neither the imprisoned leaders nor the external actors supporting Shining Path: the Colombian FARC and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. These groups already operate with Shining Path in the drug business, trafficking in Peruvian poppy crops and heroin. These crops could be even more lucrative for Shining Path than its 1980’s trafficking in cocaine.

If the March 2002 attack is confirmed to mark Shining Path’s return, we cannot blame Abimael Guzman but instead can only wonder why the fox was given full run of the henhouse. In view of Shining Path’s connections and known contempt for the United States (it pointedly did not express sympathy for the September 11 attacks, as many other insurgent and terrorist groups did), all U.S. efforts must be brought to bear to eradicate not only Shining Path but also the terrorist and narcotrafficking activities of the other groups that abet it.

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