Turning the Clock Back To Chaos?

Peru’s drug lords are gaining ground, and so are rebels. Toledo’s battle against a return to the bad old days

By Joseph Contreras NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

March 18 issue — Mario Ayala Otarola is running scared. The mayor of San Miguel de Ene fled his isolated village in the jungles of eastern Peru last December. He had heard that a column of Shining Path guerrillas operating in the area planned to assassinate him. Three local mayors have gone into hiding after receiving death threats, and the rebels have warned employees of a U.S.-funded development project that they are under surveillance and should not interfere with local coca farming. “Either you’re with Shining Path or you must leave the area,” says the 50-year-old sesame farmer who escaped with his wife and five children. “The narcos and Shining Path are helping each other, and that puts us in great danger.”

THAT HAS AN all-too-familiar ring for millions of Peruvians. After 10 years of steady decline, the Shining Path is stirring again. An estimated 150 guerrillas lurk in the verdant hills above the Ene and Apurimac river valleys, occasionally venturing from their redoubts in search of new recruits and easy targets like Mario Ayala. Aided by their cut of profits from suddenly resurgent coca and opium-poppy cultivation—in a country long touted by U.S. officials as a success story in the war against drugs—the guerrillas are ambushing cops, blowing up electricity pylons and even hatched a plot to detonate a car bomb outside the American Embassy in Lima. The terrorist attack was thwarted, but U.S. officials are worried. “We’re not at all complacent about this,” says one. “It’s not like we’re witnessing anything on the scale of what we saw in the 1980s and early 1990s, but all the ingredients are there—all they lack right now is leadership.”

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