Word: lima
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PLAINCLOTHES ANTITERRORIST POLICE HAD BEEN tracking the movements of a lithe young couple in their middle-class home in a Lima suburb for weeks, suspecting that they were members of Peru's Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement. Their huge purchases of food, liquor and clothing in sizes much too large for themselves suggested that they had company in the house. Butts of Winston cigarettes in the trash led the detectives to believe that the guest might be none other than the group's elusive and ruthless founder, Abimael Guzman, who went underground in the late 1970s. When the cops finally...
...year campaign that took 25,000 lives, damaged $22 billion worth of property and left some Peruvians fearing that his "forces of history" might achieve victory. That is, until last week -- when Guzman was captured by government forces in a bloodless raid on a modest house in one of Lima's middle-class neighborhoods...
...autocratic Alberto Fujimori, who has turned his presidency into a virtual dictatorship, partly to quell the revolution. "Our fear was broken from one day to another," was how Isabel Coral, who works with victims of Shining Path violence, greeted the arrest. In their recent year long assault on Lima, the guerrillas had come close to terrorizing the populace into capitulation. Guzman's arrest not only halted that momentum but, more important, it gave the government's anti-guerrilla campaign a welcome boost. "In a struggle like this one, morale and will decide who wins," said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State...
...latest offensive by Peru's Shining Path guerrillas has reached unprecedented ferocity -- and has focused on Lima, which has never experienced such a brutal wave of attacks. Starting in mid-July with a car bomb that killed more than 20 people in the capital, the campaign has flared into a full-scale blitz. Last week bombs destroyed several police stations, a private research center and the Bolivian embassy. Though President Alberto Fujimori, who canceled his trip to an Ibero-American summit in Madrid, has promised a "battle without mercy," his police and army seem helpless...
...only surprise for many observers was that it took so long for the putsch to come. Large tracts of Peruvian territory have been overrun by drug traffickers and vicious Shining Path guerrillas, whose terrorist campaign has reached the shantytowns around Lima, the nation's capital. Less than 20% of the work force is employed full time. More than half of Peru's 22 million people live in dismal poverty; a recent cholera epidemic killed more than...