Word: senderistas
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Considered one of South America's most secure jails when it opened in 1986, Canto Grande no longer deserves that reputation. Its closed-circuit televisions and searchlights are broken. Inside the four-story women's cellblock, the inmates have taken over and turned it into a Senderista training camp, complete with red felt and tinsel banners that proclaim LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION...
When the daily chores are done, the prisoners attend political-education classes or learn to knit and sew. Whenever possible, they smuggle the goods to the outside for sale, donating the profits to the Senderista cause. Several times a week around noon, the 63 Senderista women and 120 men in a nearby cellblock break for an "agitation," in which they rattle the bars and hurl earsplitting insults at their guards. For recreation, there is volleyball in a pavilion's patio, under red-painted panels that pay homage to Marx, Lenin and Mao. Close to the top of the walls...
...interview with TIME inside Canto Grande two weeks ago, McNamara was careful to refer all questions about Senderista politics to the smartly dressed, unfailingly polite "delegate" inmates who run the cellblock. Delegate Dalila claimed that all the pavilion's inmates belong to the "authentic" Peruvian Communist Party, which is how Senderistas see themselves. These true believers disdain both the Soviet Union, which they consider to be as imperialist as the U.S., and today's China. Their goal is to establish a workers' state along the lines of Mao Zedong's China. "We believe in armed struggle to take power," said...
Founded in the early 1970s, Sendero Luminoso claims as many as 1,000 members, most of them peasants and students from the mountains. Their eccentric ideology is mingled with a curious form of messianic tribalism. The Senderistas use Inca slingshots, for example, to fling dynamite sticks at targets. The guerrillas' atavistic tactics have evoked a similar response from the Andean villagers. When eight journalists were killed near Ayacucho in January, a government commission concluded that villagers had perpetrated the crime using Senderista methods. The bodies of the newsmen were carefully stripped, washed and turned face down, while their clothes...
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