Word: sendero
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lima has not found a decent way of fighting Sendero. The army has taken to shooting up whole villages that are suspected of harboring Senderistas, which doesn't endear the government to anyone. "Civilian response has been to ignore it," one U.S. official told The New York Times. "The military response has been to blow everyone away...
Second, APRA left a taste for messianic solutions to the endemic problems of underdevelopment and poverty that plague Peru. Sendero plays off of that quite handily--indeed, some Apristas have a certain grudging sympathy for Sendero. After all, they considered violent solutions...
...Still, Sendero is in a class by itself. With a human rights record that makes one's head spin, Sendero's leader Abimale Guzman Reynoso aims not just at revolution, but at a society modeled explicitly on China during the Cultural Revolution...
...takes a million deaths to do it, that's just fine with Sendero. The only nice thing about Sendero is that it's not getting much help--yet--from the outside. Guzman reviled the Soviet Union, and China hasn't stepped in to help out these Maoist purists (remember, Deng Xiaoping got purged a few times during the Cultural Revolution...
...Fujimoro may have a repeat of 1968 in mind--pull a putsch, but don't behave like a putschist. Such progressive authoritarianism is sort of like smoking a joint but not inhaling. Bad idea. Fujimoro's best bet against Sendero is U.S. support (if Bush were wise, he'd think about debt relief instead of just throwing aid dollars into Peru), and Peruvian popular support...