CANAYRE, Peru
— First the soldiers came to Río Seco, a coca-growing village in the
lush mountain jungles of southern Peru. “They called us subversives and
they opened fire,” said Benedicto Cóndor, 55, a coca farmer. They shot
dead four people at close range, including a woman who was five months
pregnant, witnesses said. Two children, ages 6 and 1, disappeared and
are believed dead. Four months later, the guerrillas arrived, accusing the villagers of
helping the military. They abducted the village leader, who has not
been seen since. The harrowing tales of violence trickling out of
the jungle as dozens of families have fled their villages in recent
months raise an ominous specter: a brutal war that terrorized the
country for two decades may be sparking back to life. The war against the Shining Path rebels, which took nearly 70,000 lives, supposedly ended in 2000. But
here in one of the most remote corners of the Andes, the military, in a
renewed campaign, is battling a resurgent rebel faction. And the
Shining Path, taking a page from Colombia’s rebels, has reinvented
itself as an illicit drug enterprise, rebuilding on the profits of
Peru’s thriving cocaine trade. The front lines lie in the
drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a 250-square-mile region in the
Apurímac and Ene River Valley. The region is Peru’s largest producer of
coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. As the military and the
rebels skirmish for control of isolated coca-producing hamlets, the
reports of rising body counts and civilians killed in the cross-fire,
still far lower than the carnage at the height of the Shining Path war
in the 1980s and early 90s, are rousing ghosts most Peruvians thought
were long dead. “The soldiers think we are all terrorists, and
with that idea they believe they can destroy anything that moves,” said
Alfredo Pacheco, 45, a coca farmer who fled his village, Nueva
Esperanza, in September, after soldiers burned the mud huts there in
pursuit of the rebels. Military officials contended that the huts were coca-leaf maceration pits and cocaine labs. SOURCE:NYT.COM