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Lima, September 14, 1993A delegation of Ashaninka Amerindians that came here to ask for economic aid and arms for a proposed counter-insurgency batallion returned home with official promises and 80 shotguns bought with private aid they received.
This was far short of the 1000 guns they say they need to bring order to their area, located along the Ene River in Peru's central forest, and wracked with ethnic strife, rebel activity and drug trafficking.
On August 18, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas attacked six Ashaninka villages and killed 56 peoplesome were Amerindians, the others settlers.
Fourteen Ashaninka children were tortured and their ears hacked off with machetes, in what the authorities view as a warning to the community and to the rest of the country.
During their visit to the capital, Hector Metcori, President of the Association of Ashaninka Communities in the central forest, and Emilio Kitoniro, the association's Secretary for Self-Defense, received a promise from President Alberto Fujimori.
Fujimori announced that he would modify the counter-insurgent strategy in the forest: most of the soldiers would be young Ashaninkas and not people from the mountains or the coast, as has obtained thus far.
The Ashaninkas are the biggest ethnic group in Peru's forest region. They live from fishing, hunting and rudimentary farming that enables them to market coffee, bananas and other crops.
They also live in constant conflict with settlers from the mountains, who are mainly Quechua Indians and mestizos.
According to French ethnologist Michel Saenz, in the mid-1980s, Colombian bands began promoting coca cultivation in the area, "and along with drug-trafficking came Sendero (Luminoso)."
Saenz, who has been living in the zone for eight years, said the insurgents used violent methods to make sure that coca was grown there, sometimes prohibiting people from cultivating coffee and burning coffee plantations.
Although there are laws that protect them, the Ashaninkas are very vulnerable to the aggressive expansion of the mountain dwellers, who are more adapted to the market economy and have closer links with the local authorities.
The Sendero massacre in the six Ashaninka villages was seen by the international press as a renewal of political violence by the group almost a year after Abimael Guzman, its supreme leader, was caught by the authorities.
But some Peruvian experts, like Carlos Tapia and Oscar Espinoza, felt that the killings were no new development because the group has committed similar acts there in the past.
They admit, however, that the central forest has become Sendero Luminoso's most important center of operations following the failure of its campaign in Lima and its virtual expulsion from the central and south-central mountain valleys.
"In Lima, Sendero fell victim to its mistaken strategy. Probably because of the misled personality of Abimael Guzman, it made the mistake of wanting to force the outcome of the war and its entire national and metropolitan directorate fell one after the other," Tapia said.
In the mountain districts, he added, peasant patrols armed by the government have already broken the fear that was the rebels' most important political weapon.
Metcori and Kitoniro travelled to Lima not only to request help for the victims of the massacre, but also to ask for a change in the authorities' counter-insurgency strategy.
They said the Ashaninkas had been unable to defend themselves because, although they had agreed to form peasant patrols, they never received weapons promised to them.
They told Fujimori and army General Commander Nicholas de Bari Hermosa that peasant patrols were not functioning in the forest because they military have no confidence in the Ashaninkas, but put their faith in the settlers.
According to media reports, the military taught the Ashaninka patrols to use arms, gave them some to parade with, photographed them and then took the weapons away.
Said sociologist Imelda Vega Centeno: "The military chiefs do not understand the forest dwellers. It seems to me that they consider them nomads and believe that if they are given weapons, the Ashaninkas will go into the forest and steal them."
"They place more trust in the settlers, who are also Andean Amerindians, but farmers and therefore more stable," Vega Centeno explained.
Sendero also does not give the Ashaninkas firearms, but in addition to encourage them to grow coca and helping them to sell it, they exploit their longstanding conflict with the settlers.
The August 18 attack may have been aimed at punishing the villages not only because they agreed to form patrols, but also because they have mixed populations of Ashaninkas and settlers.
Survivors of the the attacks said their assailants included other Ashaninkas who, although they had no firearms, acted with great fury. These, Metkori and Kitoniro said, came from Ashaninka villages under the guerrillas' military control.
Fourth World Bulletin • December 1993
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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