In Peru, a Rebellion Reborn

In August, the Peruvian military launched an offensive known as Operation Excellence to target the group's jungle stronghold in the Vizcatan area of the Apurimac-Ene River Valley, down the eastern slope from Pukatoro. In addition to the 17 soldiers killed last month, 35 others have been wounded in the fighting, said navy Capt. Juan Carlos Llosa, a spokesman for Peru's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"They are trained in combat, and they know the area, which is their strength," he said of the guerrillas. "It is a force that should not be underestimated."

The military says it has killed four guerrillas.

Peruvian officials describe the remnants of the Shining Path -- Sendero Luminoso in Spanish -- as "narco-terrorists," involved in cultivating coca, a crop that has grown by 18 percent across the Andean region in the past five years, and in shipping drugs, and who are interested primarily in making money. In this, they resemble other diminished leftist rebel groups in Latin America, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which rely on cocaine rather than popular support to survive.

"Today the Shining Path is working as if it were a company," said Luis Giampetri Rojas, a former admiral and Peru's vice president. "I would say that the Shining Path of today has something of an ideology, because they have not lost it, but also they have been contaminated with the capitalism of drug trafficking. Today, if drug trafficking didn't exist, the Shining Path would not have a way to subsist."

Over the years, the Shining Path has fortified Vizcatan with a network of land mines and booby traps and built tunnels to hide and escape. Some participants in the group's first uprising received guerrilla training in China decades ago, but the modern-day fighters have trained themselves, putting in years of practice in the mountains and jungles.

"Their tactical level is better than our Special Forces'," said one Shining Path analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending the Peruvian military. "They are faster, quicker, better at ambushes and capable of hiding underground."

This resurgence has worried local residents, who fear that growing military pressure could reignite bloodshed. In the center of the village of Mayhuavilca, the stone ruins of a Catholic church bombed by the Shining Path is just one reminder of this history.

"There were killings, orphans and widows -- too many problems happened here," said Alcides Limache Medina, a village official who had fought the Shining Path.

"We still have our weapons, and we're beginning to organize again," Limache said. "It's terrible that they are returning."

Another resident, 16-year-old Milser Curo Rojas, whose grandfather was killed by the Shining Path, said some of his neighbors are selling their livestock to prepare in case they need to flee the village again. "We are worried," he said. "If what happened in the past continues, we're going to leave."

The Shining Path rebels insist they "don't want war," he said. "They just want the support of the people. They say the soldiers want war. They asked the people to help them."

"My own best guess is we're looking at a strategy of renewed effort to build a base," said Boston University professor David Scott Palmer, who has studied Peru for decades. "The Shining Path folks are working right alongside the local growers, and are helping them hoe, and helping them with [community work], and would pay for what they buy. They're seen, if not as a positive force, at least as worthy of being accepted -- not embraced but at least accepted."

This attempt to win popular support is just one of several evolutions the Shining Path has undergone. After Guzmán was captured in 1992, he called on his followers to lay down their weapons. Some complied, but others, who became known as Proseguir, or Continue, insisted on armed resistance. The remaining fighters clustered in hidden camps in two main areas, the Apurimac-Ene River Valley and the Upper Huallaga Valley, which are also centers of coca cultivation.

By 2000, the debilitated and impoverished Shining Path was protecting young men who carried backpacks of cocaine on footpaths through the Andes. The guerrillas saw themselves as "defenders of coca growers," who rejected Guzmán and other early leaders as assassins and traitors of the people, said Jaime Antezana of the Institute for International Studies at Peru's Catholic University in Lima.

"The Shining Path in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were in full war, destroyed bridges, destroyed electrical towers, destroyed machinery to build roads. They assassinated technicians," Antezana said. "In this process of change, when they formed the alliance with drug traffickers, they no longer opposed development projects."

As their wealth grew, the guerrillas morphed from a security operation for drug dealers to growing coca and producing cocaine paste themselves, as well as shipping their own drugs and actively recruiting new members, according to observers.

The Shining Path has not yet become even a shadow of the national security threat for President Alan García that it was during his first term, from 1985 to 1990, when he was one of many officials accused of overseeing military massacres of rural people believed to be supporting the group. But the recent attacks and the ongoing work to excavate mass graves -- such as one in the village of Putis this year believed to contain 123 people, including children, allegedly killed by soldiers -- has raised further questions about the government's current response to the guerrillas.

Several hundred soldiers are taking part in Operation Excellence, and Carlos, the Joint Chiefs spokesman, said the military plans to establish two or three new bases in Shining Path territory.

That is not welcome news to some residents high in the Andes. Cesar Sanchez Medina, 37, the lone teacher in the 20-student elementary school in Mayhuavilca, said the schoolhouse, rebuilt with money from the state's war reparations fund, may close down again if violence returns.

"Alan García doesn't know what we are living through here," he said. "He's not foreseeing what could happen if the army gets involved. What we want is that neither side interrupts our lives."

Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin contributed to this report.