The Face Behind the Rebel Mask

LIMA, Peru — The terrorists of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement want to be known as good guerrillas.

Along with the explosives strapped to their chests and the bandannas over their faces, the rebels holding the Japanese ambassador’s residence here have wrapped themselves in the mantle of Latin America’s romantic revolutionary myths.

They treat their 74 remaining hostages with respect, and they invited journalists into the barricaded mansion to further an image of humane, moderate idealists fighting for the poor. They see themselves as the heirs of Che Guevara, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and other icons of the political left.

But the face behind the mask resembles a gangster as much as a guerrilla, Jesse James as much as Robin Hood. The Tupac Amaru is a veritable industry of organized crime that has made a fortune during the last decade in specialized rackets: kidnapping tycoons, protecting drug traffickers, robbing banks, serving as terrorist “consultants.”

“It seems a grotesque aberration to use the adjective ‘moderate’ for a movement that, in the name of the future socialist paradise, has murdered countless persons and made a specialty out of kidnapping for money,” wrote Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who survived an assassination attempt by Tupac Amaru when he ran for president in 1990.

The rhetoric and theatrics of Tupac Amaru evoke the 1960s and 1970s; the group’s actions embody the more confused and ambiguous reality of Latin American rebels in the post-Cold War era.

While some guerrillas lay down their guns, signing peace accords in Guatemala and running for office in Colombia, others survive and evolve. The evolution of Tupac Amaru and others often blurs the line between politics and gangsterism.

“There is nothing romantic about the Tupac Amaru,” said Simon Strong, a British author who has written on terrorism in Peru. “They don’t have a serious political project. They represent a hodgepodge of old Marxist-Leninist-nationalist ideas. That handful of people holding the residence are probably all they have got in Lima.”

Tupac Amaru controls little territory and doesn’t have much popular support, unlike rebels in Colombia or the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

Although Latin America’s weakened guerrillas appear less likely than ever to topple a government, the propaganda offensive by Tupac Amaru shows that terrorism in the region can still wreak disproportionate havoc by capturing the attention of the global media.

One man who knows the changing face of terrorism is Hector Jhon, 55, a retired general of the Peruvian police.

Jhon is of Chinese descent, a veteran terrorist hunter with a smooth, watchful air who carries himself like an athlete. He commanded the anti-terrorist police during the bloody years of 1990 and 1991, helping to create investigative squads that won major victories by capturing terrorist leaders.

After years of studying, stalking and interrogating Tupac Amaru rebels, Jhon talks about his old adversaries with the insight and respect of a courtly duelist.

He has a profound connection with Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, the 48-year-old commander of the 17 guerrillas holding the diplomatic compound. Nine years ago, Cerpa spared the life of Jhon’s son.

The remarkable incident occurred in 1987, when the younger Jhon was a police corporal in the town of Juanjui.

Cerpa led an invasion of the town by Tupac Amaru, then a 4-year-old rebel group operating in the jungles in classic guerrilla fashion.

During a gunfight between guerrillas and police, the younger Jhon’s arm was mangled by a high-powered slug. He lay bleeding by a car for two hours.

After the police were routed, the wounded officer watched helplessly as Cerpa and another guerrilla stood over him. The guerrilla asked if he should shoot the officer. Cerpa said: “No. Let him be. Maybe he’ll make it.”

And the general’s son survived. He and his father have spent many hours talking about Cerpa. The memories of the battlefield gesture of mercy came rushing back after the Dec. 17 assault at the Japanese ambassador’s reception.

“In the heart of every man, as bad as he may be, there are traces of goodness,” Jhon said. “And in Cerpa those traces are evident. . . . At bottom he has human sentiment.”

The story evokes the image Tupac Amaru likes to promote: dashing rebels with a code of honor.

Former union activist Cerpa, the Sorbonne-educated Victor Polay and other founders of Tupac Amaru imbibed the swashbuckling tradition of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Tupac Amaru’s models and allies included Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and the M-19 of Colombia, whose two-month takeover of the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogota in 1980 appears to be the script for the Tupac Amaru invasion here.

The Peruvian group has a taste for symbolism: In 1983, Tupac Amaru operatives dramatized a declaration of armed struggle by stealing the sword from a statue of a Peruvian national hero.

In the early days, baby-faced rebels “liberated” rural villages, fired ineffectual mortar rounds at U.S. diplomatic targets and hijacked Coca-Cola delivery trucks in the slums, riding through the streets giving away Coke afterward.

“They were a style that was half traditional Latin American guerrillas with a mix of Robin Hood and Boy Scouts,” said Enrique Bernales, a former senator and a scholar of terrorist violence.

Nonetheless, the movement never developed a political following remotely comparable to that of its larger and more savage rival, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path.

Tupac Amaru, which at its peak numbered about 1,000 fighters, soon branched out into Mafia-style crime. It fought Sendero for control of coca fields in regions such as the Upper Huallaga Valley, where guerrillas forced drug traffickers into lucrative protection deals.

In this sense, the Peruvian rebels resemble Colombia’s guerrillas, who have cemented alliances with cocaine cartels in the 1990s.

Experts disagree about the extent of the expansion of Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso into the drug trade.

British author Strong asserts that the Tupac Amaru fits the profile of narco-guerrillas far more than Sendero. Jhon says Sendero’s involvement with traffickers is more clearly documented than Tupac Amaru’s.

In any case, Tupac Amaru used crime to acquire arms, supplies and safe houses. And there was plenty of profit left over, according to experts, after more than 23 kidnappings in the late 1980s and the 1990s that were executed with the managerial precision of a multinational corporation.

“They practically formed an organized criminal kidnapping business,” Jhon said. “There was a complete structure with a well-defined hierarchy.”

The paramilitary kidnapping apparatus was divided into cells: Intelligence units identified potential victims in the Peruvian elite, tactical teams carried out the abductions, negotiators communicated ransom demands to families. The ransoms were routinely in the millions of dollars; the frightened rich of Lima took refuge behind barbed wire, bulletproof glass, bodyguard details.

One kidnapping victim was industrialist Hector Jeri, a 70-year-old former air force general. In 1988, he spent five hellish months in the hidden basement of a house in Lima that the Tupac Amaru converted into a so-called “jail of the people.”

Jeri’s closet-sized, subterranean cell was lighted with a single, perpetually burning bulb. He ate rice and a fried egg three times a day, keeping track of the days by counting the meals.

Jeri was released after a payment of more than $1 million, according to a relative who negotiated with the kidnappers. Jeri died a few years later.

The ordeal “left him filled with fear,” said the relative, who asked not to be identified. “It was a huge blow to him. He was never the same.”

Tupac Amaru choreographed Jeri’s release for maximum public impact, turning the industrialist over to a television host during a live program.

The kidnappers also ordered the family to distribute 10 truckloads of food in designated slums--a detail that the victim’s relative finds ironic.

“That makes me wonder about the Robin Hood thing,” the relative said. “I think it was clear the money was for them and they weren’t going to spend it on food for the poor.”

Tupac Amaru’s talent for big-money kidnappings gained it foreign partners. Like an international consulting firm, the terrorists helped organize abductions by allies in neighboring nations in return for a percentage of the take, according to Jhon.

There is a theory here that the attack on the Japanese ambassador’s residence was financed by recent operations such as a kidnapping that brought a $1.2-million ransom last year for a Bolivian cement magnate. Bolivian police arrested Tupac Amaru members in that case.

What have the terrorists done with all the cash over the years?

The leaders lived well, according to Jhon, who led police raids in upper-class sections of Lima that turned up pleasant homes and luxury cars. Terrorists have died in violent internal confrontations that were reportedly disputes over money.

And observers believe that there are millions of dollars socked away in other nations; Tupac Amaru members and relatives live in France, Germany, Bolivia, Panama.

“The quantity was so great that it is quite probable that the money has been invested in the stock markets of the world,” terrorism scholar Bernales said.

But it is unfair to dismiss the group as thugs whose only goal is money, analysts say.

“There is a lot of ego here,” Jhon said. “A lot of ego, of spectacle, the pursuit of leadership.”

Unlike Sendero Luminoso, which cranks out volumes of turgid and messianic philosophy, Tupac Amaru lacks a developed political ideology. The smaller rebel group rails against neoliberal economics and accuses the Japanese of being the new imperialists.

But in its statements during the takeover, Tupac Amaru has not offered much of an alternative platform other than bettering the lot of the poor. The terrorists have also demanded the release of hundreds of imprisoned comrades, including most of the group’s leadership, and more humane prison conditions.

Tupac Amaru’s battered state mirrors the decline of many Latin American guerrilla groups. The demise of the Soviet Bloc deprived revolutionaries of powerful sponsors. The spread of democracy in the region blunted extremism from the left as well as the right.

In recent years, leftist stalwarts who fought civil conflicts have been voted out of office in Nicaragua, joined mainstream electoral politics in Colombia and signed peace accords in Guatemala.

Economic and social injustice endure from Mexico to Chile, however, along with remnants of terrorist groups that work together across national boundaries. Even if leaders have drifted into ideological confusion and criminal enterprises, they still command foot soldiers like the disciplined, jungle-trained warriors holed up in the mansion in Lima.

The Lima standoff seems to signal a return to overt political action by Tupac Amaru. Whether it is a rebirth or a last gasp remains to be seen. But many experts say Latin America does not face a substantial resurgence of leftist terrorism.

Still, this hostage crisis and a subsequent jailbreak last week in Chile, where gunmen in a helicopter swooped into a prison and escaped with two guerrilla leaders, could inspire other attacks across the region aimed at generating publicity, Bernales said.

“In this continent, there are still people who allow themselves to be seduced by bandannas, guns, the image of the guerrilla warrior who fights for justice,” Bernales said.

“I think all the governments in the region are very worried. And after what happened in Chile, they are more worried.”