Before he became an author and a professor of political philosophy at DePaul, Bill Martin was just another Maoist longhair working the graveyard shift at a convenience store. One night in 1982 business was dead; he was killing time at the counter leafing through a copy of Soldier of Fortune and stopped at an article titled “Weird Warriors of Peru.” It was about a small band of commie guerrillas called the “Shining Path,” and though the writer described them with a kind of grudging respect, he hoped somebody would go down to Peru and wipe them out. But he cautioned all gung-ho mercenaries to proceed carefully. They may be weird, but they are warriors, he said. Bill Martin had never heard of the Shining Path, but he kept the article. Ten years later, he was still a long-haired communist, still had the article, and the weird warriors were in control of a large portion of Peru.
Peru is a poor country that should be rich. Writing in Granta about his 1990 campaign for president, Mario Vargas Llosa quoted a 19th-century naturalist, Antonio Raimondi, who described Peru as “a beggar sitting on a bench made of gold.” In Puria, where Vargas Llosa lived as a child, the soil is fertile, there is offshore oil. “Why should an area with these resources die of starvation?” Vargas Llosa asked. His solution was liberal reform and a free market economy. He lost the election.
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Then in late September the news said the Peruvian government had captured Abimael Guzman, aka Presidente Gonzalo. Guzman had been a philosophy professor before he founded the Shining Path, which announced its existence with an attack on an election headquarters in 1980. Peru’s public enemy number one, he’d never met with the world press before his arrest. Their introduction was pretty theatrical. Reporters were led into a room dominated by a large draped object surrounded by soldiers carrying submachine guns. The curtain covering the object dropped to the floor revealing a cage containing Guzman. Alone, he paced, talking rapidly. Cameras rolled and flashes flashed. The soldiers sang the Peruvian national anthem to drown him out. Guzman sang the “Internationale.” He wouldn’t shut up. The curtain went up. The press was ushered out. It was a little like the unveiling of King Kong.
Martin taught for the rest of the day, spent 15 minutes talking to his wife, then hopped the el to O’Hare. The plane left on time. He’d only had about three hours’ sleep, but that was normal for him–he’d kept graveyard-shift hours for years. He was up for most of the flight. He and the two other American committee members arrived in Lima at 7:30 the next morning. By 9:30 they’d reached their hotel, the Lima Sheraton, and met the other members of their group, two Italians and a German who’d arrived from Europe the day before. The Europeans had already made arrangements to hold a press conference in a banquet room at another hotel, La Hacienda, in the Miraflores district, at three that afternoon. Miraflores is the fancy part of Lima, a little like Beverly Hills in that it supports its own private police force. It wasn’t exactly a hotbed of Guzman support. But the group had decided to hold the press conference there, both as a symbolic gesture, and also because at La Hacienda a banquet room large enough for all the expected press was only 75 bucks for an hour.
Over the next two days Martin was interrogated by 30 different people. He had few answers for them. None of the interrogators spoke English, and the only interpreter was the Italian committee member. One of the few questions he understood on his own was “Who paid you?” It was the most frequently asked question. They didn’t believe his answer. Nobody.
About two that morning one of the three generals who’d interrogated them picked up a phone. Martin only heard the general’s half of the conversation. He kept hearing the word “presidente.” He figured the general wasn’t talking to Gonzalo, or the president of Union Carbide; the general could only be talking to the president of Peru. He was glad. They had Fujimori worried.
“Maoism says that contradictions among the people are not to be dealt with by violent means. I don’t think you can compare the movement in Peru with the Soviet Union, or with the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge fucked up royally, but look at what the U.S. did. The U.S. went into Cambodia with napalm and Agent Orange, destroyed the agriculture in that country, and blamed everything that happened afterwards on the Khmer Rouge. Capitalism creates the worst possible conditions. The Khmer Rouge used desperate and somewhat misguided measures; they were some kind of combination of quasi-Maoists with a strong nationalistic aspect. Maybe they thought the people would starve anyway if they didn’t do what they did.”
