End of A Myth

PLAINCLOTHES ANTITERRORIST POLICE HAD BEEN tracking the movements of a lithe young couple in their middle-class home in a Lima suburb for weeks, suspecting that they were members of Peru's Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement. Their huge purchases of food, liquor and clothing in sizes much too large for themselves suggested that they had company in the house. Butts of Winston cigarettes in the trash led the detectives to believe that the guest might be none other than the group's elusive and ruthless founder, Abimael Guzman, who went underground in the late 1970s. When the cops finally stormed the house, they found to their amazement no bodyguards or caches of weapons -- just an overweight and sickly terrorist leader. Almost immediately, the invincible "Presidente Gonzalo," as Guzman has called himself, surrendered without a fight.

Shining Path's gruesome 12-year campaign has led to the deaths of 25,000 Peruvians. Because Guzman dominated the group's ideology as well as its centralized command, analysts expect his arrest to cause a severe setback that will put the force of 5,000 active militants on the defensive. But the guerrillas have vowed to pursue their bloody fight to destroy all of Peru's institutions and install a peasant-worker state. Last week they set off a bomb and killed a policeman to demonstrate their continued resolve. "Once a new central committee is formed," Guzman apparently told his captors, "the revolution will move ahead."

The government has two weeks to prepare charges of treason against Guzman and his cohorts for trial in a military court next month. A guilty verdict would undoubtedly give a political boost to President Alberto Fujimori, who already has overwhelming popular support in Peru for abolishing a do-nothing Congress and judicial system last April and now for taking an important step toward fulfilling his promise to pacify the country by 1995. With Guzman safely behind bars, progovernment candidates for constitutional congress elections in November are likely to win a majority. (See related stories beginning on page 47.)