Stones for a Democracy

By Laura L

The government takes action to quiet opposition protests

Groups of up to 150 people began to gather ominously in the Plaza Dos de Mayo in downtown Lima last Thursday at the headquarters of various left-wing political and union organizers. Over loudspeakers, union leaders exhorted the crowds with revolutionary slogans. Leaflets passed out by the Peruvian Communist Party protested hunger and misery and stated the party's demands for job stability and the control of fuel and food prices. In one shantytown south of the city, small bands of youths flung rocks at bus windows. Almost all of Peru's privately owned buses stayed off the roads, making it difficult for many people to get to work. At least one-third of the work force in 16 cities decided to stay home.

The presence of 8,000 riot-gear-equipped police in Lima made it clear that the government of President Fernando Belaunde Terry was taking the 24-hour general strike very seriously. Early Thursday morning, police pointed their shotguns at drivers of trucks with space available who tried to ignore workers seeking rides. Youths who were spotted trying to collect rocks or debris were chased, beaten with nightsticks and sometimes shoved into police vans. Jorge del Prado, 73, a senator and leader of the Peruvian Communist Party, was struck in the chest by a tear-gas canister fired at close range. Despite the numerous clashes around the country however, the day's toll was miraculously low: none dead and about 50 injured, few seriously.

Trying to avert the strike, Belaunde, 72, called for a national three-day suspension of liberties, prohibiting demonstrations and meetings, and gave police broader powers of arrest. This kept disturbances to a minimum. But perhaps the most important deterrent to a larger strike came three days earlier, when Belaunde announced the removal of Finance Minister Carlos Rodriguez Pastor. Rodriguez Pastor had engineered an austerity program under which the country was beginning to strain. His replacement, Jose Benavides Munoz, was expected to look for economic alternatives, but the strikers remained unimpressed.

Peru's economy began to slide in 1980 under the pressure of a world recession and low prices for the country's copper and lead exports. Belaunde further undermined the economy by borrowing excessively from other countries and failing to curb money-losing state enterprises. The gross domestic product declined 12% last year, the worst performance in Latin America. Inflation hit 125%, unemployment 8.3% and underemployment 51%. The Peruvian sol declined 130% against the dollar during 1983. The country's foreign debt is $13 billion, about two-thirds of its gross domestic production. Belaunde put Peru on the austerity program in 1982, but so far he has resisted pressure from the International Monetary Fund for a major devaluation this year, opting instead for minidevaluations almost daily.

Because the rural economy is especially unpromising, jobless Peruvians have been migrating to the capital in frightening numbers. A pleasant colonial-style city of 1.5 million inhabitants 20 years ago, Lima has become a nightmarish sprawl of 6.5 million. The city has grown so fast that suburban slum districts housing 500,000 people are not even included on current maps. Almost 40% of the country's 18 million people are now crowded into the capital. Says Senator Manuel Ulloa Ellas, a close adviser to Belaunde: "For many of these people, there are no jobs, no services, no education. Everything is falling to pieces."

To compound the government's economic problems, a costly hit-and-run war with terrorists has begun to spill down from the Andes. Street crime is so prevalent in Lima these days that women rarely venture outside wearing jewelry and men routinely leave their watches at home. Electricity blackouts, kidnapings and Molotov cocktails are becoming almost commonplace. The terrorist acts began to rise a few months ago, when the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas decided to concentrate their efforts on the capital. Following its emergence as a violent force four years ago, the group, which numbers about 2,000, had been confined largely to the remote, poverty-stricken region of Ayacucho in the high Andes.

Ironically, the government's anti-Sendero campaign, which officials claim has killed 1,441 guerrillas since 1980, appears to have forced prominent members of the group into Lima. There the terrorists have found they can cause major havoc and tie up security forces with minimal effort. Their contribution to last Thursday's strike was a series of bombings in at least ten locations around the capital, including banks, a police station, an army barracks and a site near the U.S. embassy. But Sendero's splashiest success so far was a well-coordinated New Year's Eve bomb attack that blacked out all of Luna at midnight.

Sendero's biggest opportunity for mayhem and disruption will come when Belaunde's successor is selected in a two-stage election next spring. The continuing violence, combined with the economic crisis, threaten to weaken further Belaunde's center-right Popular Action Party, which was badly defeated by leftists in last November's municipal elections. Yet even with the economy collapsing around him and bombs going off regularly, Belaunde's remains ever optimistic. "I have great faith in the future of Peru," he says. Still, for the architect of Peruvian democracy, his final months in office could be long ones.

Reported by Gavin Scott and Larry Wippman/Lima

With reporting by Gavin Scott, Larry Wlppman