document: Shining Path guerrillas , who started their bloody uprising in the mountains eight years ago , are moving into the shantytowns that encircle the capital like a noose . Abimael Guzman , founder of the rebel movement , has said of the slums and their people : `` The immense masses of the shantytowns are like belts of steel that lock in the enemy and hold back his reactionary forces . '' His Maoist rebels , once secretive fanatics , are becoming a political force that seeks public support in Huaycan and the other makeshift communities where two-thirds of Lima 's 7 million people scrape along . About 10,000 people live in Huaycan . Their huts built of straw mats line the bone-dry slopes of the Andean foothills 15 miles east of downtown Lima . Most residents are poor migrants from the violent highlands where the rebel movement was born . They make ideal recruits for the Shining Path _ Sendero Luminoso in Spanish . Shining Path 's move into a more public role , and through most of Peru from its Andean base in Ayacucho province , has coincided with economic collapse and annual inflation of nearly 2,000 percent . In the cities , the guerrillas combine conventional politics with terror . In the countryside , they make ever-bolder attacks on the military . Rebel columns strike along the spine of the Andes from the Ecuadorean frontier in the north to Bolivia in the south . The guerrillas also work with drug traffickers in Peru 's eastern jungle , source of the raw material for much of the world 's cocaine , and buy sophisticated weapons with the profits . More than 12,000 people have been killed in the civil war , most of them Andean peasants slain by rebels or security forces , and official figures put damage to the shattered economy at $ 10 billion . The guerrillas are believed to have only about 5,000 armed combatants , so they do not appear close to seizing power , but there is increasing pessimism about the prospects of controlling them . `` Most evaluations of Sendero Luminoso 's eight-year expansion under the democratic system ... have become increasingly grim , '' the Andean Report , a respected economic journal , said recently . One reason the movement grows is its appeal to Peru 's Indians , subjected for centuries to scorn and discrimination by the white ruling elite . `` Political violence in Peru is not the result of poverty alone but of humiliation , oppression , hate between classes , racism , '' Sen. Enrique Bernales , chairman of a committee on violence , said when it released a report in September . The most striking development of the last 18 months has been the Shining Path 's move into public view in this grimy capital on South America 's Pacific coast . Rebels organize support groups in the slums , infiltrate labor unions , organize marches , spread their message of revolution with the aid of a sympathetic daily newspaper and agitate among university students . Analysts and experts on counterinsurgency say Shining Path appears bent on dominating the radical left of legal politics . Officials have become alarmed by the broadening of tactics to include infiltration of legitimate organizations , including unions of government workers . They say this clouds distinctions between the legal and illegal left , making it move difficult to combat the rebel movement . `` Sendero is seeking semi-legal status as a way of winning militants and sympathizers , while at the same time generating a confusing situation in which the security forces indiscrimately repress members of the legal left along with leftist insurgents , '' a ranking police official said privately . Guzman , a Marxist philosophy professor , founded Sendero Luminoso in 1970 in Ayacucho , an Andean state capital 230 miles southeast of Lima where he had built a following at the University of Huamanga . Followers call Guzman , 54 , `` the fourth sword of Marxism '' after Marx , Lenin and Mao . His movement , a splinter group of the Communist Party , gathered strength in Indian communities of the southern Andes for 10 years before launching its guerrilla war . According to counterinsurgency experts , the guerrillas switched their emphasis to the cities because migration of Indian peasants to urban centers accelerated after the highlands became a battlefield . Guzman 's guerrillas have followed tens of thousands of peasants from the Andes into Lima 's shantytowns and see the slums as a new stronghold . In July , the pro-Shining Path newspaper El Diario published a 48-page report on the guerrilla movement . It quoted Guzman as saying in his first interview since going underground in 1980 : `` We had to follow the road from the countryside to the city . We must prepare for the insurrection that is coming , which means the taking of the cities . '' He said conditions were ripe for the next stage in the struggle for power : inciting a coup against President Alan Garcia by provoking economic chaos and increasing attacks on the army . The final stage , he said , would be a popular uprising against a repressive military regime . Shining Path has infiltrated 167 unions and neighborhood associations in the Lima slums this year , says a confidential Interior Ministry report obtained by The Associated Press . Guerrillas threaten and sometimes kill community leaders , establish `` people 's schools '' and set up `` street theaters '' for propaganda , it said . Cardinal Juan Landazuri of the Roman Catholic Church said : `` Priests tell me that young people in the shantytowns are going over to Sendero . I have been in a shantytown where there is a Shining Path group , and the police are doing nothing about it . '' Huaycan is one of the slums where Shining Path works hardest because it is just off the Central Highway , a strategic route through the capital 's main industrial zone to the mountains . The industrial zone contains 850 of the country 's most important factories . Red-painted slogans hailing the `` People 's War '' and `` President Gonzalo , '' the rebel name for Guzman , cover the concrete-block clinic , other buildings with solid walls and even large rocks . Residents were suspicious and uncommunicative when an Associated Press reporter visited , except for three 10-year-old boys at the entrance who laughed and waved red flags with the Shining Path 's hammer-and-sickle emblem . The Central Highway passes through what looks like a military zone . Most factories are behind high walls topped with barbed wire and towers from which guards with automatic rifles keep watch . Guerrillas killed three plant managers in 1988 who were involved in labor disputes . Union leaders also are uneasy . `` I doubt if you 'll find any union leader ... who will declare he is a Senderista , but I 'll bet you 'll find many who are afraid to say anything against Sendero , '' an American labor adviser said on condition of anonymity . The highway ties Lima to the agricultural lands of the central Andes and Peru 's most important mines , where unions threatened by the Shining Path have conducted a strike since late October that costs millions of dollars a day in export earnings . End Adv for Sun Jan 8
extractive_keyphrases: shining path guerrillas shantytowns rebel movement political force huaycan political violence public support central highway