PERU'S REBELS STAGE DRUG-FUELLED REVIVAL

Peru's Maoist guerrilla movement, the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, is
reinventing itself as an international drugs gang, police say. The group,
dormant for almost 10 years, is regaining momentum in the rugged highlands.

Last spring, Colombian drug barons, who lose acres of supplies each time
US-donated helicopters spray their crops with herbicides, were quick to
seize an unexpected opportunity to move into Peru. Washington had stopped
using its aircraft to prevent drug flights between Colombia and Peru after
a CIA blunder led to the shooting down of an American missionary's plane.
Border surveillance was badly affected, and within months world attention
turned to Afghanistan.

With the Afghan heroin trade in a shambles, Colombian traffickers are
poised to penetrate Europe, using cocaine distribution networks. They
already dominate the US trade.

Police in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru's principal coca-growing region,
claim Colombian entrepreneurs have begun to supply farmers with poppy seed,
arrange start-up credits for new planters and furnish weapons to protect
the lucrative new fields. Sticky opium gum sells for twice the price of
coca base, incentive enough for most subsistence farmers to begin
cultivation. Guerrillas exploit the trade by demanding protection money
from opium farmers and traffickers.

The Shining Path, which began in the early 80s as a Maoist reform movement
in the Andes, was all but vanquished by widespread arrests in 1992. But the
rebels have begun to ambush security forces and menace peasants again. The
600 remaining guerrillas take their cue from narco-guerrillas across the
border in Colombia and fund themselves through heroin trafficking.

The Shining Path movement, which once threatened to topple the Peruvian
government, became dormant after the capture of its leader, Abimael Guzman.
More than 5,000 guerrillas, bent on slaughtering the wealthiest 10 per cent
of Peru's population to create a new social order, went underground or into
exile.

Only two Shining Path leaders remain at large, but with political
transition under way in Peru, violent Maoists are resurfacing. Guerrillas
killed four rural police officers in the summer, and after "Yanks out of
Afghanistan" flyers and graffiti were spotted in October, intelligence
agents claimed to have uncovered an alleged Shining Path plot to blow up
the US embassy in Lima.

A hundred new police outposts will be manned next year in the former
Shining Path strongholds. Luis Cruzado, an anti-narcotics officer, told The
Washington Post: "The guerrillas are trying to capitalise on new strategies
to expand the reach of their subversion. The Shining Path is at the very
least maintaining its size and expanding its presence." Police say they see
all the signs of a new narco-guerrilla organisation.

Poppy cultivation has increased sharply in central Peru - the narrow
valleys and misty crags where the Shining Path's Commander Feliciano, also
known as Oscar Ramirez Durand, hid until his capture in 1999. Since then,
drug seizures have increased fivefold. Nine Colombians were arrested
recently on drug charges. Police said two morphine laboratories found near
the town of Tingo Maria last month, must have come from Colombia.

Because Colombian anti-drug troops concentrate on the coca crop, the number
of opium poppies destroyed in 2001 was less than a quarter of the previous
year. Demonstenes Garcia, the head of the police anti-narcotics base in
Tingo Maria, says: "Peru has the capacity to be the heroin capital of Latin
America."

Coca cultivation, rife in the 1980s, was cut by the former government of
Alberto Fujimori. Over the past 10 years crop substitution with palm oil
plantations had gained ground. But farmers have balked at government limits
on coca plants and want a promised pay-off before destroying them. Just
three acres of coca are allowed per family, enough for a personal supply of
traditional medicine, but poppy fields are now flourishing alongside.