Peru Rebels Threaten U.S. Drug Program
TINGO MARIA, Peru -- Some of the best coca in the world -- the stuff that is refined into cocaine -- comes from Tingo Maria and the surrounding area on the edge of the Amazon jungle.</br></br>But cocaine isn't the reason that Felipe Aponte Ortiz, blindfolded and barefoot, has been hauled into a police interrogation room. Mr. Aponte, 36 years old, is in jail because he is a guerrilla, as his suitcase full of Marxist literature and home-made explosives quickly establishes. He is Comrade Campa, a leading ideologue on the local committee of the Shining Path, Peru's increasingly violent Maoist insurgents.</br></br>The presence of Mr. Aponte and others like him in Peru's coca-growing regions has the government worried. In the past 10 months, the Shining Path has successfully turned local fury over a U.S.-backed coca-eradication program into a campaign of antigovernment violence. They have formed dozens of local Shining Path cells and bombed 10 of the area's 13 civil guard stations. In effect, officials say, the guerrillas have opened a second front 500 miles north of the 13-province emergency zone that until now has been the only center of guerrilla operations.</br></br>The new support for the guerrillas could endanger the already troubled U.S.-aided program to destroy Peru's coca crop, which accounts for about half of the cocaine smuggled into the U.S. And it has shaken President Fernando Belaunde Terry's four-year-old civilian government. Mr. Belaunde, also beset by an economic crisis, has been forced to ask the army to fight the guerrillas -- a politically dangerous move in a country where the army has ruled for 12 of the past 16 years.</br></br>"Call it subversion or what you will, it's a civil war," says Lt. Col. Guillermo Espino, the local police chief.