Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 07:09:31 -0800
Subject: M-G: MRTA Has History Of High-Profile Attacks


Greetings.  This post has a pretty good history of MRTA
and paints what seems to be a pretty accurate picture of
them, except I do not think you could describe them as
"Marxist-Leninists" as the article does.  They do not 
come across as having anything to do with Leninism, but
rather I would describe them as following the ideology
of the "Early Malecki", the mad-bomber proto-type of
our present day internet-bolshevik Malecki.  Aren't 
the antics of the MRTA similar to those of the cockroach
as a young boy?   -Jay Miles / Detroit

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MRTA Group Has History Of High-Profile Attacks

By Eugene Robinson

(The Washington Post - December 19 1996) The Tupac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement, which seized hundreds of hostages at the
Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima Tuesday night, is the
smaller, lesser-known and more theatrical of the two guerrilla
groups that have been fighting to tear down the Peruvian state
for more than a decade.
     Known by its Spanish initials MRTA, the group espouses a
Cuban-inspired, Marxist-Leninist ideology. Unlike the much
larger, avowedly Maoist group Shining Path, which sought to
launch its revolution from a support base among peasants in the
countryside, MRTA has leaned instead toward headline-grabbing
acts of urban terrorism.
     MRTA is the group that American Lori Helene Berenson was
convicted of aiding last year in a case that drew international
attention. Berenson, 27, was arrested in November 1995 and
accused of helping the group obtain and operate a house in Lima
that was used as a training center for commandos. Authorities
reported confiscating weapons, 8,000 rounds of ammunition and
3,000 sticks of dynamite. Convicted by a military court in a
secret trial, Berenson is serving a life sentence at a
maximum-security prison high in the Andes.
     Until the Berenson case, it was generally assumed that MRTA
was moribund - a victim of President Alberto Fujimori's tough
anti-guerrilla campaign.
     While Shining Path at its height boasted at least 10,000
armed members spread throughout the country, MRTA's ranks
probably never numbered more than 1,000, most analysts believe.
The recapture of the group's leader, Victor Polay, in 1992 seemed
to rob MRTA of all momentum. Other rebel commanders surrendered
in 1993.
     From its earliest days in 1984, the group included U.S.
facilities in Peru among its targets. It shot at and tried to
firebomb the U.S. Embassy, set fire to several Kentucky Fried
Chicken restaurants, attacked U.S. banks and businesses with
bombs, and fired mortars at the U.S. ambassador's residence,
among other actions. Forcing the U.S. governmental and business
presence out of the country was seen as one of the movement's
principal aims.
     MRTA also carried out several high-profile assassinations,
including the 1990 slaying of a former defense minister. Most of
the group's attacks took place in Lima, the teeming capital,
where intense media coverage made its impact seem greater than
perhaps it was.
     MRTA was believed to have contacts with guerrilla groups in
Colombia and to consider the Cuban revolution its model, but it
is unclear whether these connections survived the end of the Cold
War.
     The group, unlike Shining Path, also had links to nonviolent
leftist groups in Peru. During the late 1980s, when MRTA was
setting off small bombs and occupying radio stations with little
loss of life, the group acquired a kind of radical-chic status
among Peruvian leftists - but this faded quickly as the attacks
became deadlier.
     In 1990, 49 MRTA members - including Polay, the leader, who
had been captured the previous year - staged a spectacular escape
>from the Canto Grande prison near Lima, supposedly the nation's
most secure penal facility. They made their exit through an
elaborate tunnel that had taken them months to dig.
     The original Tupac Amaru was an Inca leader who held out
against the Spanish conquest well after most of the rest of the
empire had been subdued. His name was appropriated 200 years
later by an Indian named Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, who led a
failed revolt against Spanish rule in 1780.
     The name Tupac Amaru then entered the hemisphere's
revolutionary lore. It has been used by a defunct group of urban
revolutionaries in Uruguay called the Tupamaros, the late U.S.
rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, and the men and women who last night
posed as waiters and took hostages at the Japanese compound in
Lima.

(Source: The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com)

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