Peru Lurching Toward Anarchy

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On an average day in Peru, six people die by political violence. One day it is a government agent organizing peasant cooperatives. One day it is a ruling- party mayor. One day it is a government-aligned journalist. Most days it is peasants who get in the way.

There was the day in early February when the killing came to SAIS Cahuide, a private co-op in Peru's central Junin department. It was a thriving agricultural concern then, boasting up to 130,000 head of livestock, 800 workers who sold 10,000 liters of milk a day, and 170 administrative and technical advisers. A column of guerrillas armed with machine guns, members of the 5,000-strong Maoist revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), marched in to destroy everything and starve anyone who did not cooperate with them. The rebels killed or took most of the animals, executed one director and three administrators of the co-op, and destroyed tractors, before disappearing into the countryside. Today the cooperative is nearly deserted, and those who remain live in constant fear that the guerrillas will return. "We are abandoned here," says a co-op official, whose requests for protection from the authorities have been in vain.

The fate of SAIS Cahuide has become a familiar tale in Peru, which is reeling from the double punch of guerrilla insurgency and economic stagflation. The confluence of crises has brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy and shaken the nation's institutional foundations. While a military coup does not appear imminent, the basic conditions for civilian democracy are ! eroding at an alarming rate. Approximately 150,000 Peruvians emigrated last year. Rural families who lack the money to leave have migrated to urban centers, straining city budgets and turning the pueblos jovenes, or shantytowns, into breeding grounds for subversion.

Violence has become a fact of Peruvian life. Government studies count 12,965 people dead in terrorist-related violence since 1980, when Sendero Luminoso began its campaign to overthrow the government. Already this year, 794 killings have been tallied, though the actual number is no doubt much higher. Outside the major cities, hundreds of police officers and mayors have deserted their posts after receiving death threats from terrorists. In the area around Huancayo, the capital of Peru's breadbasket department of Junin, Sendero Luminoso is locked in a battle for dominance with the Cuban-oriented M.R.T.A. rebels. The city, says Raul Gonzalez, a sociologist and expert on the Sendero Luminoso, "is now the critical spot to Sendero's future." From there, the Shining Path, which already controls at least one-third of the countryside, intends to take Lima, only 120 miles away, by encircling it and cutting it off from the rest of the country.

Yet despite the looming guerrilla menace, the deteriorating state of the economy is the immediate worry of most Peruvians. The country's inflation rate topped 1,720% last year, and could reach an unbelievable 10,000% in 1989. Buying power has dropped 50%; up to two-thirds of the working population is either under- or unemployed. In the capital, bread, rice and sugar are becoming scarce, and powdered milk is unavailable in many neighborhoods.