Editor's note: They have been likened to the murderous Khmer Rouge, the Maoist insurgents whose revolution in the 1970s left bone-strewn killing fields across Cambodia. And after more than a decade of fighting in the mountains and jungles of Peru, the rebels of the Shining Path now have control of large areas. Their goal, by the end of the century, is to control the entire country.As communism collapses in much of the world, a guerrilla movement has steadily expanded from its mountain bastions in Peru and now threatens to take control of the impoverished nation.
The rebels have driven government officials out of large swaths of the countryside, leaving a power vacuum they have quickly filled. Almost no corner of the country is safe from attack. In recent years, 400 rural police posts have closed due to assaults by guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Light).To contain the rebels' advance, the government has steadily expanded the regions under military control, until 55 percent of Peru's 22 million inhabitants now live in areas where constitutional liberties are suspended.
In recent months the Shining Path has intensified its campaign in the dusty shantytowns that ring Lima, the capital, located on Peru's desert coast 250 miles northwest of Ayacucho, the Andean birthplace of the rebel movement.
The guerrillas have begun murdering Roman Catholic priests, mothers running soup kitchens, foreign aid technicians - anyone who stands in their way and whose work is seen as deadening "the people's revolutionary ardor."
The growing influence and boldness of the reb-els heightens the perception that Peru, South America's third-largest country, is at a crossroads.
Shining Path cadres celebrate at nighttime rallies in Lima's shantytowns, unfurling red banners with the hammer and sickle, once the symbol of international communism, and leading crowds in revolutionary chants. Their clandestine Schools for Pioneers indoctrinate children as young as 4.
Rebel assassins are eliminating merchants who oppose their efforts to control Lima's sprawling wholesale food market. Their goal is to cut off food supplies to the capital.
"This war is being fought on all fronts at the same time: military, economic, political and psychological," says Henri Favre, a French sociologist who has studied the rebel movement since its beginnings.
"It is total war by the poor."
Although the attacks on social aid programs have the immediate effect of making the lives of the neediest even harder, recent polls indicate growing numbers of Peruvians support the Shining Path rebellion.
In a survey made in Lima, 17 percent of the respondents said subversion was justified in today's Peru. Among the city's poor, 38 percent said the Shining Path would eventually win. Nearly 5 million of the capital's 7 million inhabitants live in the impoverished shantytowns, forming a large pool of potential rebel sympathizers.
Another poll of Peruvians 15 to 24 years old, representing a population of 4.5 million nationwide, showed that 25 percent of them believed armed rebellion was justified. The figure rose to 31 percent in rural areas.
The Shining Path, counterinsurgency experts say, is highly organized, carefully planned, thoroughly disciplined and patient. Carlos Ivan Degregori, a researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies, calls the movement "the most determined political force in Peru's history."
The rebel organization has taken root in a divided, vulnerable nation.
Peru has been weakened by decades of economic decline, a process accelerated by nearly $20 billion in economic damage from rebel sabotage. The guerrillas destroy railroad lines, bridges, power pylons, agricultural research stations - any target that signifies progress.
Peru's political institutions, increasingly corrupt and weak, are discredited. Even the country's once strong political left no longer represents a hurdle to the rebels.
Leftist parties suffered a collapse after their disastrous showing in the 1990 presidential elections, which brought political outsider Alberto Fujimori to power. Experts on the Maoist insurgency say the Shining Path is moving rapidly into the vacuum.
"Sendero is playing alone on the court," Degregori says.
Concern is extending abroad. A Rand Corp. study, financed by the U.S. State Department, concluded that a Shining Path victory, "inconceivable" a few years ago, "has now become a plausible outcome."
Regarding itself as the "beacon of world revolution," the Shining Path already is outlining plans to carry its war to neighboring Bolivia, an Andean nation with a predominantly Indian and mixed-race population like Peru's.
The rest of the continent would be targeted next and then the world, including the United States.
"This people's war is aimed at destroying imperialism in its nest. Our war is also with the Americans," said a Shining Path political officer who commands some 30 other rebel inmates in a cellblock at Lima's Lurigancho prison.
Already the rebellion has taken nearly 25,000 lives. Luis Arce, editor of the movement's clandestine newspaper, El Diario, recently estimated the armed struggle may cost 1 million lives.
Journalist Gustavo Gorriti, author of a widelypraised book on the insurgents, says the rebels' projected death toll is even higher.
"They think the social cost of this war may easily reach 2 million or 3 million people killed and they are prepared to pay that price," he says.
The Shining Path movement is gaining ground, analysts say, because fewer and fewer Peruvians are willing to defend the social order the rebels seek to destroy.
Few would deny Peru is a nation desperately in need of change.
In the past century, Manuel Gonzalez Prada, a distinguished political figure, said of corruption: "Wherever you press your finger, pus breaks out."
The widespread corruption still continues. A recent poll showed 95 percent of the population had little or no trust in Peru's bribe-riddled courts.
Congress, equally discredited, spends its time debating irrelevant issues and ignoring the growing reb-el threat.
Polls show voters view politicians as seeking office mainly to divide up the spoils.
Twelve million Peruvians live in acute poverty, many at near-starvation levels. Even more critical is the deeply rooted racism that feeds the Shining Path's rebellion. It is reflected in the contempt shown by a white elite toward Peru's Indian peasantry and mixed-race majority.
Jaime Urrutia, a leftist and former deputy mayor of Ayacucho, says no significant gains against Sendero will come until Peru's poor are "treated like human beings."
The rebels' campaign of terror to control Lima's shantytowns, populated mainly by rural migrants, including tens of thousands of war refugees, has drawn attention recently.
But it is Ayacucho that reveals how the Shining Path has grown to such menacing proportions in Peru.
The insurgents' struggle to create a "People's Republic of the New Democracy" began here, in this old colonial town 9,000 feet high in the arid Andes.
The origin of the Shining Path stretches back to the 1960s, when Abimael Guzman, a philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, concluded that armed revolution was the only way to achieve profound social change in Peru.
In 1970 he founded the Shining Path as a splinter group of the Peruvian Communist Party and set out to destroy Peru's social and economic structure.
The rebel leader proposed to follow the tactics of China's Mao Tse-tung, fighting a "prolonged people's war" with a peasant army to gain control of the countryside and then surround and seize Peru's cities.
Miguel Rodriguez Rivas, Guzman's former professor at the University of San Agustin in Arequipa, has described him as "extraordinarily brilliant."
The Shining Path rebels have faithfully followed Guzman, now 57 and known as "Presidente Gonzalo," and hail him as the "Fourth Sword of Marxism," after Marx, Lenin and Mao.
"The Shining Path is more like a religious movement than a political force," Degregori says. "Religions are stronger. They can resist a long time."
Degregori studied at the University of Huamanga during the Guzman years and recently published a book on the rebels' origins, "The Rise of the Shining Path."
Guzman, he says, gathered together a core of provincial "mestizo" (mixed race) intellectuals who resented the dominance of the white elite on the coast, the heirs to the Spanish conquistadors. They formed ranks with the Quechua-speaking Indian peasantry, which has suffered from centuries of racial discrimination.
The Shining Path is often compared to the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist insurgents whose revolution in the late 1970s turned the Cambodian countryside into bone-strewn killing fields. Degregori says such comparisons "underestimate" the Peruvian rebels' fanaticism.
Despite their violence and cruelty, the rebels are making headway in winning support. They do it by establishing law and order and bringing their own brand of justice to areas under their control.
With a reputation for almost puritanical honesty, the rebels are quick to execute dishonest shopkeepers and corrupt local officials. They also halt cattle rustling, thievery, prostitution, drug abuse, even wife-beating.
"In rural areas, a man must be faithful to his wife and is permitted to go drinking only once a week. Violators are warned only once," says Raul Aranda, an agronomist in Tingo Maria, the largest town in the jungle-cloaked Upper Huallaga Valley 230 miles northeast of Lima.
The 150-mile-long valley is the world's main source of coca leaf, the raw material of cocaine. It also provides the money for the Shining Path's war chest, amounting to tens of millions of dollars each year.
In return for "war taxes," the rebels negotiate higher producer prices from Colombian drug traffickers for Peruvian peasants. They also settle disputes among the valley's 200,000 coca growers and provide protection from police.
Experts estimate that the Shining Path commands the loyalty of as many as 500,000 Peruvians, mainly in rural areas, and that it has caused a power vacuum in 10 percent of Peru's territory.
In those areas it has killed or driven out the mayors, justices of peace, police and schoolteachers.
"Sendero Luminoso has set up an alternative government structure and has not been challenged," says a senior U.S. Embassy official.
In hundreds of villages and small towns, it has named "people's committees," consisting of five commissars responsible for such things as security, health, education and economic production, including collective farms.
Sendero has about 10,000 armed fighters to wage a guerrilla war against Peru's 120,000-member armed forces.
But the army, which has been denounced by international human rights groups for its brutality, is increasingly demoralized by low pay and old equipment.
A colonel earns only $240 a month. The first six months of 1991, some 180 career officers resigned due to low pay.
Sendero's timetable calls for its war of attrition against the government to put it into power by the end of the century. Some leaders say they are running ahead of schedule.
"That is my worst nightmare, my greatest fear," Degregori says. "Can you imagine another decade with Sendero?"