by Tim Johnson
December 13, 2010, MEXICO CITY — U.S. diplomats in Peru are keeping a close eye on the steady resurgence of the fanatical Sendero Luminoso insurgency but find that corruption in Peru’s army stymies efforts to fight the Maoist group, U.S. diplomatic cables show.
A U.S. cable written in November 2009 said Lima urgently needed a better strategy “for turning the tide against a re-emerging” Sendero Luminoso, also known as the Shining Path.
While the group may number only 2,000 members or so, many of them unarmed, cables indicated that Peru’s armed forces face serious equipment shortages and are plagued by generals seemingly more interested in enrichment than fighting leftist guerrillas.
Sendero Luminoso arose in the Peruvian Andes in the early 1980s, leading a fight that cost some 69,000 lives before the insurgency was largely decimated in the 1990s.
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