Peruvian Rebel Refuses to Repent

LIMA, Peru (AP) - In his first interview since his arrest 10 years ago, the jailed leader of a Peruvian rebel movement refused to repent for the political violence fueled by his group in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Victor Polay, head of the largely defeated Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, made the comments in an interview published Thursday in Caretas, Peru's leading news weekly. 

``The MRTA did not initiate the violence in Peru. Our country suffered social violence and structural crisis since the beginning of the republic, and periodic political violence,'' Polay said. 

Without specifying how, Caretas said it smuggled typed questions to Polay, who responded in writing from a maximum-security naval prison where he is jailed with other rebel chiefs. 

The magazine published what it described as a photo of Polay in his prison room. It showed Polay, looking far younger than his 49 years, sitting on a narrow bed dressed in a sweater and smoking a cigarette. Next to him on a bookcase was a sketch of Jose Carlos Mariategui, who founded Peru's Communist Party in the 1920s. 

``The MRTA acted as an organization in arms that sought social change, but we never rejected political dialogue that could have avoided bringing us to civil war,'' Polay wrote. 

The MRTA is blamed for, at most, 200 of the 30,000 deaths in political violence that wracked Peru from 1980 until the mid 1990s. Most of the victims were rural people caught in the crossfire between the army and the much larger Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency. 

The Tupac Amaru group grabbed the world's attention in December 1996 when 14 of its members seized the Japanese ambassador's residence during a cocktail party and held 72 hostages for four months. A raid by army commandoes freed 71 of the captives but left one hostage and all the guerrillas dead. 

 © 1999-2004, PERU TO YOU    This page last updated on April 05, 2009