THE SHINING PATH TO DESTRUCTION

Nicholas Farrell meets

a victim of Peru's Maoist terrorists

THE campaign by Sendero Luminoso ('shining path'), Peru's Maoist terrorist organisation, to wreck the country's pres- idential elections last Sunday with bombs and murders failed to stop 80 per cent of the electorate from voting.

However, their brutal exploits have forced one man I know to leave Peru. He now languishes in Chertsey. His name is Julian Latham; he became over the course of 20 years, father to 38 orphaned Peruvian children, and his story is an account of the hope that has turned to horror in their country. Seven of his boys are dead, butchered by Sendero Luminoso. The rest are in hiding, petrified. Latham wants them out but he has no money and that is why he has come to Britain.

So, sitting in a smart London restaurant wearing his only suit, which he bought for £17 in 1973 and which hangs unused most of the time, Latham told his tale. He said, 'I just want to try and find a way to get my children away from the massacre.' Quietly, he added, as if in despair, 'I've got to go back. They're my kids.'

His story began in a place called San Francisco on the banks of a raging river, the Apurimac, in the foothills of the Andes, where vampire bats feed on ex- posed faces and toes, and green parrots screech in the dense jungle which is inha- bited by ancient tribes that hunt with bow and arrow.

This other San Francisco, some 700 miles from Lima, is reached either by lorry along what is called a road but in the rainy season is a quagmire, or by boat up the Apurimac whose whirlpools and waves are equally treacherous. It is a frontier town where Western life stops dead and some- thing else begins: a port of about 3,000 people, until recently full of wicked mer- chants with false weighing scales, preying on farmers with no one else to sell to and plying them with beer; full, too, of cocaine runners with conspicuous gold watches and the handsome descendants of the Incas; of dug-out canoes and dreadful diseases.

San Francisco is full of good and evil in sharp juxtaposition. The only white men who pass through this shanty town of corrugated iron and open sewers running down what passes for a main street are priests or mad or both. Latham does not appear to be either, though he had a mission. But he stopped in San Francisco and built an empire of sorts, not on money but on hope. Then he fled.

At this time of year, lightning cracks open what he describes as 'the mackerel sky' above the green hills overlooking Frisco. The air is heavy, hot and sultry. And in the gathering gloom the evil in man is winning, as in so much of Peru. Its name is Sendero Luminoso. Even the merchants have fled from Frisco.

No matter if the novelist centre-right candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa, becomes President, Sendero has most of the country outside the major cities in its awful grip. Sendero does not contest elections nor does it have a spokesman. It does not need them. Sendero rules by terror, extortion and the proceeds of cocaine, of which Peru is the world's largest producer.

Two months ago, aged 54, Latham left Peru. He will go back to Peru but he may never return to San Francisco. Sendero control it and they forced him out. His head is high on their shopping list. In the early 1980s the government made Latham

'It's rubbish! I've had mine ten years and in all that time he's only misbehaved once.'

responsible for the health care of the 100,000 people living in the 120-mile-long Apurimac valley. With around £100,000 a year from the Amazon Trust, a charity set up in England to back his work, he organised the reconstruction of the derelict hospital in San Francisco and 12 clinics along the river. He does not know if they are still running.

The people came to know Latham as Don Julian and he was so revered by them that they came to rely on him. The Don got things done. That was before Sendero, which surfaced in 1982. First came two verbal threats, then a written note was handed to him, demanding £50,000 protec- tion money. Soon after, on a deserted dirt road, they stopped him and demanded petrol. They were about to douse him with it and set fire to him when he recognised one. 'I asked him: "How is your mother?" The look in his eye changed. I was very lucky. They waved me on.'

But then his office was blown up in 1983 and that achieved Sendero's objective: he left San Francisco, the hospital and the clinics with many of his terrified children. They escaped clandestinely by boat along obscure small rivers and in the backs of lorries hiding among the fruit. They went to Paraguay where they spent three largely unhappy years. Then they came back to Peru but not San Francisco. That would have been suicide.

Those of his boys who remained have suffered terribly. To date Sendero has slaughtered seven and an eighth is feared dead. Each night one, a farmer, lights candles around the edges of his small- holding and prays to the Virgin Mary. that Sendero will not come.

Now in hiding on the southern coast of Peru, 30 miles from Lima, the majority of Latham's boys — many now men with wives and children — try desperately to make a living selling bits and pieces picked up from the barren sands of the coast.

Latham himself was born in Rhodesia of farming stock. He attended St George's Jesuit College in Salisbury. It was chance , that took him to Peru in 1969, aged 33, a young man with no particular vocation in life. One day in Hanover Square, he was helping a friend with a gardening business tend the plants, when a monk who had taught him at the Jesuit College happened to walk by. He was invited to Worth Abbey where the abbot asked him to help four Benedictine monks at the Worth mission on the banks of the Apurimac, ten miles from San Francisco, with their agri- cultural machinery. He agreed to go for a year.

In Peru towards the end of that year, a wretched and starving boy tugged at his trousers and took him to his family in a tin-roofed hut. The father had fallen off a bridge over a river and died. The mother was soon to die from tuberculosis, as were her small twins. But this boy, Armando, then 15, and his brother, Mario, survived. They were Latham's first boys and he stayed to become their father.

He said, 'It was my introduction to poverty and I decided to try to help these kids.'

But they had no money. So, desperate, the father and his two sons set off deep into the jungle to find a giant torneillo tree, a type of mahogany, to make into a 70-foot dug-out. With a 40-horse-power outboard this would enable them to earn a living ferrying farm produce up and down the river. By the third day, Latham's hands were so ruined from hacking at the wood that the boys told him contemptuously to go away and 'do the cooking'. Surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes, blood-sucking flies and vampire bats he felt useless. He had lost their respect.

He said, 'I was furious. They thought I was some kind of nice white guy. But all I could do for them was give them some money and very little else.'

Gradually Latham learnt how best to gouge out the hard wood with a special axe called an udza and three months later he and his boys made a triumphant return to San Francisco with their spectacular vessel. Thirty Campa Indians helped drag the enormous dug-out two miles through the jungle with bark ropes. It took three days. The dug-out was the first of three boats which they built and sold and with the money they eventually bought small- holdings. Latham also persuaded the far- mers to join a co-operative that trans- ported their produce to Lima, thus side- stepping the exploitative merchants.

This caused high tension in San Francis- co, though nothing compared to the horror that was to come one night when someone whispered in Latham's ear as he slept, `Vamos morir [we're going to die].'

He said, 'I got up and went to a very rowdy bar full of smoke and I looked at this guy, a merchant called Super Cholo. He hated us. I threw him over a chair. And I said, "If I have anything more like that you know what's going to happen." It was bravado. But it worked.'

The dug-outs were a watershed. Latham had earned the respect of the boys and despite the merchants life was relatively tranquil. Latham told me, 'My plan for the valley was that it should be self-supporting in every way. Apart from the health clinics we had started building roads and bridges. We wanted to build a small hydro-electric station. But drugs became more and more a problem. I could see the area disintegrat- ing. There were the most terrible murders. And we also knew that Sendero was gathering momentum.'

Sendero do not like roads and bridges and clinics. They represent progress and the terrorists' philosophy demands the collapse of capitalism, not its success. 'We were building a bridge and Sendero arrived with machine guns and said, "You can't build this bridge." There was this wonder- ful schoolmaster who stood up and said, "We're bloody well going to build this bloody bridge, guns or no guns."' But, Latham added, 'They ended up with their clothes torn off and their crutches cut out and their tongues cut out and they were fed to the dogs in front of their wives and children. The next night they blew up our office.'

Latham has come back from the jungle as a storyteller with a story, rather like the character in the presidential candidate's novel of the same name. It is so fantastical that it is hard to believe. But Mr Martin Appleby, chairman of the Amazon Trust, told me, 'I've been out there four times. If anything I've found that Julian tends to underplay rather than exaggerate what has happened. `He's an extraordinary man. His name was a byword. He is a tremendous attrac- tion to the oppressed. Sendero had to destroy him. Anyone who was a force for progress had to be killed.'

'Before the Common Agricultural Policy it used to be Animal Farm.'