I HAD been reading Gongora's Soledades when the news programmes on all the channels of sunny Miami opened with the story of the audacious coup demand in Lima by the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru), who have occupied the Japanese embassy with over 400 hostages inside, among them diplomats, state ministers, businessmen, officers, functionaries and the usual cocktail lions, gathered there to celebrate the Emperor's birthday.
The first thing that entered my head was a quite frivolous consideration the extraordinary coincidence of having taken up again just now, when this new terrorist deed occurred, a book that I had been reading at every free moment during the Peruvian electoral campaign of 1989-90, when the MRTA perpetrated some of its noisiest operations.
Since then, the cold and perfect beauty of Gongora's poetry has been indelibly associated in my memory with the blood and thunder of terrorist violence which marked that campaign.
No solution yet seems forthcoming, and of course I hope the solution will be quick and peaceful, with a safe homecoming for all the hostages, among whom I have numerous acquaintances and some close friends. But, while making all due efforts not to seem rash or add fuel to the fire, I cannot help but comment on how the mass media have been treating the event.
I hear on US television, and read in the press, that in Peru there are two terrorist organisations one radical and fanatical, Shining Path; and another moderate and political, the MRTA. The former are more cruel and intransigent on account of their Maoist affiliation, their model of society being the China of the cultural revolution and the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, and the latter are more flexible and pragmatic because they are only Castrists, and may eventually transform themselves into a political party operating in a legal context.
As proof of the MRTA's moderation, we are told of the decent treatment they give to their hostages, the cordial discussions on economic policy that the operation leaders sometimes have with captured businessmen, and the talks that the kidnappers offer to their victims, enlightening them as to their revolutionary ideals. I am bound to say that this nomenclature of "radical" and "moderate" terrorists has always seemed a fallacy to me.
Even if it is true that between Shining Path and the MRTA there exist marked ideological differences, yet in that which is really important, in that which really defines a political movement - its methods - these differences are well nigh invisible. It is true that the Shining Path have killed many more people, but this is not because the MRTA are more benign - they are just not as numerous, and have a more limited capacity for destruction.
Even so, the MRTA's record since it was founded in 1983 is laden with innocent blood and corpses, assaults, kidnappings for ransom, all sorts of extortions, and an organic alliance with the drug traffickers of the Huallaga valley - to whom, in return for substantial remuneration, they have been supplying armed protection for many years.
It may be my judgment is tainted with subjectivity; an MRTA commando tried to annihilate me and my family at the airport of Pucallpa during that electoral campaign and, not managing to do so, consoled themselves by wiping out a handful of peasants who had discovered them.
But the fact is, it seems to me a gross aberration - this use of the adjective "moderate" for a movement that, in the name of the future socialist paradise, has murdered countless people and made a specialty of kidnapping for ransom. All the major kidnappings that have taken place in Peru in the last 10 years have been their doing, and have netted them many millions of dollars - invested, presumably, in arms and ammunition to make possible new operations that will again fill their coffers and leave a trail of suffering and horror.
One of my closest friends was a victim of theirs. For six months they held him captive in a tiny cave, where he was unable to stand up, and where, there being frequent power blackouts at that time, he spent long periods in total darkness, in the crunchy company of the cockroaches - where he learned to kill with feral alacrity, guided only by his sense of hearing.
His family, meanwhile, was subjected to daily psychological torture, by telephone calls and cassettes with recordings Machiavellically conceived to wrack their nerves. This person emerged hale and hearty from the terrible trial, but others did not survive it, or emerged as nervous wrecks. If these people are the moderates of terror, what can the extremists be like?
This is why, from the first moment, I have opposed, with the same conviction and severity, both Shining Path and the MRTA - maintaining that, more than their ideological divergency, the important thing is the identity that exists between them in the vileness of their behaviour.
For both of them consider that, in pursuit of their political ends, the killing of their adversaries or of innocent persons, along with robbery, assault, kidnapping and alliance with drug traffickers, are perfectly legitimate methods. And for the same reason, I have criticised the senselessness of the Peruvians who applauded the Fujimori regime when, to fight the terrorists more "efficiently", it borrowed their methods, and generalised the use of torture, disappearances or bare faced murders.
A complacent attitude to state terror is, unfortunately, wide spread in countries where a feeling of insecurity and desperation, caused by the actions of extremists, lead wide sectors of the public to approve a hardline policy of counter terrorism.
This is a pure illusion, a deceitful mirage. The fact is that when the state adopts terrorist methods to combat terrorism, the terrorists are already the winners, for they have managed to impose the logic of their game, and have deeply wounded the institutions of democracy.
Peru is now waking up from the authoritarian dream it embraced so enthusiastically, i.e. an authoritarian regime of "no nonsense" - no free press, no independent judges or parliamentary representatives - which was to stamp out ruthlessly the terrorists, and put an end to the "political haggling" of the supposed democracy. Well, now it seems that, four years after the coup d'etat that ended democracy in Peru, terrorism is far from stamped out, as the government's propagandists had been claiming.
The MRTA, at least, has given spectacular proof of its existence, occupying as it has for days now the front pages of the newspapers, and prime time on television all over the world. And in other departments, the so called "Peruvian model" that shone so brightly in the eyes of Latin American militarists in recent years looks every day less like a regime of peace and economic progress, and more like a poorly veiled version of the traditional dictatorships of our continent.