Back on the Warpath

LINO CHIPANA/EL COMERCIO-AP

SELF-DEFENSE: The government is arming militias to fight rebels

In downtown Lima, inside Peru's National Antiterrorism Bureau, agents are putting the finishing touches on the new Terror Museum. Most of the display cases hold police-confiscated kitsch: rebel soap carvings, music boxes that play communist hymns, all of them bearing the image of Abimael Guzmán. "Presidente Gonzalo," as his followers call him, is the leader of Shining Path, the bloodthirsty Maoist guerrillas who killed more than half of the 69,000 Peruvians who died in the armed conflicts of the 1980s and early '90s, according to a report issued in August by Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Nearby is a lifelike dummy...

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