Cynthia McNamara is not your typical tourist. For more than 15 years, the 39- year-old Philadelphia-born anthropologist has prowled the back roads of Africa and Asia and lived for stretches in Spain and Iran. Last December, however, as McNamara was finishing up a two-year trek through South America, she stumbled into a nightmare involving Peruvian officials and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the shadowy, Maoist-oriented guerrilla group committed to overthrowing the Lima government. Her terrifying sojourn ended two weeks ago, as abruptly as it had begun, but not before she had spent four months in a prison, where she lived alongside members of one of the world's most secretive rebel groups.
McNamara's brush with horror began Dec. 4, when four policemen stopped her as she strolled through the southern Peruvian town of Ayacucho. At first they claimed they were conducting a passport check. Then, according to McNamara, the police searched her hotel room and confiscated "suspicious" articles -- medicine, vitamins, a ball of string and tourist maps. In the local jail, McNamara got a hint of the problems to come. "No one told me what was going on," she said. "But the word terrorismo drifted down the staircase."
Within two days the Peruvian authorities charged McNamara with the murder of two government officials who were killed in a 1987 Sendero Luminoso attack near the Andean town of Vilcashuaman. The evidence against her was flimsy: the two survivors of the assault said it was led by a tall gringa, local slang for any non-Indian woman from the Peruvian coast. Both victims met McNamara and said she was not the killer, but to no avail. Though McNamara claimed she was in Puquio, a town more than 200 miles away, when the murders occurred, records from the hotel where she had been staying on that fateful day had disappeared.
According to McNamara, she was interrogated for a week by Peru's counterterrorism police and Interpol before she was allowed to call a lawyer ( or the U.S. embassy. On Dec. 28, McNamara was transferred to Canto Grande, Peru's maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Lima. She was housed in a cellblock where some of Sendero Luminoso's most notorious leaders are kept, awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes ranging from sabotage to assassination.
Considered one of South America's most secure jails when it opened in 1986, Canto Grande no longer deserves that reputation. Its closed-circuit televisions and searchlights are broken. Inside the four-story women's cellblock, the inmates have taken over and turned it into a Senderista training camp, complete with red felt and tinsel banners that proclaim LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!
When the daily chores are done, the prisoners attend political-education classes or learn to knit and sew. Whenever possible, they smuggle the goods to the outside for sale, donating the profits to the Senderista cause. Several times a week around noon, the 63 Senderista women and 120 men in a nearby cellblock break for an "agitation," in which they rattle the bars and hurl earsplitting insults at their guards. For recreation, there is volleyball in a pavilion's patio, under red-painted panels that pay homage to Marx, Lenin and Mao. Close to the top of the walls the Senderistas have daubed, in red paint, a paraphrase of the Chairman's poetry: NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THOSE WHO DARE TO SCALE THE HEIGHTS.