PERSPECTIVE ON PERU : Fortune Favors the Unworthy : So the Shining Path’s leader is arrested. But it was Alberto Fujimori who destroyed a viable democracy.

The stunning news of the arrest of Abimael Guzman, the Shining Path’s philosopher-king, was all the more spectacular because of the multiple and far-reaching conceptual resonances. Could just one masterful lightning stroke implode the long insurrectionary buildup of the Shining Path (through 12 years of armed insurgency and 15 previous years of preparatory work)? Could carefully built strategic initiative and favorable strategic momentum--both of which the Shining Path unfortunately had--be lost in a moment if a dashing action rendered the queen bee a prisoner and the red beehive rudderless?

Conceptual counterpoint didn’t stop there if moments defeat years, and if audaciousness defeats deliberateness: There was added drama because the Shining Path was widely regarded as a movement that had been rowing against the stream of history and actually making progress against the current. Militant anachronism subduing reality, defiant Stalinism reincarnated in a wounded country. Could this disappear in a wink? As the Sendero Luminoso’s prophet--the one who claimed to interpret the allegedly inexorable laws of history--was stared at in his human stature, abruptly diminished by defeat, you couldn’t help but wonder whether a group of policemen had not only made an arrest but also stated a philosophical case: that accident is central to history, and that single events can defy and eventually alter powerful trends of progression or regression in human affairs.

Two questions central to us and important to the hemisphere arise. The first is what will happen now with the Sendero Luminoso? And the second--taking into account the country’s political circumstance--is what will happen to Peru? Or, in other words, who reaps the spoils of victory?

The Shining Path has lost to captivity a man who is for them much more than a leader. He is the object of the closest approximation to religious worship that a secular group can practice. Although Stalinist and Maoist to the core, the Shining Path had one important difference with the orthodox Leninist parties, and that is the stage at which personality cult or leader worship was developed. All victorious Communist parties developed their brand of leader worship after taking power, not before. The Shining Path began to develop a cult-like devotion to Guzman well before the insurgency’s first shot was fired. Over the years this achieved proportions that would have brought a blush even to the cheeks of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung.

I don’t know of any Communist Party, especially a Maoist party, that recovered from the loss of its leader during the revolutionary stage. India’s Naxalites; Iran’s Sarbedaran and Colombia’s People’s Revolutionary Army were three Maoist movements that lost such leaders. The first two groups were destroyed, and the third vegetated for years until it signed a peace accord with President Cesar Gaviria’s government.

The outcome has been different with fundamentalist movements. To a large extent, Shining Path has many things in common with such movements. The loss of a metaphysical leader has on occasion sharpened the believer’s swords. Look at Hezbollah’s growth in Lebanon after their imam, Musa al Sadr, disappeared and was probably murdered in Libya in August, 1978.

But in the Shining Path’s hybrid case, much will depend on whether myth is satisfactorily contrasted with reality throughout Guzman’s trial process. A difficult thing even in a law-abiding, efficient country. And so many outcomes, most of them unsatisfactory, are possible there, that any prediction, including the obvious one of the Sendero Luminoso’s demise, would be found too risky even by a penniless palm-reader.

The second question, on who takes the prize is, sadly, much easier to answer. Indeed, one cannot help think that by being captured when Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship was beginning to show some of its many structural flaws, when his popular support was taking a plunge and when the democratic opposition was gaining the determination to get its act together, Guzman managed to inflict a parting blow to Peruvian society.

Fujimori will now get an immense boost domestically, providing all the pretexts needed to those in the U.S. government who pine for the apparently simpler, more manageable relationship with a cooperative dictator. If up to now their applause was under the table, you’ll see unblushing praise in the coming weeks.

Eventually, the price will be paid by Peruvians and by hemispherical democracy in equal part. When fortune favors the unworthy, it often exacts later hidden loan-shark terms. And when the unworthy is a political leader, it is often the led who end up paying both principal and interest.

Fujimori’s permanence in power would be a continuous subtraction of whatever achievement and promise Guzman’s capture made possible. He’ll now feel confident enough to stake his projected basis for a long-term dictatorial regime, legitimized through the bare cosmetics of a democratic process and interpreted in the immediate future by some analysts as an attempt to graft Taiwan, Pinochet’s Chile and Singapore into Peruvian reality. In reality, it would only be a subtropical implementation of inept fascism.

Victory cannot, after all, be proclaimed by arresting Guzman. In this kind of war you can only measure substantial progress by the number of people and amount of territory that have been brought back to a viable democratic life. If this, the real work, is not done, then the possibility of new forms of rebellion and social disintegration--or the stronger resumption of the known ones--would increase.

Lastly, even though it is quite clear Fujimori is going to profit from it, it should be said that this success won’t be the product of his strategy or his measures. This was the success of a highly autonomous, small specialized police unit, DINCOTE (Direccion Contra el Terrorismo, or the police anti-terrorism unit), the only group that has inflicted consistent damage to the Sendero Luminoso over the years.

DINCOTE’s bust proves that persistent, intelligent police work, carefully planned and flawlessly executed, can get results that count, instead of the routine list of atrocities that has been a sickening feature of most counterinsurgency efforts throughout the war.

On Sept. 16, as if to underline the importance of the point, the corpses of 13 kidnaped college students in the city of Huancayo were found on the outskirts of the Andean city. The kidnapers were “presumably military,” according to a dispatch by COMISEDH, a prestigious human-rights organization.

Certainly it is not Fujimori, the destroyer of democracy, who will be the one to bring it back. Wasn’t it James A. Baker III who admonished him, “Mr. President, you cannot destroy democracy in order to save it?” I hope some of his former subordinates remember this.