THE OTHER PATH

PREFACE

"Boooom!!!" The massive explosion hit at 8:00 p.m. on July 20, 1992, while many of us were still working at the Instituto Libertad y Democracia (ILD) offices in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima. The blast was so powerful that it smashed walls and windows, sending splinters of glass, metal, and furniture shooting through rooms like jet-propelled daggers. It was a car bomb, and the explosion hurled the car's engine across the property, destroying everything in its way until it crashed into the wall of a neighbor's house some one hundred meters to the rear of our building. For miles around, a huge mushrooming cloud could be seen rising above our devastated headquarters.

It was not the first time we had been the target of terror. The Shining Path, which had been terrorizing Peru since 1980, considered the ILD their intellectual nemesis. They had bombed our offices before, shot at our automobiles, and threatened our people. That nagging feeling that there is bound to be a next time saved many lives. Three minutes before the bomb went off, we heard the familiar cracking of the gunfire directed at our building intended to force our security guards to take cover behind the outer walls protecting the ILD so that a group of Shining Path commandos could deliver a much more deadly package —in this case, according to the police investigation, a car containing four hundred kilos of dynamite and ammonium nitrate. The warning shots gave us precious seconds to dive for cover and avoid the deadly debris that soon was flying through our offices.

Some, however, were not so lucky. According to the press, three people died in the attack and nineteen were wounded. Among the wounded, Edilberto Mesías, an ILD security guard who had taken a bullet in the stomach, crawled to a nearby hospital and managed to survive. Marco Tulio Ojeda, a policeman assigned to the ILD, heroically rushed to the car to try to tear out the bomb's burning fuse but was seconds too late: the car blew and Marco was immediately killed. By the time the twenty of us who were inside the building got up from the floor, shook off the glass, metal, and dust, and rushed outside to assess the damage, we found a Franciscan priest already administering last rites to some of the victims lying on the sidewalk, innocent passersby who had been killed by the gunfire and explosion.

It was a tragic moment. All of us were stunned by the violence of it and saddened by the innocent lives lost. But nobody was surprised. In fact, some of us were convinced that this attack was another sign that we were actually winning our intellectual war against the Shining Path. The most optimistic among us was Mariano Cornejo, the guru of our think tank, who rushed into the remains of my office fifteen minutes after the explosion. Living just a few blocks away from the ILD, Mariano knew who the target was as soon as he heard the explosion. "What more proof do we need that we have the Shining Path on the run?" he asked me. "They have run out of arguments. They can only make statements with gunpowder. They don't know what to do any more."

Mariano was referring to the fact that the ILD had openly taken on the Shining Path five years before, when we published The Other Path in Peru. As the title indicates, the book was an intellectual challenge to the terrorists. Based on solid fieldwork and hard facts, the book puts forward a much more realistic picture of poverty in Peru and a more effective alternative to remedy underdevelopment and injustice than that proposed by the terrorist.