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S E C R E T LIMA 000487 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/14/2017 
TAGS: PGOV PINR PTER SNAR PE
SUBJECT: PERU: GOVERNMENT PLAN TO TAKE BACK ITS TERRITORY 
FROM TERRORIST AND CRIMINAL GROUPS 
 
Classified By: Ambassador J. Curtis Struble for reasons 1.4(c) and (d). 
 
¶1.  (S) Summary: The Garcia government has developed a 
comprehensive plan that, successfully implemented, could end 
the continuing threat to Peru's peace and security 
represented by Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso -- SL) remnants 
while blunting the FARC and narcotraffickers.  The four-part 
plan focuses on regions where a weak state presence has 
allowed terrorist or narcotics groups to flourish, 
potentially threatening national security.  They are the 
VRAE, the Huallaga valley (areas where separate SL columns 
operate), the Putumayo (to control the border with Colombia 
and blunt FARC influence) as well as Peru's northern coast 
(targeting maritime narcotraffickers).  Substantively, the 
plan incorporates enhanced intelligence collection, targeted 
security operations, infusions of economic support that 
establish the state's presence and civic actions intended to 
separate terrorist groups from local populations.  Besides 
addressing the vexing lack of a unified command authority in 
the VRAE and Huallaga regions, the plan enjoys political 
support at the highest levels and appears to have sufficient 
funding for at least the first part -- Plan VRAE -- to begin 
in earnest.  In its scope and thoroughness, this 
comprehensive CT/CN plan appears to offer more promise than 
anything evidenced by the previous government, but the real 
proof will be in its implementation.  End Summary. 
 
¶2.  (S/NF) The Garcia government, led by the Ministries of 
Defense and Interior, has developed a comprehensive 
counter-terrorism plan that could end the continuing menace 
to Peru's peace and security represented by the Shining Path 
(SL) while also blunting FARC and narcotrafficker influence. 
According to sensitive reporting, SL has  200-500 armed 
militants that operate independently in two separate regions, 
one in the VRAE and the other in the Huallaga valley.  While 
these SL columns still espouse the group's revolutionary 
"Maoist" ideology, reporting in recent years records their 
transformation into mercenaries who sell protection and 
extortion services to narcotics traffickers and other 
criminal operations, much like the FARC in Colombia.  While 
SL remnants are relatively few and geographically isolated, 
government intelligence officials believe that, like the 
FARC, the terrorist group could reemerge as a significant 
national security threat in the future. 
 
¶3.  (S) The government's plan is multidimensional first in 
geographic terms, focusing on four priority areas.  Indeed, 
one might characterize the plan as, in effect, four separate 
plans arranged into one loose framework. 
 
-- The first two plans target the VRAE and the Huallaga 
Valley -- remote coca growing zones east of the Andes that 
cut across the departments of Junin, Huancevelica, Ayacucho 
and Apurimac.  Not coincidentally, these areas are also home 
to the two separate remnant columns of SL, who operate 
independently of one another.  "Plan VRAE" is already 
approved and closest to execution. 
 
-- The third plan seeks to reinforce security in the Putumayo 
region along the northern border with Colombia.  It aims to 
expand the state's presence in that remote region, including 
with patrols along the Putumayo river in order to prevent 
FARC elements from using Peruvian territory.  (The FARC uses 
Peruvian territory, to some extent, for rest and relaxation, 
logistics and supply and has co-opted some communities and 
local leaders in the region.) 
 
-- The fourth plan, still in gestation, aims for government 
security forces to more closely monitor and control the 
country's northern coast.  In recent years some of Peru's 
largest drug seizures were made along or offshore the 
northern coast, indicating its growing importance as a 
trafficking route. 
 
While each of these targeted areas requires a distinct plan 
crafted to its particular geographic and other challenges, 
they are all similar in their remoteness, lack of state 
presence, and the ability of illegal armed groups, including 
terrorists, to conduct operations there. 
 
¶4.  (S) Substantively, the government's plan incorporates the 
interconnected, mutually reinforcing elements of classic 
counterinsurgency strategy.  These elements are: 

-- Enhanced intelligence gathering capabilities to identify 
with greater precision the physical location and membership 
of these groups.  (Government officials have requested 
specific assistance from U.S. counterparts in this 
connection.) 
 
-- Targeted security operations, which aim to root out the 
terrorists while minimizing damage to innocent members of 
surrounding communities.  Past governments erred in not 
extirpating definitively the remnants of SL while they were 
weak.  The stepped-up pace of SL attacks in the two regions 
over the past 18 months shows that the remnant groups used 
the respite to recruit auxiliaries, enlist locals in 
intelligence collection, and build symbiotic relations with 
narcotics traffickers and illegal loggers.  The current plan 
could finally remove this threat.  At the same time, the plan 
reflects an understanding, learned through past missteps, 
that security operations alone are insufficient to the task. 
 
-- Establishing and expanding the state's presence with 
infusions of economic support to build roads, schools, 
clinics and to pay for other pressing local needs.  The 
government recognizes that terrorist groups have survived in 
the vacuum left by the absence of the state, and that failing 
to correct this situation would inevitably doom the larger 
effort. 
 
-- Civic operations to win the "hearts and minds" of local 
populations and to convince them that their future lies with 
the government rather than with the terrorists.  This will 
take the form of a more integrated "community policing" 
concept in which relationships between security forces and 
local populations are cemented by long-term intensive contact 
and by high-impact public relations outreach such as health 
and vaccination campaigns.  (One persistent structural 
problem in the past has been that, while security forces 
rotate in and out of these remote regions, terrorist groups 
remain, and therefore have a more intimate knowledge of the 
people and terrain.) 
 
The economic support and civic operations components seek to 
"separate" local populations from terrorist groups, build 
trust between local populations and security forces and 
provide the vital human intelligence needed to carry out 
other elements of the plan. 
 
¶5.  (S/NF) The government's plan seeks to overcome an 
obstacle that has vexed counterterrorism efforts in the 
recent past, i.e., to unify a command authority structure 
that has historically been divided between Peruvian National 
Police (PNP) and the uniformed military forces.   Problems 
relating to divided or ambiguous command authority, 
characterized by PNP and military forces acting without 
reference to the other's information or orders, have often 
generated confusion, ineffective operations and sometimes 
worse.  According to sensitive reporting, the killing of five 
PNP officers and three civilians in a December SL attack was 
caused in part by a lack of communication and coordination 
with nearby military forces, which had standing orders that 
travel in such high risk areas be done in protected convoys. 
 
¶6.  (S) The plan is closely monitored by Minister of Defense 
Wagner, Minister of Interior Mazetti and Chairman of Joint 
Chiefs equivalent Montoya.  President Garcia, who wishes to 
correct a legacy of mistakes in the security area made during 
his first term (85-90) when the SL flourished, has reportedly 
"blessed" the plan.  The Ministry of Defense has taken the 
lead in coordinating the VRAE, Putumayo and the northern 
coast plans, while civilian intelligence agencies in the 
Ministry of Interior have led in developing the Huallaga 
Valley plan. 
 
¶7.  (S) There are early indications that stage one of the 
plan has funding levels -- reportedly of approximately USD 20 
million -- reflecting that political will and that should 
facilitate the kick-off of its initial key elements.  (Plan 
VRAE is closest to implementation, and could serve as a kind 
of test case for the broader effort.)  While these funds are 
insufficient to resolve larger problems of poverty and 
exclusion that indirectly feed into terrorism and that 
represent the government's primary political challenge, they 
should give government forces a genuine capacity to get to 
work.  In this respect, the government appears to be putting 
its money where its mouth is on counter-terrorism. 
 
-------- 
Comment: 
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¶8.  (C) In its comprehensive scope and thoroughness, this 
multi-sectoral and thematically integrated CT plan offers 
more promise than anything evidenced by the previous 
government, which spent its first years pretending a 
terrorism threat no longer existed.  Still, in this as in 
other government plans, the proof will be in its successful 
implementation and in its results.  It is important to note 
that the only major step proceeding from discussions into 
action has been the reorganization of command and control. 
STRUBLE