There was a television set in the den, and the hostages could channel-surf between soccer games and the coverage of their own plight. But then, with a wave of their Kalashnikov assault rifles, the two women among the 20 or so guerrillas would commandeer the TV to watch their favorite soap opera: “MarIa From the Barrio.” For more serious fare, seminars were organized in the dining room. Hostages gave hourlong presentations on their specialties, ranging from economics and polling to Andean and Japanese food. A Peruvian insurance executive held forth on the intricacies of a product that all of them found intensely interesting: kidnapping insurance.
Outsiders got their first look at the barricaded villa last week, when about 20 Peruvian and foreign journalists defied the police and swarmed into the building. The guerrillas welcomed them. They trotted out some hostages to show that the prisoners had not been harmed. “We hope for a happy ending,” said one captive, Peruvian Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela. The rebels then released more hostages, but they insisted that they were not about to compromise with the embattled government of President Alberto Fujimori. “We are in no rush,” said NEstor Cerpa Cartolini, the leader of the TUpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, also known by its Spanish abbreviation, MRTA.
Cerpa, 43, a pudgy man with a red-and-white bandanna over his face, insisted that the government had to release more than 400 comrades– including his own wife–who were enduring the abysmal hardships of Peruvian prisons (“a slow death penalty,” he called it). Cerpa dismissed speculation that the guerrillas would end their siege in exchange for a guaranteed flight to Cuba, their ideological model. “We didn’t do all this just to get safe passage out of the country,” said the former la- bor leader.
Fujimori, a hard-line capitalist reformer, thought he had defeated the leftist guerrillas who once ravaged Peru. Now, stunned by the nearly extinct MRTA’s daring raid, he holed up in his presidential palace, talking to almost no one. Peruvian security expert Enrique Obando said isolation is “Fujimori’s usual reaction to problems for which he has no response. It comes from not knowing what to do.” From the outset the president’s military advisers wanted an attack on the villa, despite the potential for a bloodbath. But Japan, Peru’s most important source of foreign aid and investment and the home of Fujimori’s ancestors, urged him to avoid violence. “Fujimori listens to the military, but his relationship with Japan is so tight he can’t act,” said Fernando Rospigliosi, a columnist for the Peruvian newsweekly Caretas. “He’s not accustomed to this. He never negotiates.”
The 74 remaining hostages included top-ranking Peruvian officials and Japanese business executives, plus the Japanese ambassador and Fujimori’s brother, Pedro. The guerrillas who held them were armed with grenades and other explosives, antitank guns and automatic weapons, according to released hostages. Cerpa went out of his way to be polite to the captives, though one of his deputies, known as Tito, was less friendly, perhaps because he took a bullet in the leg on the first night. Early in the siege, when the guerrillas saw two escaped hostages running away from the villa, they did not shoot.
The guerrillas had crashed the party–held to mark the birthday of Japan’s emperor–by bursting through a wall from the villa next door. They met surprisingly little opposition; convinced that he had already defeated the rebels, Fujimori had relaxed his guard, even cutting his antiterrorism budget. But it was one of the hostages, Japanese Ambassador Morihisha Aoki, who publicly assumed blame for the security fiasco. Every day the tall, gray-haired diplomat visited all his fellow hostages, offering apologies and sharing his cigarettes and clothes. “He distributed all his belongings almost as if it were a form of penance,” said opposition congressman Javier Diez Canseco, who was released after five days. On the 13th day of the crisis, Aoki sang for the captives, provoking wild cheers and applause. But even the ambassador’s gen- erosity had its limits. At one point he confided to another hostage: “I understand people using my shirts, my shaving cream, even my cologne. But my toothbrush, that’s too much.”
In the heat of the Peruvian summer, conditions inside the villa soon became hellish, with overturned furniture blocking the breeze from the windows. When temper- atures dropped on chilly nights, there weren’t enough blankets to go around. Toilets backed up and stank; the prisoners were reduced to using the yellow pages for toilet paper. The government turned off the villa’s electricity, turned it back on, then turned it off again. One of the ambassador’s dogs wandered into the backyard and was killed by a land mine.
On Christmas Day there was roast turkey for dinner, delivered by Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko. One of the president’s few confidants, Bishop Juan LuIs Cipriani, said mass and served as an intermediary between the rebels and the government. Cerpa allowed the hostages to use their cellular phones until the batteries died. He laughed when Aoki was unable to get President Fujimori on the phone. “Mr. Ambassador,” he said, “you’ve campaigned with Fujimori; you’ve given him lots of money. What do you think of your friend’s loyalty now?”
Fujimori insisted he would not release any MRTA prisoners. “It would be instant political death–like drinking poison,” said LuIs Jochamowitz, author of a respected presidential biography. Concessions to MRTA also might arouse the guerrillas of the Maoist Shining Path, Peru’s larger and more violent rebel movement. Still, experts said there was reason to hope for a compromise. MRTA, they suggested, could free the hostages in return for safe passage to Cuba, an unofficial payoff from Japanese companies and a pledge by the government to improve conditions for imprisoned rebels. But a negotiated settlement seemed a long way off. “Listen,” Cerpa told one hostage, “we came physically and mentally prepared to stay for a long time. You all just came for a cocktail party.”
