Sendero Luminoso Organization

President Alberto Fujimori is using conciliatory letters by the imprisoned leader of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency to bolster political support. The letters to the president--signed by Abimael Guzman, the founder and leader of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) who is serving a life sentence at a military prison near here--propose talks to end the 13-year-old war that has killed more than 27,000 Peruvians. On Oct.

Sendero Luminoso guerrillas attacked Ashaninka Indian communities along the banks of a jungle river valley in central Peru, killing up to 62 villagers and wounding 34 others, officials in Lima said. Local officials said the attack was the second by the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, this week. On Monday guerrillas killed eight people in another village.

Warring bands of guerrillas turned the mountains around Churin into a "red zone," imposing their authority over peasant villages, terrorizing and slaughtering people who stood in their way. Many villages emptied as frightened residents fled. And all but a trickle of tourists stopped coming to take Churin's famous mineral waters. Like much of Peru, this area 120 miles north of Lima was seething and suffering under the violent onslaught of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path.

Shooting candidates and setting off bombs, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas have carried out a bloody campaign aimed at disrupting municipal elections today and showing that the Maoist group is still fearsomely effective. A powerful car bomb exploded Thursday outside the Peruvian headquarters of IBM, injuring several people, and terrorists assassinated a candidate for mayor of the important Lima district of Villa El Salvador. A dozen other mayoral candidates have been killed since late December.

The Sendero Luminoso is back with a vengeance, announcing its presence in recent days in the flash and roar of deadly car bombs. It is the first major terrorist offensive in Lima since police captured Sendero Luminoso leader Abimael Guzman in early September, and it has erupted just in time to complicate a crucial and controversial electoral process.

Maoist guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside a school for police officials Sunday, wounding 10 civilians, police said. It was the first major act of violence by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas ahead of elections for a new assembly.

Abimael Guzman, patriarch of the ruthless Sendero Luminoso revolutionary movement, lost his last chance Wednesday to overturn a life sentence for "treason against the fatherland." In rejecting his second and final appeal, Peru's Supreme Council of Military Justice sealed Guzman's transformation from a mastermind of terror to a prisoner without prospects. He is to be confined for life to a cell on a navy base off the coast of Lima.

Abimael Guzman, guiding light of Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, is expected to lose his final appeal this week against a life sentence imposed by a military court. The Supreme Council of Military Justice will issue its decision by Wednesday. Guzman, 57, was convicted on charges of treason for leading the Maoist rebel movement in a war of terrorism since 1980.

After a secret trial of eight days, an anonymous military judge sentenced Sendero Luminoso guerrilla chieftain Abimael Guzman to life in prison on Wednesday and levied a $25-billion fine against him and two of his lieutenants. The judge convicted Guzman, 57, of "treason against the fatherland," giving him the maximum sentence allowed by Peruvian law. Anti-terrorist police captured Guzman on Sept. 12 in a Lima hide-out, ending a 12-year manhunt.

As hundreds of reporters crowded a platform in front of a curtained cell at central police headquarters here Thursday, agents pulled the strings, the curtains dropped and there behind bars was Abimael Guzman, 57, feared leader of the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas and for 12 years Peru's most wanted man. It was Guzman's first appearance before the press since police arrested him and seven others in a Lima safehouse Sept. 12.