PERU’S ELECTION RATTLED BY ALLEGED MASSACRE BY ‘SENDERO LUMINOSO’

Peruvians vote on Sunday for a new president after a polarizing hard-Left versus hard-Right campaign dominated by the bloody reemergence of remnants of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Marxist guerrillas.

Pedro Castillo, a radical teachers union leader, faces off against Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the disgraced 1990s strongman Alberto Fujimori, in an election that has left many in the pandemic-ravaged Andean nation in despair. The most recent polls had the pair in a statistical dead heat.

Castillo, 51, began the runoff race with a 20-point lead. But Ms. Fujimori, 46, has steadily hauled him in, helped by what critics regarded as Castillo’s erratic, amateur campaign and the backlash to a massacre of 16 people in a remote coca-growing valley where the last surviving members of the Shining Path are now cornered.

Critics said the massacre could be the handiwork of armed pro-Fujimori elements out to portray Castillo as a leader who would plunge Peru into internecine war.

The terrorists shot up two rickety, open-air bars on May 23, before vanishing back into the jungle.

They left behind a pamphlet bearing the hammer and sickle and warning Peruvians not to vote for Ms. Fujimori.

The attack is the group’s bloodiest in more than a decade and has been seized on by Ms. Fujimori’s supporters, who warn of Castillo’s alleged terrorist sympathies.

Fujimori herself is under fire and could be tried for allegedly laundering $17 million. The case will be postponed, should she win, until she steps down in 2026. Her father is imprisoned under a 25-year sentence for the massacres of suspected guerrillas, many of whom had nothing to do with the Sendero Luminoso.

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