The Peruvian military announced in late April that it would conduct an operation against the militant group Shining Path in the Apurimac and Ene River Valley (VRAE). The operation was announced as a response to the group's April 9 kidnapping of 36 workers associated with the country's Camisea natural gas project. Formed in the 1960s as a Maoist political movement, Shining Path has a long history of militant activities in Peru. After the 1992 arrest of the Shining Path's founder, Abimael Guzman, the group fragmented into two factions, and its ranks declined from tens of thousands to just a few thousand fighters. The first Shining Path faction operates in the Alto Huallaga River Valley and is closely involved with drug cultivation and trafficking but maintains its allegiance to Guzman's ideological teachings. The Huallaga group has undergone a series of setbacks after years of fighting Peruvian police. As a result, the government declared the Shining Path dead in the Alto Huallaga River Valley April 5 and announced that it would focus its efforts on combating the second Shining Path faction. The second, stronger Shining Path group operates in the VRAE region on the east-facing slopes of the Andes Mountains in south-central Peru. Though not entirely without ideological motivation, the VRAE faction has explicitly abandoned Guzman's teachings and is deeply involved with coca base production and sale to international drug traffickers primarily from Colombia. With the group's increased focus on drug trafficking, it no longer focuses its efforts on instigating political change in Peru. Instead, the VRAE faction's main concern is protecting its lucrative drug processing and smuggling activities from government interference. The challenge for Peruvian security forces is to protect important economic infrastructure while combating Shining Path militants who are fighting within their own territory and are deeply enmeshed in the local population. Though recent successes against the Shining Path in northern Peru's Alto Huallaga River Valley have demonstrated the capabilities of the Peruvian national police against the militants, the overlapping geography of the coca-growing VRAE with the natural gas infrastructure of the Camisea project escalates the situation for Peru and could push Lima to seek closer security coordination with the United States or Colombia.
