Hostages Persevere in Peru as 4th Month of Captivity Begins

LIMA, Peru — Inside the besieged mansion with the columned facade reminiscent of the Southern manor in “Gone With the Wind,” a 37-year-old Peruvian congressman named Luis Chang Ching wards off despair with a disciplined routine.

Awaking at dawn, hostage Chang reads the Bible. He does push-ups and sit-ups, and jogs in once-elegant hallways now smeared with the guerrilla graffiti of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. As his fellow hostages strum guitars and take Japanese lessons in the stuffy confines of the mansion, Chang writes letters to his family, pouring out the melancholy and tension of captivity.

In a despondent moment three weeks ago, when he apparently felt death close at hand, one of Chang’s letters made a gloomy reference to his two dead brothers: “Being realistic, I think I will soon visit Manuel and Santiago. I hope my journey will be calm.”

But Chang’s mood has picked up; he joked in a recent letter that he needs a haircut. “I have a mustache, a beard, long hair. I look like Jesus Christ.”

Chang and 71 others begin their fourth grinding month under the guns of their Tupac Amaru captors today. The standoff at the Japanese ambassador’s residence has debilitated the diplomats, legislators, Cabinet ministers, businessmen and police and military commanders, according to relatives and government officials.

“Right now it’s pretty miserable,” said a foreign diplomat monitoring the crisis. “There’s the heat, the illness, the psychological roller coaster.”

The captives are mostly middle-aged and elderly men--Peruvians, Japanese and the Bolivian ambassador. They suffer stomach problems, rashes, gum disease and other ailments caused by stress and harsh conditions; the already precarious health of several men has worsened. And the mood of rebel chief Nestor Cerpa Cartolini and his youthful jungle fighters has darkened as their talks with the government have lurched from potential breakthrough to virtual breakdown, according to another diplomatic source.

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Reports compiled by Peruvian intelligence agents using long-range eavesdropping equipment with the help of U.S. agents indicate that the approximately 18 rebels are increasingly jumpy and “paranoid,” the source said.

But both sides seem convinced that violence would be disastrous, and hope for a peaceful resolution endures. Analysts predict that the rebels will ultimately accept an offer of asylum in Cuba. Although no one expects President Alberto Fujimori to grant the guerrillas’ demand to free about 380 imprisoned rebels, diplomatic sources say the government may agree to compromise measures, perhaps releasing relatively minor offenders, reviewing harsh sentences and improving prison conditions.

The guerrillas and the government are groping for an accord that allows both sides to save face, according to sociologist Raul Gonzalez, an expert on terrorism.

“They both need a political trophy,” he said. “They are talking past each other. They have to engage in a dialogue at a political level about an agreement that benefits them both.”

As a mediating commission shuttles between the two sides trying to bring them back to the negotiating table, the hostages and their families cling to the solace of a routine. Since the crisis began Dec. 17, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been their bridge across limbo, providing the hostages medical care, counseling, clothes, mattresses, more than 6,500 gallons of water and about 18,000 meals. It has passed along about 6,600 written messages.

“We don’t know what we would do without the Red Cross,” said Cecilia Chang, the congressman’s sister. On Tuesdays and Fridays, she goes to Red Cross headquarters to send and receive the letters, which are screened by the humanitarian agency, the police and the Tupac Amaru. On Wednesdays, she picks up Chang’s dirty clothes.

The brother and sister shared an apartment in Lima before the crisis. Their tender, wisecracking relationship colors their written exchanges. Cecilia recently reminded her brother that when he was 5, he said he wanted a baby sister so she could wash his socks.

“I told him, ‘You finally got your wish,’ ” she said in an interview last week. “Now washing his laundry gives me consolation.”

The Tupac Amaru stormed the gala reception at the Japanese ambassador’s mansion only two months after Chang’s brother Manuel died in a plane crash. The ordeal doubled the anguish of a family whose surviving son embodies the new Asian Peruvian political class that has coalesced around Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent.

Chang’s father emigrated from China in the early 1930s and owns a grocery store in the provincial city of Chiclayo. The younger Chang became an economics professor, newspaper columnist and activist for Fujimori’s Change 90 party. He was elected to Congress in 1995 and is a gregarious workaholic who relaxes at home by singing Elton John songs on a karaoke machine.

The congressman’s intense Catholicism helps him withstand captivity, according to his sister.

“Some of the hostages who were released told me they think he is very strong because of his faith,” said the microbiologist, who talks about her brother in a soft rush of words.

She spent the first days of the siege by the television, flinching through the frantic hours when the guerrillas threatened to shoot hostages. Now she absorbs herself in her work and tends to her brother’s needs. She spends time on the phone calming her elderly, infirm parents after alarming developments such as recent allegations by the rebels that police were tunneling under the residence to mount a subterranean attack.

“We have the hope that everything will end up all right,” she said. “But the tunnel scared us.”

Much like their families on the outside, the hostages follow the rhetorical theater and speculative news coverage of the negotiations with portable radios. There is no television because security forces cut off the electricity.

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Although the water also was cut off, the hostages are able to bathe. The Red Cross has brought in water tanks and portable toilets. Three times a day, the Red Cross delivers meals prepared by Japanese and Peruvian restaurants in Lima that are paid for by the Japanese government. The rebels eat three hours after the hostages because they fear the police might slip knockout drugs into the food.

In addition to well-regimented maintenance chores, the hostages find diversion playing chess, mah-jongg, Trivial Pursuit and card games. Their list of requested books features escapist fare--”The Three Musketeers”--and a grimly pertinent novel about a Peruvian guerrilla called “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” Japanese hostages teach relaxation techniques. Dante Cordova, a former head of Fujimori’s Cabinet and an accomplished guitarist, leads singing sessions.

Taking advantage of a distinguished assortment of talents, the captives also have organized seminars about their specialties. Juan Mendoza, a deputy minister of mining, lectures about the history of gold and currency in Peru since the days of the Incas, the topic of his unfinished book.

Mendoza, 57, learned something about hardship in the 1970s when he spent years in the jungles prospecting for gold. He brought his family along. Those tough years helped prepare the family for their current plight, said Mendoza’s wife, Enriqueta.

The 55-year-old mother of four has responded to the crisis with steely good cheer. She looked poised and stylish when she received a reporter last week at their colonial-style home, where sunlight flooded the patio and a guard with a pistol in his belt opened the gate.

“I have to stay strong,” she said. “In order to help my husband, I have to stay calm. If I cry and moan, it’s a disaster and no help at all. I must keep my head high.”

She has led family and friends in two demonstrations outside the besieged residence, appealing to the Tupac Amaru to release her husband. Mendoza is one of four hostages in delicate health; one of the confrontational scenarios Peruvians fear most is that a hostage could become dangerously ill. Mendoza was taken captive days before he was scheduled to undergo surgery for a hernia.

But the rebels refused to free the deputy minister. Red Cross doctors, who visit the mansion every day, say his condition is stable.

“So I just have to pray that God keeps him that way,” said his wife. She obsessively waters the garden and supervises remodeling projects in preparation for a homecoming.

The Mendozas’ sons range in age from 13 to 34. The anxiety overwhelms the younger sons. They fight among themselves and burst into tears. One has developed insomnia; his mother finds him sitting in the dark at night, chain-smoking and listening to news on the radio.

“I don’t have any trouble going to sleep,” Enriqueta Mendoza said. “But lately, I wake up suddenly at 4 in the morning. And I think about my husband. What is he doing right now? Is he asleep? Is he awake like me?”

The deputy minister is reportedly housed in a first-floor room with other prize civilian hostages, including Peruvian Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela and Pedro Fujimori, the president’s brother.

Mendoza has the reserved, solitary temperament of an engineer and outdoorsman, his wife said. He passes the days reading, doing light exercises permitted by the doctors and composing letters.

After nightfall, the guerrillas go on full alert and make their rounds with machine guns and walkie-talkies at the ready. The hostages have little to do in the darkness. Judging from his letters, Mendoza has spent hours reflecting on his life, his family, his achievements and regrets. His words are full of nostalgia and yearning.

“Dear Renato, I am very grateful for what you wrote, I also love you all,” he told one son in a recent letter. “Before, we had great difficulties and you overcame them with courage and pressed forward, so let’s think the same way now.”

To his wife, Mendoza says how fortunate he is to have married her. “I was so lucky, I miss you and the boys so much, I hope we will all be together again soon.”