Cerpa never had the chance to make good on his threat. Shortly after 3 that afternoon, Pando was lying on his mattress, engrossed in the last chapters of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Bolivian Ambassador Jorge Gumucio Granier suddenly appeared at the door. “They’re coming for us in a few moments,” he said softly. “Be calm.” Pando glanced nervously at the other hostages in the room, including Juan Julio Wicht, a Roman Catholic priest who was hunched over a plastic chess set. In the room directly below, they could hear Cerpa and a half-dozen other rebels shouting and cheering as they played soccer, using a bit of rolled-up carpet as a ball. Two minutes later a huge blast rocked the house, showering Pando, Wicht and the others in plaster, roofing tiles and chunks of concrete. More explosions and the rat-a-tat of machine guns erupted around them. “I lay down on the floor,” remembers Wicht, “and I prayed to God to make my death as painless as possible.”
Wicht, like all but one of his fellow captives, survived the ordeal. In the most successful hostage-rescue operation since the Israeli raid on Entebbe airport in 1976, 140 Peruvian commandos blasted into the Japanese compound through five tunnels to rescue 72 diplomats, military officers and businessmen held captive by Tupac Amaru rebels since Dec. 17. The carefully planned assault, in which a captive Peruvian Supreme Court justice, two Peruvian commandos and all 14 rebels died, put an end to a test of wills between messianic guerrilla leader Cerpa and Peru’s hard-line president, Alberto Fujimori. For four months Cerpa had steadfastly insisted that the Peruvian government release MRTA prisoners, including his common-law wife, held in what the guerrillas called “death jails.” Fujimori refused, offering the captors only safe passage to Cuba.
The hostages had spent their last months wavering between hope, terror and numbing boredom. Awakened at 6 each morning by Cerpa’s revolutionary chants, the men shared a Red Cross-delivered breakfast of coffee, tea and rolls. Then they took turns cleaning the toilets, sweeping the floors and performing other menial chores. Next came two hours of physical exercise: some jogged back and forth along a 55-meter-long corridor and up and down a spiral staircase. In the late morning some Peruvians tutored their Japanese colleagues in Spanish, while others took their fellow captives’ blood pressure. The hostages ate a Japanese-style lunch –rice, sushi, noodles–delivered from Lima restaurants, then spent the hot afternoons taking siestas, reading, writing messages to their families or playing chess. Dinner was around 6, and darkness enveloped the residence soon afterward. The government had cut off all power back in December. Bedtime was at 9. As they lay on their thin mattresses, the men could often hear the pitter-patter of rats scurrying across the floor and inside the walls.
In early March, Cerpa became convinced–rightly, it turned out –that the Peruvian government was secretly constructing tunnels beneath the residence. He immediately moved 36 hostages from the downstairs quarters into the eight upper bedrooms already occupied by the rest of the captives. Conditions deteriorated sharply, with 19 men in one bedroom sharing two portable toilets and a single shower.
Around that time Cerpa stepped up rehearsals for a suicidal last stand against the Peruvian military. Four times a week, cadres took up positions along the second-floor corridor, pointing their AK-47 assault rifles at the hostages in each room. “If we’re attacked,” he warned them, “nobody here will survive.” At night, Cerpa slept among the hostages, watched over by a bodyguard. Two teenage girl rebels slept in the same room. Four other guerrillas, known as Salvador, Tito, El Arabe and El Mexicano, patrolled the corridors, singling out certain prisoners for harassment. The rebels shined powerful flashlights on the face of Pedro Fujimori, the president’s brother, and often loaded and cocked their weapons inches away from him as he tried to sleep.
Chances for a peaceful solution faded in the weeks before the assault. The hostages’ initial euphoria caused by talks between the MRTA and the Peruvian government turned into despair over Cerpa’s inflexibility. In the far-corner bedroom eight captive military officers hatched an escape plan, but shelved it amid worries that Cerpa would likely take revenge on those left behind. Instead, the men, who kept in touch with intelligence officers through microphones and, apparently, receivers hidden inside a guitar and a thermos, began quietly preparing for a military assault from the outside. Only eight other hostages were brought into the loop. “Giving the information to too many people would have been highly dangerous,” says one of those involved. “One person in a panic could have destroyed everything.” The hostages told their outside contacts that Cerpa and his MRTA cadres had gradually relaxed their guard, placing only one or two guerrillas on the second floor while they played afternoon games of soccer. “Cerpa believed that the problem was outside, not inside,” says one hostage. “That was his most important mistake.”
On Sunday, April 20, Cerpa abruptly refused to permit medical teams to visit the hostages, probably suspecting they were carrying messages back and forth. For Fujimori that seemed to be the last straw. On Monday, 140 elite commandos from the navy, marines and army moved into five illuminated, air-conditioned tunnels nine feet below the residence. At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, one of the military hostages sent word via microphone of the MRTA’s exact positions to a commando in an adjacent house. “Eight of them are playing football, including Cerpa,” he said. Three others watched the game. One of the teenage girls guarded the front door, a male guerrilla relaxed beneath the spiral staircase and one patrolled the upstairs corridor. As the rebels played on, doors were quietly opened on the second floor to create a corridor through four bedrooms, leading to a terrace. The word spread through the rooms that the hostages should change into light-colored clothing to avoid being mistaken for the camouflage-clad guerrillas. At 3:17, Fujimori sent the “Go” signal. Then came the first explosion.
Some hostages were taken totally by surprise. Congressman Luis Chang Ching was sponging himself with Baby Wipes in the bathtub when the house shook and the ceiling fell in. He dived to the floor, along with two Peruvian government vice ministers who were sitting on the portable toilets. They lay on the floor, terrified, as the house filled with smoke and gunfire echoed through the hallways. In the adjacent bedroom, Wicht lay with his face pressed against the floor until he felt a Peruvian commando grab his arm. “He said, “Keep calm’,” Wicht remembers. The pair lay listening to explosions and gunfire, the smoke so thick they could see only six feet ahead of them. Then the commando pulled Wicht to his feet and pushed him through the terrace door. They raced down the stairs, crossed the garden and took refuge. Pando fled down the same staircase, just ahead of Foreign Minister Tudela and another commando. Suddenly a guerrilla burst through the doors and hit the soldier in the back with a burst from his AK-47. “He fell over, dead,” Pando recalls. “And his blood splattered on my pants.”
The guerrillas who survived the initial explosion staggered through the chaos toward the second floor, apparently determined to kill whatever hostages they could. Nestor Cerpa was shot dead on the staircase. His last words: “We’re f—ed.” One guerrilla entered the bedroom where Peru’s Supreme Court justices slept, mortally wounding Judge Carlos Giusti Aruna with a shot to his femoral artery. The guerrilla was killed moments later. A Peruvian newspaper reported that the two teenage girls screamed, “We surrender! We surrender!” as the commandos charged into the residence. Cowering in a corner, the girls were shot dead moments later. The two youngest male rebels were also reputedly disarmed, made to stand against a wall and coolly executed in the last moments of the 35-minute operation. As the smoke cleared, commandos allegedly went from body to body, firing a bullet into the forehead of each prostrate guerrilla.
President Fujimori, who had been beleaguered by a spreading scandal over allegations of killings and torture by his intelligence service, now is a hero in his country. The MRTA, meanwhile, is down to about 100 leaderless guerrillas hiding in the jungle, a Web site and a blind spokesman in Hamburg. The group may yet summon the strength for sporadic violence. But it seems that the Tupac Amaru all but perished alongside its fanatical leader in the rubble of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima.
THE RELEASE: SWIFT AND SURE In a dramatic and expertly planned operation, commandos rescued 71 hostages from their four-month imprisonment by Tupac Amaru rebels in the Japanese ambassador’s residence.
Minutes before the raid, a group of hostages is secretly instructed to open the second-floor steel terrace door, lie down on the floor and remain still.
A tunnel bomb explodes under the living room, where eight terrorists are playing soccer. Five are killed. Other bombs create openings for commandos.
Commandos rush into the second story through the open steel door. One is killed leading Peruvian Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela to safety. His killer is then shot.
More commandos climb a set of stairs from the kitchen and engage in a gun battle with terrorists. One commando and one hostage are shot.
The terrorists who survived the initial first-floor blast grab their weapons but are shot from above and below while rushing up the main stairs.
Commandos lead the hostages from the building through the terrace doors. In the end, one hostage, two commandos and all 14 rebels lay dead.
