Maxey Information Services

On December 17, 1996, the Japanese Ambassador to Peru, Morihisha Aoki, gave a reception in honor of Emperor Akihito.  I attended as one of the representatives of USAID Peru. The reception area was in the back of the residence under a colossal tent striped in red and white. It was very impressive in an F. Scott Fitzgerald, a la Great Gatsby, kind of way. The architecture reminded me of fraternity houses at Mississippi State University -- antebellum style -- and I learned that its design was based on Tara from "Gone With the Wind" (a young bride asked her elderly Peruvian husband to build it in the late 1930s after they had seen the movie).

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I got to the reception at 7:00 pm. My wife did not feel well and she had stayed home.  I was anxious to return home and tried to leave at 8:00, but Ambassador Aoki was still receiving guests. I circled back into the crowd, and fifteen minutes later, there was a massive explosion in the back of the compound and the almost immediate sound of automatic weapons firing from front and back. After the first few seconds of shock, we hit the ground. I scrambled for a low wall that surrounded the patio. I could see the top of the canopy kicking up as bullets passed through it, and I could hear the MRTA shouting revolutionary slogans.

 

I remember hearing men and women shouting. I thought of how I had seen Lori Berenson (the American woman who was convicted in Peruvian military courts of being a terrorist with the MRTA) on Peruvian TV shouting revolutionary slogans when she was captured. These people sounded the same -- angry, threatening.

 

The firing continued. It grew louder, and we heard less firing on the street, but the firing in the compound on all sides was intense, loud, and point-blank. I remember my ears hurt from the concussion of the shots, and I involuntarily shook when the guerilla that was immediately behind me fired his weapon.

 

When everything started, I thought we might have a chance if the police could take the area, but then I heard an MRTA guerilla behind me shouting to keep my face down or be shot. I looked to my right and saw the head of our Economics Section, John Riddle, and to my left was my boss, Don Boyd, the AID Director. We heard the guerrillas shout "No somos assesinos, somos el MRTA.' (We are not murderers; we are the MRTA.)

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John Riddle said, "Thank God, it's the MRTA." I thought about that for a second. If it had been the Shining Path, we might have been summarily executed. Don Boyd, the AID Director, whispered to me, "How can this be happening? Where is the security?"

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John and Don had both lost sight of their wives, and I knew they were concerned. I thought, "Thank God, my wife, Annie, decided not to come." I had called her twice that afternoon to ask her to come. "This is a big deal," I said. But she was still feeling nausea from her pregnancy and decided not to go.

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After a few minutes of being on the ground with shouting and firing going on and lots of confusion, I heard the guerilla behind me shout for his people to stop firing to conserve their ammunition. He was El Arabe, the second in command of the MRTA group that had taken us, and he was communicating with the other guerrillas by radio -- it was strapped on to his shoulder and he talked into it. I had seen policemen with the same kind of equipment.

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After El Arabe got everybody settled down, I looked over to a woman to my left. I saw her looking up at him and motioning with her head, "Yes, I should get up?" She nodded in the affirmative, and we realized that the MRTA wanted us to stand. We stood up with our hands on the backs of our necks and then watched as they motioned us into the Ambassador's residence.

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I remember that once I moved through the doors, I immediately began to look for a place to hide, on the floor, under something, in a closet, anywhere. I had people on all sides and I moved quickly to a hall way where no one was (there was a spilled drink on the floor with broken glass -- I imagined that someone had been surprised there in the initial attack and had dropped their drink). The guerrillas almost immediately began shouting for us to again get on the floor.

 

I started to get down in that hallway but couldn't force myself to lie on the wet floor. I stepped out of the hallway and into the front room immediately at the base of the stairs. I laid down with a Peruvian lady at my side and the wall against me. The guerrilla that was controlling this room started firing his AK-47 for some reason, and the concussion of the shells was deafening. The lady and I both covered our ears. I could smell the gun smoke and hear the spent cartridges hit the floor. I kept my head buried on the floor and did not look at the guerrilla or try to determine what he was doing. I thought about being identified as an AID employee, and the first thing I did was take off my AID lapel pin and hide it between the carpet and the floor molding.

 

The guerilla stopped firing after a while, and we were told to move again. The room I had been in was turned into a command post by the guerrillas, with furniture piled against the windows and the hallway where I had lain with the lady on my side.

We were told to get up and move into the back room, a banquet room with two open areas, a dining table, and heavy furniture. This place was packed, and it was impossible to lie on the floor. We all had to sit upright on the floor. This was the first time I had seen the MRTA.

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They were dressed in black battle fatigues with a red and white MRTA flag draped as a bandanna across their faces. They were each armed with an automatic weapon, AK-47 or a Belgian automatic rifle, and you could see grenades hanging in their vests; each had a knife in a shoulder holster, a 9 mm pistol strapped across the front of their vest and a matching backpack filled with something (more grenades, I imagined). Their battle gear with the MRTA flag as a bandana, the black tech wear and armed as they were -- was impressive. But the thing that impressed me most was how young they were. All but one looked to be in their twenties and the two girls I saw among them appeared to be adolescents.

 

By this time, I had taken off my jacket because of the heat and draped it across my legs. I was sitting upright with my head down, trying to avoid eye contact with the guerrillas. Things had calmed down a little, and the two guerrillas who controlled our room began to talk.

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One of them had found a Peruvian National Police(PNP) officials jacket. The jacket indicated that a PNP General was in the room without his uniform. The guerrilla began to talk about how the PNP had killed his cousin. He started asking out loud, "Who owns this jacket?" "Are you ashamed of the jacket?" "How would you like to meet St. Peter?" "I'm going to kill whoever this jacket belongs to." And he began walking among us through the room.

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It was at this point that I realized I had taken my jacket off. I suddenly felt a rush and a chill down my back as he moved around the room. "What if he thinks it is my jacket?" I slowly tried to slip back into my jacket. He didn't notice me, or if he did, he didn't say anything. It was about this same time that El Arabe climbed halfway up the stairs and shouted for everybody to listen up.

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He said they wanted everybody upstairs and that we should all move up there quickly.  We hurried up the stairs to the second level of the residence. I ended up in one of Ambassador Aoki's daughter's bedrooms. On the floor next to me was Minister of Agriculture Rodolfo Munante. I said hello. We met twice in the last few weeks to discuss plans for developing high-quality coffee production in the high jungle areas. I also noticed a man wedged in beside the bed and the wall. He had removed his uniform and was in his underwear. He was a military commander, and he was acting very strange.

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While we were upstairs, the police shot tear gas into the house. I wet my tie in the bathroom next to the bedroom where we were on the floor and used that to cover my nose and mouth. As the air cleared, we were sent back downstairs, and the servers for the reception, dressed in white uniforms, were told they could leave, and they started coming down the stairs.

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I noticed the military commander who had been in my room. He had stripped off his uniform and put on a white shirt. At the bottom of the stairs, he started running for the front door. He managed to get through and run down the driveway to the front gate. The nearest MRTA person was one of the young girls. She leveled her weapon and aimed at the man but did not fire.

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He was the first person to escape. Later a second person climbed out the window of the bathroom on the first floor and got to the gate. The MRTA threatened to throw a grenade in the bathroom when the man did not come out when they called him. That was the first time I saw them visibly flustered, making everyone nervous.

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The women were released later that night, and then El Arabe got halfway up the stairs and had the guest list in his hands. He started calling out the guests and motioned for them to go upstairs. My name was on the list, and I ended up in a room on the second floor with 27 other men in a 12'x15' room. the days were hot, and the nights were interminably long. I remember that it was hard to get a breeze inside during the day. I made a fan from a piece of cardboard and fanned myself and my neighbors as we lay on the floor.

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I was reminded of a line from Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Blanche DuBois tries to seduce a messenger boy who has come to the door. Blanche says to the boy, "These rainy Saturday afternoons in New Orleans are as if God has dropped a little piece of eternity in your lap, and you don't know what to do with it."

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The story goes on. I go through a range of emotions as I remember it. I was released five days later with 224 hostages. I felt as if I were dead and then came alive again when I was released. That is a good thing to understand but I'm unsure if anyone goes through it without collateral losses.

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                                  A documentary video of the MRTA event is here.

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