'If We Meet Face To Face, You Shoot First...'
Submitted By: Phantom
Article Date: 08/17/1999
URL: http://www.goofball.com/news/990817_shoot
LIMA (Reuters) -
"If we meet face to face, you shoot first because I would not
want to kill you,'' Ramirez Martinez said. He recounted the
bitter argument at that meeting in 1975, before his son went
into hiding to join Latin America's most violent rebel group.
Two decades on, his son, Oscar Ramirez Durand, alias
''Feliciano,'' is a household name in Peru -- the die-hard
leader of the Maoist rebels who have fought a 19-year war
against the government in which more than 30,000 people have
died.
While the guerrilla's father pursued a successful military
career, becoming a top army general in the 1980s, he never again
heard from his son, who has never been spotted in public and
persistently eluded capture.
"As a son he is spiritually dead for me,'' he told Reuters in an
interview at his small apartment in Lima.
Oscar
Ramirez Martinez, a retired army general, cannot recall his
son's birthday. He has not one photo. What he does remember are
the last words he spoke years ago to his wayward child, now the
leader of Peru's notorious Shining Path rebels.