BY ROBIN KIRK
Kirk is an associate editor of Pacific News Service and a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Lima.

It was at the desolate, wind-swept army base called Castropampa that I saw first-hand what a thorn in the side La Republica's investigative unit, Unidad de investigacion, is to the powerful in Peru. La Republica got its start as a sensationalist crime tabloid in 1981. Since then, it has turned into a serious paper, and its combative, muckracking style has won its second place in Peru (circulation 105,000), not far behind the leading paper, the staid El Comercio.

The Unidad de Investigacion is two women and four men, who might best be described as journalistic commandos, willing to venture into Peru's most remote and strife-torn areas to get the story.

Since its formation in February 1990, the team has published in depth pieces on such subjects as the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas' brutal campaign to rid the countryside of civil authorities, the spread of killer fevers among Peru's jungle tribes, and a four-part series on "The Other Huallaga," which documented the spread of coca cultivation beyond the Upper Huallaga valley, the focus of U.S. anti-drug efforts. "Added to the 60,000 hectares already being cultivated in the Upper Huallaga," wrote Francisco Reyes, the investigative unit's young specialist on drugs and political violence, "these 50,000 new hectares show clearly the failure of the purely repressive strategy applied by successive American governments."

When Reyes and photographer Virgilio Grajeda joined the Unidad de investigacion, Castropampa was first on their wish list of places to go. The army base overlooks the province of Huanta, cradle of the Shining Path. Their first story on Castropampa was based on interviews with local peasants who said the army was forcing them to join paramilitary units which, in turn, took part in massacres and "disappearances" of people the army said supported the guerrillas.

The story came out last July on the morning that I was interviewing base commander Lieutenant Colonel Alfonso Hurtado, known locally as the "Big Banana." He was not pleased: other newspapers, he said, are content to publish military press releases, and do not go nosing into what is none of their business. "I am the maximum authority in the province of Huanta," he shouted at me, "and I can guarantee you that those [La Republica] reporters will never set foot here again."

Threats from the military are taken seriously in Peru. La Republica correspondent Jaime Ayal, for example, walked into a Huanta navy base in 1984 and has yet to come out.

But despite Hurtado's displeasure, Reyes and Grajeda came back to report a second article, this one focused on "Centurion," a Castropampa sergeant -- and Hurtado aide -- who villagers claimed had directed most of the ninety "disappearances" documented in Huanta in the first six months of 1990. Photographer Grajeda, who speaks fluent Quechua, had, with the help of Quechua-speaking peasant women, even managed to identify and photograph Centurion during a Sunday parade in Huanta's central square.

Such scrutiny is galling to the nation's security forces, which are rarely criticized by anyone in Peruvian society. Although Peru's press is free, there is a strong feeling among its journalists that self-censorship and an open alliance with the security forces play an increasingly important role in shaping what is considered news. For instance, the newsweekly Caretas, which has a long tradition of publishing hard-hitting pieces, recently released a statement on "journalistic principles in covering subversion," which declares that journalists should be "natural and conscious allies of the armed forces and police."

Yet according to Alejandro Miro Quesada, vice-president of the Freedom of the Press committee of the Inter-American Press Association, of the twenty-six journalists killed and "disappeared" in Peru since 1983, seventeen were the victims either of the security forces or of legal and extralegal paramilitary units allied with the government. (Under a state of emergency first declared in 1982 and later expanded several times, the security forces control more than half of Peru's territory.) Unidad de investigacion's structure -- two-person teams that travel to troubled areas but are back in Lima by the time the story breaks -- is designed to reduce the risk of reporting in Peru, says Angel Paez, who runs the unit. "Local correspondents," he adds, "are especially subject to pressure and open threats from all sides -- not to report critical stories or stories that contradict or call into question the official story." Paez is proud of the results: "Before the Unidad was formed, most of what we published didn't go beyond the simple recitation of figures -- how many dead and this many buckets of blood."

Members of the unit grumble about management's delays in printing pieces critical of the left-wing politicos who dominate La Republica's board of directors. They also complain about low salaries -- $ 200 per month -- and the minuscule expense accounts that more than once have left photographers without film and team members stranded in the provinces without bus fare home.

What keeps the investigative unit plugging away is a sense that their work makes a difference in Peru. "People not only read our work, but cit it out and save it," says Reyes. "For me that's a compliment and a sign we're doing our job."

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