THE name of Tapuc Amaru is enough to send a chill of fear into any Latin American government in the Andes at any time. After all, 200 years ago Tapuc Amaru, an Indian who claimed descent from the last Inca emperor, nearly overthrew Spanish rule, tossing out the Latins and aiming to restore the greatest empire South America has ever seen.
He and his men and women, mostly of Quecha and Aymara peoples, laid year-long siege to La Paz, capital of upper Peru, now Bolivia, and came within an ace of capturing that forbidding city. The colonists, in the event, fought off the siege.
Tapuc Amaru's present-day followers aspire to the same nationalism that he appealed to in the 1790s and they distance themselves sharply from the better- known - and much more bloodthirsty guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path. The Senderistas worship at the altars of Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and other foreigners.
The MRTA leadership draws on much of the same discontented middleclass support as the Shining Path and its leader, Abimael Guzman (Chairman Gonzalo) who has been in close confinement in a Peruvian jail since November 1992.
But the MRTA proclaims a more local message. If it pays homage to any foreign ideologue it is to Fidel Castro, scourge of the Yankee capitalists. But it is careful to present itself as a Peruvian solution to Peruvian problems.
Its choice of target the Japanese ambassador's residence is highly illustrative. A movement has to have young middleclass support if it aims to infiltrate a diplomatic party in the guise of waiters, and succeeds.
The symbolism of the action, moreover, is meant to convey a clear message to the people of Peru. They are being ruled by Alberto Fujimori - universally and erroneously known as El Chinito, "the Little Chinaman" whose foreign roots lay not in the land of Peru but across the Pacific in Japan.
He and his cronies in the world of Japanese multinationals had, according to the MRTA, seized control of the country of the Incas for the benefit of capitalists and bankers and must be stopped.
No matter that Fujimori is a Catholic with little fluency in the tongue of his ancestors. In the view of the MRTA he is part of the neo-conservative movement which is trying to install a facade of modernity on a society which is backward and marked with some of the deepest cleavages between rich and poor that are to be found in a continent already notorious for its social inequalities.
The MRTA wants revolution to put an end to a situation where in the middle of this year the legal minimum wage was only 71 per cent of what it had been in 1990 and where 10 per cent inflation erodes the meagre earnings of that small proportion of the population who have a full-time job.
The MRTA's last significant action in Lima happened just over a year ago when it took a family hostage in an upmarket Lima suburb during a gun battle with police near a rebel safe house that it used as an arsenal and a guerrilla training centre.
That conflict ended with the release of the family and the surrender of those rebels who survived, including the group's number two leader, Miguel Rincon.
The movement first developed nearly two decades ago, then its leader, Victor Polay Campos was captured and the authorities focussed on the fanatical Senderistas. In 1990 Polay escaped and the movement, backed by peasants in the countryside and young intellectuals in the cities, flared up again in the Amazon, where it could raise funds by controlling and "taxing" the dealers in cocaine.
In September 1992, however, Polay was back behind bars and the government was confident the MRTA had been eliminated. Today it is back, bolder than brass.