LIMA – The leader of a remnant of Peru’s Shining Path guerrilla group has proclaimed a halt to armed actions and called on the government to enter a dialogue.

“This is an announcement of the suspension of military actions and we will limit ourselves to agitation and propaganda, we will respond if we are attacked,” Filomeno Cerron Cardoso, known as “Comrade Artemio,” said in an audio message to Amistad radio in the jungle region of Ucayali.

The message was aired Wednesday by the RPP radio network.

The rebel commander rejected the label of “narco-terrorists” that Peruvian officials have sought to hang on the insurgents, whom the government accuse of acting as security guards and enforcers for drug traffickers in the Upper Huallaga Valley.

Artemio’s faction of Shining Path has mounted few attacks against Peru’s government and security forces in recent years.

In fact, the main focus of police and the military has been on Shining Path cells operating in the Valley of the Apurimac and Ene rivers, or VRAE region.

More than 40 military personnel have died in ambushes and attacks by Shining Path fighters in the VRAE, Peru’s main cocaine-producing area, in recent months.

“We want the people to understand that if we do them harm we feel ashamed, and we ask forgiveness from the families we have cast into mourning,” Artemio said.

He went on to request talks with Peru’s civilian and military leaders with the presence of mediators.

Artemio took the opportunity to distance himself from the Shining Path units in the VRAE, whose leaders, comrades “Jose” and “Raul,” have publicly urged the death of the guerrilla group’s jailed founder, Abimael Guzman.

“The position of the Communist Party of Peru is of total rejection and condemnation of that group of mercenaries managed by Jose and Raul, who want the death of President Gonzalo (as Guzman is known to his supporters),” Artemio said.

The Maoist-inspired Shining Path launched its uprising on May 17, 1980, with an attack on Chuschi, a small town in Ayacucho province.

A truth commission appointed by former President Alejandro Toledo blamed Shining Path for most of the nearly 70,000 deaths the panel ascribed to politically motivated violence during the two decades following the group’s 1980 uprising.

Abimael Guzman, a former philosophy professor at San Cristobal University in Ayacucho, was captured with his top lieutenants on Sept. 12, 1992, an event that marked the “defeat” of the insurgency. EFE