PERUVIAN'S POLITICS LEAD TO JAIL `TOMB' : GUERRILLAS SEEK LEADER'S LIBERATION.

Byline: Diana Jean Schemo The New York Times

Victor Polay Campos, the jailed founder of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, is the son of leftist political reformers whose roots go back to the labor struggles of the 1930s. Polay's tale of taking up arms is part of a political struggle that meanders through the history of Peru in this century - one whose chapters would look hauntingly like the family's photo album.

The 45-year-old leader's liberation, along with improvement in the conditions under which he and more than 400 of his comrades are being held, are the core demands of Tupac Amaru guerrillas who continue to hold 74 hostages inside the Japanese ambassador's residence they seized Dec. 17.

Polay, his vision faltering, his spirits nearly broken, lives in a dark concrete box measuring 6-1/2 feet along each wall. His mother, Otilia Campos de Polay, who owns a hardware store in the working-class neighborhood of El Callao, calls it his ``tomb.'' He has been held in solitary confinement at a maximum security prison at the naval base not far from her store for three years.

Campos said in an interview that her son founded Tupac Amaru in 1983, a year after he returned from university studies in Madrid, Spain, and Paris. In Paris, he had been a roommate of Alan Garcia, a future Peruvian president who hailed from the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, known as APRA.

That left-wing, anti-imperialist party, which started in the 1930s, counted among its founders Polay's father, Victor Polay Risco. Campos said her husband, who died four years ago, was imprisoned from 1930 to 1945 for his political activities. Her own parents, Alfredo Campos and Maria Barcena, were founders of APRA in Cuzco, she said.

After the election of Garcia in 1985, the first time APRA had won the presidency, Victor Polay Campos said he would give him a year to fulfill the promises to the poor of the party. By the late 1980s, he had carried out his threat to turn to violence.

Garcia, whose boyish charm made him the darling of Peruvians for the first two years of his administration, did fulfill many of his campaign pledges, with measures like paying only 10 percent of the foreign debt, instituting price controls and eventually nationalizing banks. The effects were disastrous - hyperinflation, rampant unemployment and a shrinking economy - and guerrillas of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru gained ground during his administration.

Garcia ended his presidency lonely and discredited.

Campos said her son's decision to create a guerrilla movement to back his Marxist ideas frightened her. At 68, she is old enough to have childhood memories of APRA's early years of struggle.

``I always thought it was dangerous,'' she said in an interview. ``Like any mother, I was very worried, because I didn't agree with this exaggerated idealism of my son. I had lived through the 1930s, the whole sad story of the APRA party, which had been persecuted and tortured, and so I knew I didn't want the same path for my son but something better.

``We had already suffered so much for the country, because at every moment, we, Apristas, were being locked up, assassinated. We had a mountain of dead. We had 6,000 dead.''

The group her son founded, while considered less indiscriminate in its use of violence than the Maoists of the Shining Path, is accused of assassinations and bombings. In 1989 it killed the defense minister, Gen. Enrique Lopez Albuhar, and it later kidnapped David Ballon Vera, a mining executive who was found starved to death, his body scarred and showing signs of torture.

The Tupac Amaru remains one of the last holdovers of the Battalion America, an umbrella group which included the M-19 guerrilla group in Colombia, which laid down its weapons and became a legal party in 1991.

The Peruvians also had close links with other Latin American guerrilla movements that have left off violent confrontations since the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador.

Exposed to the political process, those movements fizzled out or proved minor draws at the ballot box. But here, after more than 30,000 killed by the military and guerrillas, Peruvians insist upon the rule of law as the starting point for any discussions.

According to figures supplied by the Andean Commission of Jurists, a human rights organization, of the roughly 4,500 people killed in guerrilla conflict in Peru in 1991, the most violent year, 3,145 were killed by the military, 1,314 by the Shining Path and 139 by the Tupac Amaru.

President Alberto Fujimori has built his political life on an unyielding, avowedly pitiless stand against guerrillas for the violence they promote.

``Nobody can believe that destroying factories, roads, bridges, threatening investors and tourists, and committing bloody crimes, will reduce poverty,'' Fujimori said in a speech at the Palace of Justice on Thursday.

In his cell, Polay's political education has come to an end. Though he is allowed to read novels, prison officials turn away any writing that is remotely political, said his mother. Most recently, it was the memoirs of Winston Churchill.

Perhaps because Polay and other members of the Tupac Amaru tunneled their way out of another jail in the final days of Garcia's presidency, his cell now is a box of reinforced concrete, with just a six-inch hole in the ground for a bathroom and a six-inch hole in the ceiling for light and air. With the siege of the Japanese ambassador's residence, his visiting privileges - 30 minutes with up to two people once a month - have been suspended.

Campos, while not defending the Marxism that the Tupac Amaru advances, said socialist ideals were not unworkable simply because communism had failed throughout Eastern Europe. She said she had been three times to Europe, where Polay's wife, Rosa, and their three children live, and had also visited Asia, and nowhere had found the kind of poverty that is endemic in much of South America.

``How can you compare Russia or Germany, one of the countries that have always been so advanced in terms of workers' rights, countries of great men, of great chemical discoveries, to Latin America,'' she said. ``I don't mean Marxism. Please don't put down that I'm talking about Marxism. I mean socialism adapted to the Peruvian reality.''

And she believes there is precedent for change, for APRA had been outlawed four times before being legalized for the last time and winning the presidency in 1985. Others say the comparison is disingenuous.

``It ignores history,'' said Congresswoman Lourdes Flores Nano of the Popular Christian Party. ``APRA has always been a political party in terms of fighting democratically.

``The MRTA are terrorists,'' she said, using the Spanish initials of the Tupac Amaru.

The Tupac Amaru guerrillas in the Japanese ambassador's residence have not raised the prospect of a peace agreement, and an above-ground political role for them, since the siege began.

It is a subject many Peruvians say cannot be addressed as long as they are holding hostages. But the group had seemed to be moving in that direction, analysts here noted.