The consensus of the world's elites is that the Tupac Amaru hostage seizure in Lima is the last gasp of 60s-style domestic insurgencies. In fact, the group commands an international network that includes Japan's notorious Red Army Faction and feeds off the global drug trade. PNS associate editor Yoichi Clark Shimatsu is a Tokyo-based investigative reporter and former editor of the English-language Japan Times Weekly.

TOKYO -- In a recent communique issued from Lima, the Group of Seven denounced Peru's Tupac Amaru guerrillas as terrorists, echoing the global media consensus that the hostage seizure represents the last gasp of a purely domestic insurgency.

But the global economic leaders missed the point: The guerrillas are just as much a part of globalism as the G-7 itself, as their extensive network across the Americas and Europe attests. Not only have they received weapons training in Colombia from the M-19 movement, they also sponsor a Spanish-language homepage on the Internet and their main foreign spokesman is based in Hamburg, Germany. Their military gas masks and night-vision goggles suggest links to the international arms trade. Their recruitment of New Yorker Lori Berenson indicates some sympathy in the U.S.

Tactical training and arms are one thing, foreign intelligence is another. In seizing the Japanese ambassador's residence without taking a single life, Tupac Amaru mounted a covert operation with such professionalism that it makes the Chechen rebels seem primitive.

Japanese security experts and investigative journalists in Lima and Tokyo have suspected that the Peruvian guerrillas weren't just lucky but received critical intelligence and tactical assistance from an ultra-radical group called the Japanese Red Army Faction (RAF). They cite as evidence:

*One of the female hostages released by the group told Japanese television news that she believed several guerrilla supporters -- not just two ersatz waiters -- were present at the diplomatic cocktail party among the 200 Japanese and Japanese Peruvian guests.

*A telephone interview of the Japanese ambassador by a Tokyo news program rambled on in Japanese until he was asked about the size of the attacking force. At that point the call was terminated, indicating a Japanese-language speaker was assisting the guerrillas inside the residence.

*Intelligence officers among the American and European guests attempted to give false names when captured, but the guerrillas, including lower-ranking gunmen, recognized them by name and nationality. This suggests they had access to confidential photos and the embassy guest list long before the reception.

*A Japanese-speaking woman was overheard by a Japanese journalist phoning a report to a Tupac Amaru safe house in Lima from a task force center set up inside Japan's Embassy after the take-down.

*The demand for prisoner releases and a huge ransom resemble earlier RAF operations -- including airline hijackings in Dacca and Dubai, seizures of the French Embassy at the Hague and the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and kidnappings of Japanese executives abroad.

*Finally, the occasion of the attack, the Emperor's birthday, has special significance for the RAF, whose efforts to disrupt the 1989 enthronement ceremony were aborted when key underground members were arrested in the Philippines and Japan.

Founded in September 1969 by radical students, the Red Army Faction subdivided into two branches, based in North Korea and the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. The latter has been led since 1971 by Japan's most-wanted woman, Fusako Shigenobu, who earned the name "Black Widow" after marrying an underling the night before his 1972 suicide-bomb attack on the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv. Shigenobu takes pride in the fact that her RAF fighters fought pitched battles against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in alliance with the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP).

With the persistence of the Iran-Iraq war into the late 1980s, however, the RAF found it difficult to continue its operations in the Middle East. As a result, they shifted to Western Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Over the last decade, South America has proven to be an ideal haven, not just for the RAF but for other ultra-radical groups. Their members easily blend into the continent's extensive ethnic communities and their skills were in demand by drug traffickers and guerrillas looking for weapons, forged passports, visas and coded bank accounts. Within a few years, the RAF was entrenched in Lima with contacts and safe houses. A group that refused to identify itself threatened to kidnap the Japanese ambassador in 1986. In 1995, a female RAF member arrested in Romania was carrying a Peruvian passport. In June Peruvian authorities captured and deported a female RAF operative to Japan.

Unlike Peru's Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, which have staged unsophisticated dynamite attacks on economic targets like the Bank of Tokyo and Peru Nissan, the Tupac Amaru movement and its Red Army Faction allies prefer a more controlled violence. The goal isn't any sudden seizure of power but leveraging billions and billions of dollars -- in ransom money, drug trade and money laundering profits.

With billions perhaps already laundered and transferred into numbered bank accounts, this international network of self-proclaimed Robin Hoods may already be as big as any Fortune 500 corporation. Far from withering in the global economy of the post-Cold War era, they have learned how to feed off the jugular of multinational corporations and the world's diplomatic corps. Today, after waging violent campaigns on Japanese campuses, over Eurasian airspace and in the Holy Land, they have found the perfect host in the Americas where control of the drug trade leads to power over governments.