LIMA -- The Maoist Shining Path, often described as Latin America's bloodiest insurgency, has been crippled militarily following key arrests and faces serious internal differences, a group leader and analysts said.


Two years ago Saturday, Shining Path guerrillas exploded a powerful van bomb that turned the fashionable Miraflores district of the capital into an inferno, killing 25 and leaving hundreds wounded or homeless.


The wave of urban bombings that followed led some analysts to warn that the guerrillas posed a threat to the Peruvian state.


Now, the Shining Path appears to be on an "irreversible course which takes it ever closer to total defeat," Ideele, a publication which specializes in the analysis of Peru's political violence, said in its July issue.


"We lack human resources and especially arms," a leader of the group said. "Our fight has been set back several years. We cannot take power in the short term."


Late last month, President Alberto Fujimori said police had arrested three key leaders of the group, one of whom was described as a lieutenant of "Comrade Feliciano."


Feliciano, nom-de-guerre of Arturo Ramirez Durand, has led the war against the government since the September 1992 capture of Shining Path chief Abimael Guzman, according to testimony from captured rebels.


Besides a weakened military arm, the group is also facing internal differences over Guzman's call last year for "a peace accord" with Fujimori's government, the guerrilla leader said.


"The struggle of the two lines is fierce," he said, referring to "orthodox" and "revisionist" lines in the party.


While some captured leaders have been allowed to visit jails around Peru to convince Shining Path prisoners of the need for an accord, internal guerrilla documents have lashed out against what they call the revisionist line of "sinister capitulation."