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By Gideon Long

LIMA, May 25 (Reuters) - Peru's Shining Path guerrillas could be gaining strength again more than a decade after they almost disappeared, but they are now more active in the cocaine trade than in fomenting Maoist revolution.

The group, which posed a major threat until its leadership collapsed in the early 1990s, is believed to have a few hundred active fighters split between two main coca growing areas, one in the Huallaga valley in the north and the other in south-central Peru, east of the Andes mountains.

In a recent report, the U.S. State Department said Shining Path was regrouping and could count on hundreds of armed combatants.

It said it was "shorter on revolutionary zeal than its predecessor" but better funded due to its links to the drugs trade in a country second only to Colombia as the world's biggest cocaine producer.

Shining Path was at its strongest in the 1980s and was one of the most ruthless rebel groups Latin America has ever seen.

Led by former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman and inspired by China's Mao Zedong, it waged a "popular war" against Peru's European-descended, coastal elite that has dominated the country since the Spanish conquest.

Peruvian authorities say the group killed over 31,000 people, sometimes beheading and mutilating its victims.

Shining Path activists still peddle hard-line Maoist ideology in provincial universities and trade union offices but have dropped all pretensions to armed revolt.

"It makes absolutely no sense anymore to talk of a subversive threat in Peru from Shining Path," said Carlos Tapia, a former member of Peru's Truth Commission, which investigated atrocities on both sides of a long and brutal war between the group and the armed forces.

COCAINE TRADE

Guzman's arrest in 1992 led to the group's almost complete collapse and since then its remnant factions have split and changed direction several times.

"These days you really can't talk about Shining Path in general," said Jaime Antezana, a political analyst at Peru's Catholic University in Lima.

He said the militants are in the cocaine trade, however. "They have turned into organizations protecting the movement of drugs, the running of drug trafficking business."

Experts say the remaining rebels have more in common with Colombia's drug-trafficking guerrillas than with their own Maoist past.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel group has fought a four-decade conflict with the Colombian state, increasingly fueled by its links to the cocaine trade.

The nature of Shining Path's link to the cocaine trade is difficult to prove, and the remnant groups issue occasional statements denying any such involvement.

Tapia said the rebels were involved in drug trafficking and protection of illegal coca crops, while Antezana said they had gone further than that by moving into cocaine production.

Both analysts questioned why the Peruvian state had failed to stamp out the relatively small, isolated remnant groups.

To the relief of most Peruvians, the days when Guzman urged his acolytes to cross "a river of blood" to liberate their country are long gone, but for some the 72-year-old gray haired professor remains a potent figure, even in jail.

"For them, Guzman is like the Pope, and what the Pope says, the bishops and cardinals do," Antezana said. "Who knows what will happen when he dies."

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