Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

Human rights ombudsman Jorge Santistevan de Noriega was attacked in the pro-Fujimori media in early March when he transmitted allegations about the forgery of signatures to the JNE and the ONPE and asked them to investigate. Cabinet ministers and pro-Fujimori congressmen claimed that Santistevan had sought to discredit the elections by leaking information to El Comercio, and hinted that they might press for his impeachment. However, as President Fujimori later acknowledged, the constitution empowers the ombudsman to monitor the actions of public entities, including those of the electoral authorities. Santistevan's office, together with Transparencia, played a key role in monitoring irregularities during the election campaign. His comment that the elections had a "factory defect"-a reference to Fujimori's unconstitutional candidacy-irritated the government, but after the firm intervention of the OAS, the U.S. State Department and several European ambassadors, the sniping at Santistevan ceased.

On June 12, the wife of Jesús Agreda Paredes, president of the Tacna Association for the Defense of Human Rights, received a telephone call from an unidentified man who said, "Tell your husband not to meddle in the Pachia case, because if he does we'll kill him." Agreda was acting on behalf of the widow of Nelson Díaz Marcos, a detainee who had died in custody allegedly as a result of torture.

During the second week of August, members of the Legal Defense Institute (Instituto de Defensa Legal, IDL), a well-respected human rights NGO, received anonymous death threats by e-mail. One of the messages, also received by political commentator Carlos Ivan Degregori, said, "Die, bastard!"According to Degregori, friends of his had received a warning that "you are being watched and we know all your movements. We know who your friends are and what they are doing.....you keep away. You are in time.... First warning." The message came form a group calling itself Colina 2000 (The Colina group was a notorious army death squad that operated in the 1990s).