PERU

Human Rights Developments

This was a year of consolidation for Alberto Fujimori, an elected president who seized dictatorial power on April 5, 1992. Although international pressure later forced changes favorable to human rights, President Fujimori marshaled unprecedented power overformerly autonomous institutions like the judiciary, Public Ministry, a newly-elected congress, and the security forces. A new legal apparatus suppressed individual rights while the institutions designed to protect them were weakened or eliminated.

For human rights, this meant isolated gains in the context of continuing, serious violations. According to the government's Public Ministry and the nongovernmental National Coordinating Committee for Human Rights (Coordinadora), the number of disappearances reported in the first nine months of 1993 dropped compared with the same period in 1992, from 168 to sixty-one. The number of extrajudicial executions attributed to the security forces also decreased. Violations of the laws of war by Peru's two guerrilla groups-the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA)-also decreased in number, if not severity.

Yet these figures should not be taken out of context: reporting on human rights violations was complicated by the lack of independence of once-autonomous branches of government, threats against human rights monitors, and the criminalization of such vague offenses as creating "a state of anxiety" or "affecting international relations" (Decree Law 25475). Many officials feared losing their jobs, and ordinary citizens feared imprisonment, if they supplied information. In the central and southern jungle, where violence was intense, the coup had exacerbated the difficult task of documenting reports of human rights abuse.

And some individuals who in earlier years might have been disappeared or killed by the security forces were arrested in 1993 under special laws promulgated after the coup. Tried secretly inside prison by hooded or "faceless" judges and prosecutors, defendants were prevented from mounting a meaningful defense. Those charged with "treason"-a charge that incorporated such disproportionate offenses as distributing Shining Path propaganda in the classroom and detonating a car bomb-were tried by hooded military judges, who handed down convictions in 97 percent of the cases brought to them in 1992 and most of 1993. Lawyers were not permitted to represent more than one such client at a time; the rights to habeas corpus, amparo, and provisional liberty were suspended; and defendants could be held in incommunicado police detention for up to thirty days.

Except in rare instances, suspects were unable to present witnesses in their defense or confront the prosecution. Torture, including rape, in police detention remained frequent, and confessions were routinely coerced. Many prominent Peruvians chose exile rather than face judicial procedures stacked against them. Along with admitted guerrillas, the accused included human rights monitors, journalists, environmental activists, doctors who had treated guerrillas under threat of death, and common citizens caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In repeated instances, judges based convictions not on evidence but unproved allegations. For instance, Darnilda Pardavé Trujillo was imprisoned from October 1992 through October 1993 because hersister, Yovanka, was a Shining Path leader. In his indictment, the judge concluded that it was "impossible to discard the possibility" that Darnilda knew of her sister's crimes despite the lack of any evidence. On October 29, 1993, she was finally acquitted and released. María de la Cruz Pari, who went voluntarily to the anti-terrorism police to testify on behalf of a family member on January 6, 1993, was herself arrested and raped. Antero Peña Peña, a peasant leader from the department of Piura, was detained on May 27, 1993, by soldiers who claimed to have found a subversive leaflet in his home. Police tortured Peña over the course of four days. Although the public prosecutor found no merit to the case, Peña remained imprisoned as of November.

Peruvian human rights groups believeed several hundred individuals being prosecuted for terrorism or treason were innocent. For many, their only hope of freedom lay in a personal appeal to President Fujimori. Thus, justice hinged on the whims of the chief executive, who boasted publicly that he followed certain cases and telephoned the attorney general or justice minister to register his opinion. In March, for instance, President Fujimori visited jailed journalist Danilo Quijano and declared him unjustly accused, even as Quijano's case was before a faceless court. Quijano was eventually acquitted.

Thirty-three army officers court-martialed for allegedly plotting a coup in November 1992 were also denied fair trial. Among other things, the officers were held incommunicado for ten to twenty days (the Military Code of Justice allows for only five days). Four claimed they were tortured, an allegation that did not receive sufficient investigation. A request by Americas Watch to observe their secret trials was ignored by the government. Fujimori eventually pardoned eleven men.

In response to widespread criticism, President Fujimori announced in June that the attorney general would review cases to prevent the innocent from being unjustly sentenced. The new congress (CCD) formed an honor board to review claims from dozens of judges dismissed arbitrarily after the coup and to evaluate the performance of Fujimori appointees, both judges and prosecutors. However, once issued, the honor board's recommendations appeared to be ignored.

In October, the government submitted a bill to modify aspects of anti-terrorist legislation that violate fundamental rights. The bill would restore habeas corpus and amparo; lift the restriction barring attorneys from representing more than one defendant at a time; prohibit in absentia trials; and allow for a final appeal in terrorism and treason cases before the Supreme Council of Military Justice. This appeal, or "revision," would be used to correct "a flagrant judicial error," according to the Prime Minister. If incorporated, these revisions would represent an improvement. Nonetheless, the system would remain inherently abusive since secret trials, prolonged incommunicado detention, the inability to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and overly broad definitions of terrorism and treason would survive intact.

On October 31, Peruvians narrowly approved a new constitution that expanded the death penalty, previously applied only in cases of treason in an external war, to include the crimes of treason in internal war and terrorism. This violated Peru's obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights, which both prohibits the expansion of the death penalty and bars its use for political or related common crimes. Human Rights Watch opposes the infliction of capital punishment in all circumstances because of its inherent cruelty and because its irreversible nature prevents miscarriages of justice from being corrected. We view this decision with alarm, especially since the judiciary is no longer independent and special courts violate fundamental rights to due process.

Lack of accountability for human rights abuses remained the rule in Peru, contributing to the perpetuation of abuse. As of November, there were 4,200 unresolved disappearances, and the government was making no attempt to review them. New disappearances fared no better. Among the most disturbing were those of at least thirty university students from the University of the Center, in Huancayo, Junín, most of which occurred in the second half of 1992. Subsequently, in Huancayo, ten heavily armed and hooded men, some wearing police uniforms, burst into the home of Camilo Núñez on June 17, 1993. The detention was witnessed by Núñez's wife and brother, Teófilo, who told authorities that Núñez was taken away in a police vehicle. Two months later, Teófilo was detained in the presence of his wife and father. Soon afterward, his wife discovered his corpse, blindfolded and showing signs of torture, according to the Peruvian human rights group Fundación Ecumenica Para el Desarollo y la Paz (PEDEPAZ). Police denied detaining him. Camilo Núñez remained disappeared.

As evidence emerged throughout 1993 implicating a government death squad in the disappearance of nine students and a professor from Lima's "Enrique Guzmán y Valle" (La Cantuta) University on July 18, 1992, the Fujimori government engaged in a blatant cover-up, which even included the deployment of tanks in the capital, in April, to intimidate legislators seeking to investigate the crime. The government's evasive tactics also included efforts by the pro-government majority in the CCD, military leaders, and a military tribunal to derail a congressional investigation of the La Cantura case; the public prosecutor's abdication of responsibility to investigate the crime; the attorney general's failure for six days to seal a site where remains of some of the La Cantuta victims were found; the refusal by the attorney general to accept badly needed international assistance in the exhumation and forensic analysis of the remains; and a propaganda campaign by the police aimed at discrediting the discovery of the remains. Peruvians who investigated the crime-including family members, journalists, members of the congress, and a lawyer representing family members-faced death threats and legal harassment. Finally in late October, President Fujimori announced that four army officers-who were not immediately identified-had been detained in connection with the case, the first official acknowledgment that the militarywas responsible for the crime. On November 9, a criminal court in Lima convicted several police agents of aggravated homicide for the June 1991 murder of three young men. Three of the policemen were sentenced to eighteen years each; two accomplices were sentenced to five and six years respectively. A major implicated as the intellectual author of the crime was not tried.

After the 1992 coup, the government had attempted to regain control of prison cellblocks taken over by the Shining Path and the MRTA. While recognizing the need to maintain authority in prisons, Americas Watch objected to several measures that violated the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Our objections were based on several prison visits in 1992 and an analysis of decrees affecting prisons. However, our ability to monitor prisons was complicated in 1993 when the government denied entry to Americas Watch, for the first time in ten years of work in the country. The denial flew in the face of a promise delivered by the prime minister to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, in February, to provide "free access" to prisons for international humanitarian organizations. In March, the government reached an agreement allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to prisons after suspending visits for eight months. Although an important deterrent to abuse, ICRC access does not take the place of visits by organizations that publicly report their findings. As we reported in the Human Rights Watch Global Report on Prisons, Peru's prisons remained plagued by multiple problems, including life-threatening shortages of food, medicine, water, and basic supplies; a high incidence of communicable disease; extreme violence between guards and prisoners; rampant corruption; a complete lack of legal assistance for poor and indigent prisoners; frequent reports of torture and abuse by police and guards; and severely restricted access to exercise, family visits, and medical care.

Although the capture of leaders and hundreds of militants severely weakened the Shining Path in 1993, it continued to launch brutal attacks on noncombatants and civilian targets like television stations, schools, and public transportation. On August 18, guerrillas seized twelve Asháninka villages and killed at least sixty-two people, including amerindians and mestizo settlers, in the central jungle province of Satipo, Junín. Many were first mutilated by machetes and axes. Such attacks became a leading cause of forced displacement.

Guerrillas also continued to terrorize candidates for municipal office and other local officials. In the weeks leading up to January municipal elections, Shining Path guerrillas were implicated in twenty-eight murders. Among those killed was candidate Ramón Galindo, a member of the United Left party who had served as vice-mayor in Villa El Salvador, an immense Lima slum neighborhood, after former vice-mayor María Elena Moyano was slain by the Shining Path in February 1992. In June, former Villa El Salvador mayor Michel Azcueta narrowly escaped death when two Shining Path execution squads fired at him as he entered the Fe yAlegría High School, where he taught geography. A bodyguard and four children were seriously wounded. A peace proposal made by imprisoned Shining Path leader Abimall Guzmán to the government from his prison cell in September had little immediate effect. Less than a month later, guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside a Lima hotel, killing three people.

The Right To Monitor

Although the government proved more sophisticated in its human rights rhetoric internationally, at home the attitude remained one of denial, hostility, and thinly-veiled threats against monitors. As a result, it became almost impossible to discuss human rights without being accused of distributing false information, damaging the country's image, or sympathizing with terrorists.

On September 24, human rights activist Lily Maribel Olano Elera was arrested by police outside Picsi prison in Chiclayo, Lambayeque department. Police told human rights groups that she was being investigated for "terrorism-related" crimes, a charge those groups described as preposterous. Olano was later released. The interim ministry charged Father José Manuel Miranda, of the Ica Human Rights Commission, with collaboration with guerrillas because of his work in local prisons, an accusation dropped only after international protests.

Journalists critical of the regime or engaged in investigating human rights abuses or corruption by the state were targets as well. According to the Center for Study and Action on Peace (CEAPAZ), fourteen journalists were detained and charged with "apology for terrorism" in 1993. On June 2, police arrested Piura radio journalist Juan Guerra, whose news program ran reports on police brutality. Guerra had declared publicly that police threatened to kill him for his reports. He was later released. Francisco Reyes, a reporter for the national daily, La República, was detained and severely beaten by air force soldiers at the airport in Yurimaguas on September 19; he had reported on corruption among the police and air force in the area. Reyes was subsequently turned over to the police and released.

After graves containing the remains of some La Cantuta victims were discovered by Ricardo Uceda, director of the newsweekly Sí, the Public Ministry reportedly threatened to charge Uceda with obstructing justice, one of many acts of intimidation against those who have pressed for resolution of that case. Earlier in the year, Sí was also the target of a case launched by the Defense Ministry to punish the magazine for suggesting that the military's National Intelligence Service was implicated in the 1991 Barrios Altos massacre. Caretas journalist Cecilia Valenzuela was threatened numerous times during 1993, once receiving a package containing a clipping with her photograph smeared with blood and the head of a chicken.

U.S. and O.A.S. Policy

The Clinton administration was creative in pressing for human rights improvements, obtaining some positive results. Nonetheless, those results were matched by the intransigence of the Fujimori government on other, equally important fronts or reversed once pressure subsided. Meanwhile, the Fujimori government's one-step-forward, two-steps-back approach to human rights drew some unwarranted praise from Washington.

After the army tank parade to intimidate parliamentarians investigating the La Cantuta disappearance case, in April, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Bernard Aronson called President Fujimori to protest what the State Department called "an unacceptable attempt to intimidate the legislative branch." That same day, Fujimori publicly defended the legislature's theoretical right to exercise oversight. Yet once U.S. attention was elsewhere, Fujimori supporters in the CCD and army found other ways to cripple the La Cantuta investigation.

Similarly, when the Clinton administration in February set conditions for its participation in the so-called Support Group of donor countries, Lima was quick to comply with the letter (but not the spirit) of most conditions. While the government renewed ICRC access to prisons, it barred Americas Watch and local human rights groups such access. The government began a dialogue with the Peruvian human rights organization's forming the Coordinadora, but stated that it did so only because Washington insisted.

The Clinton administration later appeared eager to normalize relations with Peru. In a statement at a meeting of bilateral donor countries on June 22, the U.S. lauded Peru's "progress in strengthening democratic institutions and the protection of human rights"-a statement difficult to defend in the wake of Fujimori's blatant manipulation of the judiciary and the military's brash threats against the legislature in the La Cantuta affair. Yet, in a July interview with a Lima daily, U.S. chargé d' affaires Charles Brayshaw expressed satisfaction that a military court was investigating the La Cantuta case, ignoring the question of civilian jurisdiction and the military's near-perfect record of protecting its members implicated in serious crimes.

Military assistance and Economic Support Funds (ESF: cash payments classified as security assistance and totaling $110 million by the end of the 1993 fiscal year) were suspended to Peru after the 1992 coup and remained so during 1993, while development assistance and anti-narcotics aid to the police, the latter worth $19 million annually, continued without interruption. During the year, the Clinton administration began to discuss with human rights groups and the U.S. Congress a gradual resumption of the ESF with conditions relating to human rights attached. One of the proposed conditions was the formation of a commission of four distinguished attorneys from Argentina, Italy and the United States to study judicial independence and due process. That commission traveled to Lima in September and was expected to make recommendations to bring Peru into compliance with international standards in a public report by the end of 1993.

Human Rights Watch opposed the resumption of ESF to Peru for so long as it takes the government to restore an independent judiciary and congress; end gross violations of human rights and punish those responsible; repeal or reform the anti-terrorism decrees that created the faceless courts; and review the cases handled by those courts.

The involvement in the La Cantuta case of a death squad run out of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) by Fujimori confidante Vladimiro Montesinos again raised questions about relations between the SIN and the Central Intelligence Agency, publicly acknowledged by Fujimori in November 1992. Americas Watch recommended that any U.S. assistance to the SIN or Vladimiro Montesinos be terminated immediately, and that if any agency of the U.S. government had information on death squads operating under Peruvian intelligence services, the Clinton Administration should disclose such information to the public.

Other governments appeared to be following the U.S. lead in warming up to the Fujimori government. For example, Sweden, once a refuge for persecuted Peruvians, partially closed its doors during 1993, on the grounds that it did not want to give safe haven to Shining Path supporters. As a result of this shift in policy, Mónica Castillo Páez, whose brother Ernesto was disappeared by police in October 1990, was deported from Sweden to Holland in August 1993. Mónica had fled Peru after police several times visited the Castillo home looking for her. In March 1991 the lawyer representing her family, Augusto Zúñiga, received a letter bomb that blew off his arm. Zúñiga remained in exile in Sweden.

The Organization of American States continued to maintain a low profile on Peru, facilitating Peru's partial rehabilitation in the eyes of the world community. A trip by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in May resulted in a bland press release that the Peruvian government heralded as an important endorsement.

The cause of human rights in Peru received a blow in February when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights threw out the Cayara case, in which the government was to be held responsible for the massacre of at least thirty peasants and the disappearance and murder of witnesses in 1988. The court's decision was based on procedural errors by the IACHR, which acts as a prosecutor before the Inter-American Court. Subsequently, the IACHR completed a report on the Cayara case, which held the government responsible for serious violations of the American Convention, and submitted the report to the OAS General Assembly in June.

The Work of Americas Watch

Through reports, press releases, opinion articles and frequent correspondence with the government and its representatives in Washington, Americas Watch continued to condemn human rights violations and violations of the laws of war by both the government and armed insurgents. Several Americas Watch missions visited Peru to gather information, meet with government officials and speakwith the press. As a result of missions, Americas Watch published two reports and a lengthy newsletter in 1993: Untold Terror: Violence against Women in Peru's Armed Conflict (with the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch), Human Rights in Peru One Year after Fujimori's Coup, and "Anatomy of a Cover-Up: The Disappearances at La Cantuta". In addition, a section on Peru was contributed to the Human Rights Watch Global Report on Prisons.

In cooperation with Peruvian human rights organizations and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), Americas Watch acted as counsel for the relatives of the victims in two cases: the 1988 Cayara massacre and the disappearance of prisoners following the 1986 prison riot at El Frontón. In the Cayara case, Americas Watch executive director Juan Méndez argued preliminary objections at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. He also represented relatives of the El Frontón victims in a trial at the court, which was expected to make a decision in January 1994. In October, Americas Watch and CEJIL presented a petition regarding the expansion of the death penalty, requesting that the IACHR declare it a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights.