January 2004
Peru has yet to emerge from the shadow of the violent civil conflict that gripped the country from 1980 until 2000. Faced by the stark findings of a truth commission report published in August 2003, politicians attacked the commission's impartiality and bickered over responsibility for the tragic loss of life. Many avoided any serious debate of the issues at the root of the conflict and of the human rights lessons highlighted by the commission. President Alejandro Toledo's political weakness (public opinion polls gave him only 11 percent support during part of the year) muted his response to the report. After delaying almost three months before reacting officially to the commission's conclusions and recommendations, Toledo acknowledged that those responsible for human rights violations must be brought to justice.
- Confronting the Past
- Police and Army Use of Excessive Force to Quell Demonstrations
- Torture and Prison Conditions
- Freedom of Expression
- Key International Actors
Confronting the Past
Nearly 70,000 people died in the armed conflict, the truth commission calculated, a much higher figure than estimated previously. Seventy-five percent of the victims were indigenous people: the Quechua-speaking populations of Peru's poorest and most neglected Andean provinces, and Asháninkas from its tropical jungle regions. Ayacucho Department, where the guerrilla organization Shining Path was originally based, suffered more than 40 percent of the civilian deaths. The commission found Shining Path responsible for most of the deaths and for acts of enormous cruelty. The armed forces and the police were found responsible for grave human rights violations, including massacres, extrajudicial executions, "disappearances," systematic torture, and rape.
The commission turned over forty-three cases to the attorney general for judicial investigation, together with evidence collected against individuals thought to be responsible for the abuses. Provincial prosecutors were already conducting investigations into sixteen of these cases following a January 2001 agreement between the government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (see below). But progress has been disappointingly slow. The post of special prosecutor created in April 2002 under the agreement has changed hands twice, and local investigators are said to lack essential resources and forensic skills. There are hundreds of burial sites from which bodies have still to be recovered, and whose identification will be a huge and daunting task.
In some cases the military has tried to hold up or block court proceedings against officers in active service. A court investigating the forced disappearance of four villagers from Chuschi, Ayacucho, in March 1991 was unable to arrest an army major because his commander delayed handing him over and a military prosecutor initiated parallel proceedings in a military court. In November 2003, a ministry of defense official admitted that no one had yet been prosecuted for the numerous rapes committed during the conflict. On the positive side, by January 2004 the police had arrested more than thirty members of the Colina Group, a death squad responsible for "disappearances" and extrajudicial executions in the early 1990s.
Police and Army Use of Excessive Force to Quell Demonstrations
The Peruvian army and police sometimes fail to observe international standards for the use of lethal force in keeping order during protests and demonstrations. On May 29, 2003, twenty-two-year-old Eddy Quilca Cruz died after soldiers fired on students marching at Puno's University of the Altiplano against the government's failure to improve living conditions. Dozens of others were reported injured, some with gunshot wounds. A day earlier, eighteen protesters were wounded, some by gunshot, in Barranca, a city north of Lima, Peru's capital. In June 2002, two people died and 150 people were injured during six-day protests in Arequipa against a plan to privatize two electricity companies. On both occasions, the Toledo government had imposed thirty-day states of emergency.
Torture and Prison Conditions
The torture of criminal suspects held for interrogation in police stations is still common. Conditions in some prisons continue to be very harsh.
Human rights groups have urged the government to close down the remote, high-altitude prisons of Challapalca, in Tacna, and Yanamayo, in Puno. After a visit to Challapalca prison in August 2002 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a damning report stating that conditions there were inhumane, and that among other physical abuses new arrivals had been beaten and tortured with electric prods. So far, the Peruvian government has failed to implement the commission's long-standing recommendation that the prison be closed. About forty prisoners were still being held there in January 2004.
Freedom of Expression
Former President Alberto Fujimori's close advisor Vladimiro Montesinos used bribery and other illegal means to use Peru's television stations to promote Fujimori's second re-election campaign and to denigrate his political opponents. Since 2000, when Fujimori left office, the attorney general has prosecuted corrupt media executives and journalists who accepted money or company shares in exchange for providing the Fujimori government with favorable coverage. Several are still in prison or under house arrest awaiting trial or release, while others have fled the country. In provincial towns, journalists are still harassed or threatened as a result of reporting that is critical of local authorities. Others face libel actions by politicians or officials they criticize.
Key International Actors
The United States and Peru continue to negotiate the renewal of joint drug interdiction flights. The flights were suspended indefinitely in April 2001 when a Peruvian fighter jet mistook a missionary plane for that of a drug-trafficker and shot it down, killing missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter. Human Rights Watch wrote to President Toledo urging him to reject any proposals that entailed the unlawful use of lethal forces against civilians, whether drug-traffickers or not. Rather than embark directly on a new lethal interdiction program in Peru, the U.S. is said to be planning to set up an aerial surveillance center in the Peruvian jungle as a first step.
A landmark 2001 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights overruling the application of amnesty laws in the "Barrios Altos" case has enabled scores of human rights cases to be reopened. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reached a friendly agreement with Peru in January 2001, according to which Peru undertook to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for 159 cases of "disappearance," most of them from the 1980s. In its annual report published in March 2003, the commission found that Peru had "partially implemented" its recommendations.
The United States cooperated with the truth commission by making available 326 declassified documents, including CIA reports, relating to human rights abuses during the armed conflict.
Related Material
More on Human Rights in Peru
Country Page
HRW World Report 2004
Report, January 26, 2004