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1994-05-02
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<text>
<title>
Peru: Human Rights Watch
</title>
<article>
<hdr>
Human Rights Watch World Report 1992
Americas Watch: Peru
</hdr>
<body>
<p>Human Rights Developments
</p>
<p> Peru now ranks as one of the most tormented countries of
Latin America. Official statistics show that some 24,000
citizens most of them civilians--have died in political
violence since 1980. As many as 200,000 people have been
displaced by the conflict, half of them children. Both official
forces and the principal insurgents, Sendero Luminoso (Shining
Path), murder and torture noncombatants and forcibly involve
civilians in the conflict, while the lesser rebel group, the
Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), also carries out
selective executions and bombings. For four straight years, from
1987 to 1990, Peru led the world in new disappearances,
according to the specialized U.N. working group. Although there
was some reduction in new disappearances during 1991, the
practice continues at a high rate. Victims of political
execution, disappearance, torture and harassment by official
forces during 1991 included peasants, labor unionists,
university students and journalists; the elderly and children
were not exempted. Sendero victims cover the same gamut, with
the addition of politicians and local officials as murder
targets, and young boys as forced recruits.
</p>
<p> In June 1990, Peruvians elected a new president, Alberto
Fujimori, who promised a fresh approach to the
counterinsurgency campaign and an end to human rights
violations. During his first year, the counterinsurgency plan
remained the same; as before, the government responded to rebel
initiatives by expanding the territory under a state of
emergency and, in emergency zones, establishing Political
Military Commands to supersede civilian authority. Nearly half
the national territory, and more than half the population of
twenty-two million, remained or was placed under a state of
emergency that is, effective military governance during 1991.
</p>
<p> The new government's sole innovation, if it could be called
that, was to put special emphasis on the creation of village
civil-defense patrols, a tactic initiated under the government
of Fernando Belaúnde (1980-1985) and continued off and on under
that of Alan García (1985-90). The local civil patrols are in
some places a genuinely volunteer force, created at the demand
of villagers who are terrified of guerrilla violence. But in
many cases the patrols were imposed by the official forces as
a form of unpaid, unwelcome reserve duty dangerous and, very
often, aggressive rather than purely defensive. The patrols are
frequently guilty of killing noncombatants, and for the first
time in 1991 carried out disappearances as well. Because
patrols include women and young boys, these normally civilian
sectors of the rural population were brought into the conflict.
</p>
<p> Predictably, human rights violations, continued during
President Fujimori's first year. Indeed, the reduction in
disappearances appeared to be balanced by an increase in the
number of acknowledged dead, who once more were principally
civilian noncombatants. Several massacres in rural areas drew
attention to the army's brutality. In some egregious abuses the
civil defense patrols participated. Officially tolerated
paramilitary violence, including assassinations, persisted,
although the death squads appeared to be local phenomena rather
than centrally coordinated. Torture took place in both military
and police detention centers. On November 3, human rights
violations took a new and grisly turn in Peru with the murder
of sixteen persons in a barbecue eatery in downtown Lima,
perpetrated by a paramilitary group.
</p>
<p> These abuses did not appear to correspond to the intentions
of the civilian government. However, President Fujimori made
gestures of confidence in several officials linked with human
rights abuses or responsible for covering them up. In December
1990, the president decreed that crimes committed by military
personnel in the emergency zones must be defined as acts of
duty and adjudicated in military courts a guarantee that the
crimes would remain unpunished. This decree was repealed by
Congress in February 1991, but congressional reformers were
unsuccessful in stopping the presidential promotion, also in
December 1990, of two army generals linked to major massacres
of the 1980s. On separate occasions during 1991, Fujimori's
defense and interior ministers were involved in attempted
cover-ups of human rights abuses which called their integrity
into question, but neither official was asked to resign.
</p>
<p> Both Sendero and the MRTA committed violations of the laws
of war, specifically, common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva
Conventions, which applies to rebel groups and forbids murder
or mistreatment of noncombatants. Sendero in particular used
terror to control civilian communities. Through a network of
clandestine and semi-clandestine front organizations, Sendero
typically seeks to infiltrate authentic popular organizations
and provoke divisions within them. If organizations prove
resistant, Sendero executes their elected leadership. Similarly,
when peasants do not support Sendero or object to its use of
violence, the guerrillas exact bloody reprisals. Favorite
targets are the civil patrols, which in Sendero's view represent
a village's collaboration with the army and navy, whether or not
they are voluntary. Sendero has carried out indiscriminate mass
murders in villages as punishment for the creation of a patrol.
On November 3, Sendero killed thirty-seven persons in Santo
Tomás de Pata, Angaraes, Ayacucho, ostensibly because they had
formed a civil patrol.
</p>
<p> During 1991, Sendero continued to be active in most of Peru,
increasing its attacks in and around Lima and in the
strategically important central states. It is not possible to
speak of firm control of population or territory, but Sendero,
has by now established itself in the central area of Peru
principally the department of Junín as firmly as it has been
established in the highland regions of Ayacucho, Apurímac and
Huancavelica since the early 1980s. It has also become a
consistent presence, and important factor, in the Upper
Huallaga River Valley, which comprises parts of two northeastern
states and is the area where small growers produce most of
Peru's coca.
</p>
<p> The guerrilla groups do not engage directly in coca
trafficking, but both receive "protection" money from drug
traffickers in the areas where they operate Sendero in the Upper
Huallaga, and the MRTA further north, in the Central Huallaga
and so indirectly derive millions of dollars a year from the
traffic in narcotics. The competition between the two groups,
already intense, is likely to become more so given the financial
stakes. Sendero was reported to be making advances on MRTA
territory in the Central Huallaga toward the end of 1991.
</p>
<p> The drug trade has stimulated corruption in a society where
bribery of officials was already common. Crime and corruption
linked to drug trafficking, added to the desperate poverty in
which most Peruvians live and the spiral of political violence
that grips the country, make Peru a place where solutions are
both hard to develop and nearly impossible to administer
effectively. In large areas of the country, political violence
has driven out judges, mayors and other representatives of
legitimate authority. In the Huallaga region, drug traffickers
suborn local prosecutors, police and military officers. The
central government, too, is riddled with corruption, of which
recent accusations against former President García provide only
one sensational example.
</p>
<p> Nonetheless, there have been some admirable efforts to
document human rights abuses and explore possible solutions to
the problem of political violence. A special Senate commission
on political violence gathers monthly statistics and makes
yearly recommendations. Politically mixed commissions in both