Among the principal actors in Peru’s long fight against subversive groups between 1980 and 2000 were the security forces, both police and military. While much of their effort was laudable, it is undeniable that the conflict, which killed over 69,000 people, included grave human rights violations, including massacres, disappearances, rape, and torture, at times committed by agents of the state. Dealing with the conflict’s legacy has long been a thorny issue in Peru. Now a new chapter has opened with the efforts of several lawmakers to promote new amnesty or pardon laws that could lead to the search for justice being subsumed by politics and procedural questions in a way that seriously obscures the truth about the responsibility of state agents for serious human rights violations.
In 2003 Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – considered a model of its kind – presented evidence of atrocities to the relevant judicial authorities. However, the cases have proceeded at a very slow pace, with few convictions and many cases stuck in the preliminary investigation phase. Meanwhile, an influential sector of Peruvian society, including some politicians, journalists, elements of the Catholic Church, and armed forces members, have been claiming in ever-louder voices that the processes represent persecution of the security forces – a form of vengeance by closet subversives who wish to defeat in court the soldiers who won the war.
Considering the tiny number of police and soldiers implicated in human rights violation relative to the overall size of the security force sector, the idea of a generalized persecution is implausible. Those favoring amnesty or pardon have one legitimate complaint: like many Peruvian legal cases, the processes have been very slow. However, as both domestic and international human rights groups constantly point out, the primary cause of the delays is the failure of the very armed forces to deliver the necessary information for the cases to move forward. If they are truly interested in rapid resolution of the cases, an end to stonewalling on information requests is clearly the place to begin.
There are two projects in the congress, both sponsored by members of the ruling APRA party. One would provide amnesty to members of the security forces, and is aimed specifically at those who participated in the liberation of hostages at the Japanese Embassy in 1996, an operation that may have led to extrajudicial killings of many of the hostage-takers. This project is unlikely to prosper as it blatantly violates Peru’s international commitments: under the Inter-American system, crimes against humanity are not subject to amnesty. In addition, the bill’s sponsor was somewhat discredited when he claimed that over 100 ex-soldiers were facing charges, when in reality only 4 notoriously brutal and/or corrupt cronies of ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori are under scrutiny.
The other project, promoted by one of APRA’s most powerful parliamentarians, Mercedes Cabanillas, would establish a pardons commission to evaluate which ex-security force members are being prosecuted on the basis of weak evidence and should therefore have the charges against them dismissed. The logic is that a number of people convicted of being subversives received pardons in the early 2000s. However, a significant number of the thousands who were convicted were undeniably innocent and had been convicted by hooded judges in kangaroo courts. There is no evidence that the processes ex-soldiers currently face are being held under remotely similar anti-defendant conditions.
If this process goes through and a large number of pardons are eventually issued, it will represent a severe setback for human rights, the rule of law, and the fight against impunity in Peru. It will also almost inevitably engender a major fight between human rights groups and the government, both within Peru and in the Inter-American system. Most ironically, many representatives of the soldiers and police under investigation don’t even want to be pardoned or amnestied: they want to prove their innocence in court. This has raised suspicions that the whole point is to benefit high level political operatives who are potentially implicated in human rights cases. The best way to allay such suspicions will be to make sure that whatever bill, if any, that eventually passes puts justice and the armed conflict’s victims ahead of politics and expediency.
Photo Credit: Flickr user moonbird
