Ex-Peru presidential contender faces rights charges

[Bacchus39]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/08/16/peru.humala.reut/index.html



LIMA, Peru (Reuters) -- Peruvian prosecutors have asked for Ollanta Humala, an ex-army officer who came close to winning Peru's 2006 presidential race, to be tried for murder in connection with Peru's fight against drugs and leftist insurgents.

Humala, who lost to President Alan Garcia, was accused of forced disappearance, torture and murder while fighting leftist insurgents and drug-traffickers at a jungle army base in 1992, said a public prosecutors' office spokesman Wednesday.

Prosecutors asked a judge Monday for charges to be filed against Humala. It is not known when the judge will issue a decision.

Humala's promises of social revolution won support from poor Peruvians for his election bid this year, though fear among the rich and middle class that he was too radical, handed a second-round victory to centrist Garcia in June.

[Peace Patriot]

1. If ever there was a political prosecution, it is this one!

1. Garcia is no "centrist." He's an extremely corrupt corporatist. What's at stake here is Peru's political soul--will it go with the vast, peaceful, democratic revolution that is sweeping Latin America--in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Venezuela, and up into Mexico and Nicaragua--or will it go with the Bushites and Corporate/World Bank/IMF rulers?

2. 1992 is FOURTEEN YEARS AGO! What the hell are they doing bringing these charges NOW?

3. The answer is that Humala, a champion of the poor and the indigenous (he's 100% indigenous, like Evo Morales in Bolivia), came out of nowhere this year, with no traditional political support and no money, and bumped the far rightwing candidate out of the race in the preliminary voting, winning 30% of the vote. With Hugo Chavez's and Evo Morales' backing, he then went on to INCREASE his vote by 15%, to a surprising (for a political novice) 45% showing, in his loss to corporate/Bush-backed Garcia in the general election. One more election, and Humala will win. Garcia will loot and destroy Peru's economy, like the rightwing did in Argentina, and Humala is the alternative to that. Humala is a clear political threat to this government. There is no other reason or sense to bringing 14 year old charges against him. He dared to challenge the thieves who are running Peru.

4. The military is often the only career--indeed, the only job--for the poor and the indigenous in Latin America, and military men have been compelled to do all sorts of repressive actions under the far rightwing juntas that have ruled Peru. And I've no doubt they are also put in compromising positions, whether they participate in repression or not, for purposes of blackmail and in efforts to corrupt them. Humala would have seen first hand what a crock of corrupt shit the "war on drugs" and the war against "leftist guerrillas" (killing poor peasants) was! That is likely what turned him into a LEFTIST POLITICIAN! Imagine if the Bushites charged John Kerry with Vietnam war crimes--which they in fact did, verbally, but what if they used 'torture memo' writer Alberto Gonzales and Bush-packed courts to go after him? This is no different. Garcia led one of the most corrupt governments in the history of Latin America. Now he's back. And he doesn't want any leftist, socialist, indigenous opposition.

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We really have to learn to read between the lines of these war profiteering corporate news monopoly articles--and seek out alternative sources of information. One good source is: www.venezuelanalysis.com.

[Bacchus39]

2. what will be the next campaign slogan?

throw out the crooks, elect a murderer!!

He was also a coup leader and he told Chavez to quit interfering with Peru's election.

and Peruvians apparently didn't think he was "the answer".

[struggle4progress]

3. Humala's an SOA graduate.

‘Dirty War' Allegations Cast Shadow on Nationalist Candidate
Monday, February 20th 2006
Ángel Páez, Inter Press Service News Agency

... Humala, who graduated in 1984 from the military academy in Chorrillos, has not referred to the fact that in 1983, he took a course at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), which was then based in Panama (before moving to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984).

Tens of thousands of Latin American officers and soldiers have taken courses at the notorious U.S. army institution, where they are trained in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics techniques.

In 1996, the U.S. Department of Defence was forced to release training manuals that had been used to instruct Latin American military personnel at the SOA that advocated torture, extortion and execution as counterinsurgency tactics ...

http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=1051

[Robbien]

4. There we go again spreading our brand of democracy

Humala was poor and joining the military was a common (if not the only) choice for the poor. His military commanders sends him to SOA where he was taught some bad tactics. His military commanders had him use those tactics.

Now he is being attacked for using those tactics.

Sounds like a frameup to me.

[struggle4progress]

5. Concur in part, dissent in part. The context is somewhat ambiguous.

Peru's dirty war was long and weird and ugly. Sendero was always a rather small group but also stark raving mad. The military response to Sendero was far too often the predictable brutal massacre of innocent peasants -- by which I mean that groups of people were chopped to pieces and their body parts stacked like cordwood as a "warning." Ordinary poor people were caught in the middle: if not killed by Senderistas as "collaborators" then at least as likely to be killed by gung-ho militarists as "insurgents." This dragged on for two decades, although the US press predictably only ever pointed its idiotic finger at Sendero.

But the overall role of the military in Peruvian society may not be entirely rightwing: it is sometimes claimed that the Peruvian military includes a significant populist group, although I do not know how to evaluate this claim.

Anyway, the allegations against Humala did not hurt him electorally in the regions of the worst military abuses -- but that may not mean the allegations are false:

Voting for the Accused
Ángel Páez

... The memory of the Accomarca massacre -- one of the worst in the 1980-2000 "dirty war" against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Maoist guerrillas -- is still fresh. Yet in the first election round held Apr. 9, a majority of the townspeople (71.8 percent) voted for Humala, despite investigations into his alleged abuses during the counter-insurgency struggle ... In the village of Umasi, army patrols killed 41 people in 1983. No one has been brought to justice. There, Humala won 68.9 percent of the vote ... "The troops that went up against Shining Path members were almost entirely comprised of young men recruited from Ayacucho villages," explained Caballero. "Ollanta Humala's party has the support of thousands of reservists who fought against the Shining Path. They are the ones campaigning for Humala in the former war zones" ... "The judge who investigated numerous crimes committed by members of Counterinsurgency Base 313, in which Humala was deployed, had the case shelved due to lack of evidence, manipulated by the accused military officers, who had many resources," said Macher ... http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=33347

[1932]

6. In Aleida Guevara's book which is an interview with Hugo Chavez,

Chavez talks about how he was assigned to an outpost in the Venezuelan jungle (as punishment for talking about socialism and social justice at an army base in Caracas). At that outpost, his job was to fight leftist insurgents and drug taffickers. However, he also used the opportunity to start an oral history program for local tribes, build infrastructure, and end the hunting of members of the tribe by white hunters for sport.

In Manuel Noriega's book, written with Peter Eisner, Noriega talks about General Omar Torrijos, who was a very progressive leader of Panama, and he talks about how Torrijos fought lefitist insurgents when he was a junior officer in the national guard. However, Torrijos also granted them amnesty when he became the leader of the country, and he paid pensions to the widows of insurgent leaders whom his unit killed in battle (which brought the insurgents' issues back into the national debate minus the violence, which was what Torrijos wanted).

There's a huge difference between an army officer violating human rights, murder & general extrajudicial proceedings and one who is doing his job as an officer in the army of a nation that is engaged in fighting with insurgents and drug dealers. However, it seems to me that if you served in the military in most South American countries in the 70s and 80s, you weren't exactly sticking flowers into the gun barrels of those who were fighting your government. Furthermore, many very progressive leaders came out of the armed services during those years partly because they were reflecting on the things for which the rebels were fighting.

I suggest that anyone who needs some background to digest this story really should read Guevara's and Eisner's books. As Gott says in his books about Cuba and Venezuela, people just don't understand the context of Latin American politics, which makes it very easy for Americans' opinions to be manipulated.