Bloody era haunts jailed ex-president
A massacre that left 15 dead in 1991 could be Alberto Fujimori's biggest legal challenge now that the ex-president has been extradited to Peru.
Posted on Mon, Sep. 24, 2007
BY TYLER BRIDGES
tbridges@MiamiHerald.com
LIMA -- Late one Sunday night nearly 16 years ago, a half-dozen men carrying machine guns equipped with silencers burst into the interior patio of a squalid tenement building here and opened fire on 20 people at a chicken barbecue.
When the masked men drove off, 15 people lay dead, including an 8-year-old boy, and four more were badly wounded.
''I was shot right in that corner,'' Tomás Livias said Sunday, pointing to the spot where he was shot 27 times and left to die. ``I will remember that night until I die.''
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was extradited from Chile on Saturday, and perhaps the most serious accusation he faces is that he sanctioned the paramilitary death squad that carried out two massacres of ordinary Peruvians.
One was the slaughter that left Livias in a wheelchair. It is known in Peru as the Barrios Altos case, after the neighborhood where the killings occurred on Nov. 3, 1991.
The other case is known as La Cantuta for the teachers' college where one professor and nine students were abducted and murdered at night on July 18, 1992. Their bodies were found a year later in a common grave.
The Barrios Altos and La Cantuta cases carry 30-year sentences, or enough to put the 69-year-old Fujimori in prison for the rest of his life.
More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/248217.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The massacre at Barrios Altos, from Wikipedia:
The Barrios Altos massacre took place on 3 November 1991, in the Barrios Altos neighborhood of Lima, Peru. Fifteen people, including an eight year old child, were killed, and four more injured, by assailants who were later determined to be members of Grupo Colina, a death squad made up of members of the Peruvian Armed Forces. The atrocity came to be seen as a symbol of the human rights violations committed during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, and was one of the crimes cited in the request for his extradition submitted by the Peruvian government to Japan in 2003.
The massacre
On the evening of 3 November, a neighborhood barbecue was being held at 840 Jirón Huanta to collect funds to repair the building. At approximately 23:30, six heavily-armed individuals burst into the building. They had arrived in two vehicles, a Jeep Cherokee and a Mitsubishi. These cars had police lights and sirens, which were turned off when they reached the location.
One of the victims of the Barrios Altos massacreThe assailants, who ranged from 25 to 30 years of age, covered their faces with balaclava masks and ordered the victims to lie on the floor. They fired at them indiscriminately for about two minutes, killing 15 of them, including an eight year-old boy, and seriously injuring another four. One of the injured was permanently disabled. Subsequently, the assailants fled in their vehicles, sounding their sirens once again.
The police during their investigation found 111 cartridges and 33 bullets of the same caliber at the scene; they determined the assailants had used sub-machine guns equipped with silencers.
Aftermath
Judicial investigations and newspaper reports subsequently revealed that those involved worked for military intelligence; they were members of the Grupo Colina, which was known for carrying out its own anti-terrorist program. It appeared later that the assailants had been targeting a meeting of Shining Path rebels, which actually took place on the second floor of the building.
(snip/...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrios_Altos_massacre~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
La CantutaIn the pre-dawn hours of July 18, 1992, nine students and one professor were "disappeared" from La Cantuta University in the Peruvian capital, Lima. Witnesses saw them being beaten and forcibly dragged away.
Then, in April, 1993, a group of Peruvian military officers — calling themselves "Sleeping Lion" — anonymously released a document detailing the La Cantuta massacre: they said an official government death squad had kidnapped the ten victims, tortured and murdered them, and then hurriedly buried, exhumed, burned, and reburied the bodies. The document named the death squad members, including its chief of operations, Major Santiago Martín Rivas, and revealed that it operated under orders from the de facto head of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, a close ally of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori. In response to these charges, the Fujimori government suggested that perhaps the ten people at La Cantuta had "kidnapped" themselves and were, in fact, hiding from the authorities.
But on July 8, 1993, after a certain Mariella Lucy Barreto Riofano, an agent of the Peruvian Army Intelligence Service, had leaked a marked map to a Peruvian magazine, reporters found the brutalized remains of the "La Cantuta 10" in Cieneguilla, a holiday resort near Lima. Investigation suggested strongly that the Peruvian intelligence services and the Peruvian army were responsible for the torture and murder, and that the actions were approved by the highest levels of the Peruvian government. The case was taken to court in 1994 — and for the first time military personnel had to answer for their official acts. Charges were brought and eleven perpetrators were convicted, but the court — another one of Peru's ubiquitous "secret military tribunals" — officially cleared the military and the intelligence services of any complicity in the crime. In July, 1995 the government released even those individuals who had been convicted.
In the words of the US State Department's Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996:A 1995 law granted amnesty from prosecution to those who committed human rights abuses during the war on terrorism from May 1980 to June 1995. When lower court judge Antonia Sacquicuray declared the Amnesty Law unconstitutional, Congress immediately passed a second law blocking any judicial review of the law's constitutionality. Subsequently, a split decision by a superior court overturned the Sacquicuray decision. These events created considerable concern over military and police impunity for past abuses. The Amnesty Law also cleared the records of security force personnel who had already been convicted of human rights abuses, including the eight military perpetrators of the 1992 La Cantuta massacre, who were sentenced in 1994 but released by military authorities a few days after the Amnesty Law's passage.
(snip/...)
http://web.mit.edu/hemisphere/pubs/abducted.shtml
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