Peru: Round-Up

Lots of notesworthy stuff being written about Peru this week:

At the start of the APEC summit in Lima, Otto reflects on South America's most charming capital city... ok, so that's not exactly how he puts it. He's right though. Lima has some good things going for it but it is an acquired taste, and if you want to see blue skies every now and then - well, I'd just give up and go to Quito instead. Also, a man has been apprehended with 36 grenades in his backpack...oh dear. Let's hope the Shining Path don't manage to make a grand entrance among all the international visitors.

Because, three police officers were killed in an ambush in Ayacucho on Sunday. The perpetrators are described as "narcoterrorists", which seems to be the new form of Sendero in many areas.

Fujimori on Trial comments on the proposed amnesty bill.

And Upside Down World reports on the exhumation work in Putis.

"Things have not changed…people feel that all they get from the state is repression," he said. "Putis is not one place. There are many Putis in Peru."

Peru: More on that Amnesty

The words 'military amnesty' just make me go a bit cross-eyed. Here's a another article from IPS illustrating why this is such a bad idea.

The Congresswoman’s [APRA representative Mercedes Cabanillas] proposal would create a pardon committee to release from prison those who -- she argues -- were "unjustly" convicted.

And she knows who these people were, does she?

Aurelio Pastor, spokesman for the APRA legislators, told IPS that the ruling party will back the draft law for a pardon, and may also support the proposed amnesty.

"What we want is for (President Alan García) to receive proposals for pardons for members of the police and military who did not violate human rights and are facing trial or have been sentenced," said Pastor. "This is a measure to strengthen the process of reconciliation. Obviously we aren’t suggesting that those who are guilty be pardoned."

Again, according to who? This seems to be based on the premise that Peru's justice system cannot distinguish between the innocent and the guilty.... but politicians who weren't party to all the evidence can. Peru's judicial system may not be perfect, and then reform is of course a possibility, but the problem is hardly solved by convicting people and then just pardoning them en masse.

Cabanillas and Núñez argue that hundreds of members of the security forces who fought the leftist guerrillas from 1980 to 2000 have been tried and sent to jail "merely on the strength of accusations by the victims."

Really - testimony by the victims convicted these people? Unbelievable.

To illustrate their point, the two legislators cite supposed legal proceedings against the members of the Chavín de Huantar commando, which carried out a spectacular rescue of 72 hostages held for four months by the insurgent Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in the Japanese ambassador’s residence in 1997.

But both Defence Minister Ántero Flores Aráoz and National Ombudswoman Beatriz Merino clarified that not a single member of the Chavín de Huantar commando has been tried, let alone jailed.

So the APRA members lied to prove their point then.

When Congresswoman Cabanillas was asked in an interview by the press to mention an emblematic case of judicial bias against a member of the security forces who deserved to be pardoned, she was unable to name any single case, and merely said that all of them were important.

LOL!
It's no laughing matter though. Peru, don't go down the terrible road that Argentina did, and is only just starting to reverse the damage now that its human rights abusers are dying of old age. Publicity and public outrage is one of the best weapons against impunity, so let's hope that Peru's human rights groups are mobilising at this stage while the draft law is still being discussed (from a glance at Aprodeh's web site, they are).

Activists Warn of "Impunity Measures"

Blog Round-Up

Some shocking pictures in
Police Repression and Presidential Promises: The Fight for Social Justice in Paraguay (Upside Down World)

IPS on the military massacre in Bogota in 1985, in which 11 Supreme Court magistrates and at least 80 others died. The killings were a botched response to the capture of the building by guerrillas.
The Truth Is Slowly Coming Out

Meanwhile,
Ecuador Protests Colombian Paramilitary Incursion, Documents CIA Infiltration (Ecuador Rising)

Peru: Resurgence of Shining Path

After years in relative obscurity, the Shining Path, one of Latin America's most notorious guerrilla groups, is fighting the Peruvian military with renewed vigor, feeding on the profits of the cocaine trade and trying to win support from the Andean villagers it once terrorized, according to residents and Peruvian officials.

There's been a flurry of articles recently about the Shining Path's 'comeback'. I wonder what the belief in guerrilla strength actually contributes to it. It's pretty hard to count underground leftist groups, you know. I've read wildly differing accounts of the number of members of Shining Path in their heyday. People who are trying to bring down a state don't exactly stick around to put their job titles down on census forms, and moreover, are you counting armed combatants, supporters, sympathisers, or something else? From this perspective you gain some insight - if little sympathy - into the Peruvian military view that indigenous villagers in general counted as terrorists.

With this in mind, I do ask myself how a belief in Shining Path's resurgence, and media focus on this, actually bolsters the activities of such a group. Fear is stirred up, people change their daily lives, the media is paying attention, the government is put on the defensive... It certainly does seem as if SP has carried out a few more audacious attacks in the past few months, and I'm not suggesting this be swept under the carpet. A year or two I heard several people at Peruvian conferences saying that since the conditions that led to Shining Path's initial growth have not changed, there is space for them to stage a comeback. Then they generally paused for dramatic effect, but since the situation was hypothetical no one was that shocked. I'm now both horrified and curious about this resurgence process. Should we stop speaking of Shining Path in the past tense?

In Peru, a Rebellion Reborn (Washington Post)

Here's the result of my playing with my blog front page and the simple yet strangely addictive wordle.

Argentina: Referees and Repression

I think this is the first time I've got one of my articles from the sports section... here's the gist:

Their names were José Francisco Bujedo and Angel Narciso Racedo, they were football referees in the '70s, but history will remember them more as agents of the dictatorship. They officiated in the Mar del Plata league; Bejedo as the principal referee and Racedo as his assistant. By contrast, when they carried out clandestine operations from the naval base (both belonged to the Navy Intelligence Services) these roles were reversed: Racedo was the boss, going by the alias Comisario Pepe, and Bujedo was his subordinate. The former was remanded in custody in the prison of Batán in the cases 4446 and 4447 concerning crimes against humanity under investigation by the Federal Court No. 3 in Mar del Plata. His comrade and fellow referee remains at large, although the families of disappeared people have already served judge Rodolfo Prada with a petition for his detention.
[...]
The referee is now 73 and his linesman 68.

Represores de negro y pantaloncitos cortos (Pagina/12)

Thoughts on WHINSEC/SOA

This blog doesn't get too many comments at this stage. You quickly learn that there is a high view to comment ratio, and that's ok. So when I saw that a very brief, linky post of mine had garnered a comment, I was interested. It was a post on Colombia and the commenter was Lee Rials, who describes himself as public affairs officer at WHINSEC, the US military training academy formerly known as the School of the Americas.

I felt privileged to have attracted the attention of a representative of a US state institution!* But a few seconds on Google deflated my pride, since it seems I have just joined the ranks of the many blogs to have been graced by the commenting ability of military public relations. Rials makes a habit of this: see here, here, and here. And in fact, if you google 'moral libel' in quotes the vast majority of the results are comments about WHINSEC/SOA from Rials. The comments are not particularly well tailored to the exact article, which explains why I got the standard 'moral libel' treatment even though I had expressed no judgement or causal link in my tiny post.

But ok, ok, we're on the subject now, so what DO I think of SOA/WHINSEC? Well, first things first: I'm not a US citizen or resident, so it's not my tax dollars paying for its existence, which may or may not be relevant. Second, can we just look up for a second? Yep, that's right, right up there - the title of the blog: Memory in Latin America. Because a lot of what I do is news compilation, and because I believe that the power of traumatic memory is its prevalence in the present, yes, I talk about the here and now. But ultimately, what brought me here is my interest in the past military dictatorships of Latin America and their aftermath. So really, I'm not so much coming from the WHINSEC direction, but am rather interested in the SOA and its legacy (lost by the acronyms? Get background here). The point being, I am still allowed to talk about what SOA may or may not have done wrong in the past even if the current institution is blameless.

You can read a lot about the activities of members of the Latin American military who had at some time attended a course or courses at SOA. They include two members of the Argentine junta (Galtieri and Viola); Ecuadorian dictator Guillermo Rodriguez; Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos and several perpetrators involved in the Cantuta massacre; and many, many, more. I'm not saying that the SOA caused every one of those people to become a torturer, a murderer, or a human rights abuser. That would be a nonsense. What I'm saying is that evidence suggests that the SOA was part of the machinery with which the US maintained its influence in the hemisphere, and that this influence did not have human rights as a priority - this is putting it about as mildly as you possibly can. The US throws its weight behind regime change when it considers this advantageous (Nicaragua, Chile); the democratic status of a country is not decisive in this, but rather the attitude of the country towards the Northern superpower. I don't think I have ever met a person who knew anything about Latin America who believed that US had anything other than its own interests - and solely those interests - at heart in its dealings with the hemisphere.

WHINSEC is the child of SOA, and a name change does not wipe away the past. Military violence against civilians is the plague of Latin America and it is not in the past, unfortunately, but continues despite democratic governments. We read daily of deaths, Peruvian villagers driven from their homes, Colombians lured with offers of job interviews, dressed as guerrillas and shot, politicians openly classifying human rights organisations as terrorists. I don't think that the efforts of Lee Rials' or those like him will ever be able to convince observers that continuing to train military officers in this institution is wise, effective, or a good use of funds, just as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were never going to be satisfied with the military continuing to control the ESMA, even though it was no longer a torture centre. Moral libel? Well, we're talking about crimes against humanity and the influences that surround them, so I think I'll take my chances with the thought crimes.

There is lots more information on this subject than I can include here, but I can give a few leads:
A Visit to WHINSEC (Plan Colombia and Beyond)
Torture is Un-American: The SOA and its Devastating Legacy (COHA)
WHINSEC transparency amendment today (Plan Colombia and Beyond)
SOA Watch
Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas [partly available free to view on Google books; not a perfect book, but informative]

*Not as privileged as the people whom the CIA drop in on, obviously.