Open Forum
Jara, Ernesto de la
Caught in an Anti-Terrorist Web Many Peruvians welcomed the draconian anti-terrorism measures President Alberto Fujimori put in place after his "self-coup" in 1992. The violence of the Shining...
...How many of them there must have been if there are still innocent people in prison being defended by the same organization, "In the Name of the Innocents...
...It wasn't a time for stopping to think that to publicly display people who'd merely been arrested as though they were convicted terrrorists was to blow up, in typical Shining Path style, elementary judicial principles and values...
...we can't fight 'barbarism with barbarism,' or 'terrorism with terror of the State,"' well, then they were immediately accused of being accomplices to terrorism and they ran the risk of being awarded their own striped suits...
...the picture of the guys in the striped suits runs over and over again...
...Shining Path demanded that its militants "carry their lives on their fingertips," that is, be ready to die at any moment, as the cost that history would demand for doing away with the state...
...For us, it's just the other way around...
...young people, old people, some yelling slogans about the "people's war," others crying, or shouting, "I'm innocent," or standing silent and dejected in the grasp of beefy police officers who wear dark glasses...
...These are people we're talking about here, somebody might be making mistakes, going too far...
...It was an everyday scene on television, and in the newspapers and magazines, as common as ads for Coca Cola or laundry detergent...
...It was a sensibility whipped up by the authorities: "We're defending the rights of all Peruvians, not those of the terrorists," they said...
...Just between August 1996 and December 1999, 606 people were pardoned...
...many were sentenced to 15 years to life (Peru has no death penalty...
...The statistics on terrorist arrests started to be given out along with the numbers concerning the decline in the inflation rate and the increase in economic growth, all of them indicators of the government's success...
...Imagery appropriate for all ages...
...The official version wants the story of innocent people imprisoned to leave us with the notion that, in the end, and in spite of everything, we were successful, we had a positive experience, and we've got to repeat it as many times as necessary, and even expand the same approach to other problems, like common crime...
...We've come a long way, but there's still much to do, there are still people to free and legal changes and indemnifications to be made and-the fundamental point-we've yet to be pardoned by the victims of this history...
...Some 16,000 people were to be tried on terrorism charges between 1992 and 2000, in either military or civilian courts...
...How many innocents there must have been, if it was necessary to create a special process for reviewing all the cases: the AdHoc Commission on Pardons...
...the lives of everyone around the prisoner are brutally disrupted forever...
...In May and June, 523 people, an average of nine a day, died in 263 attacks, most of them in Lima and most the work of Shining Path...
...Finally, let's try to make this history serve as a means of identifying what still needs to be done...
...The dispute is between the official version and another which attempts to record and process what really happened...
...It was a time in which everybody talked in simple terms about the "costs" of the war...
...And if anybody had the bad taste to rain on the parade-at the start, just a few lonely human rights organizations-by coming out to say "Careful...
...How many innocent people must have been imprisoned, altogether, when even within the bounds of an anti-terrorist law written with the aim of finding people guilty, and that lacked the most minimal legal guarantees, many, many people who were tried by "faceless" military and civilian judges were freed or pardoned, of course only after having spent a few years in prison...
...Normal...
...Watch it...
...How many before and how many since...
...Available online at www.nacla.org 3. Ernesto de la Jara, Memoria y batallas en nombre de los inocentes, Peru: 1992-2001 (Lima: Instituto de Defensa Legal, second ed., 2001...
...2 In 1995, a coalition of Peruvian human rights groups began a campaign, "In the Name of the Innocents," aimed at winning freedom for those unjustly jailed...
...They were times in which the terrorism-without-limits of Shining Path-Sendero Luminoso-had managed to terrorize us all, and the majority of the country was inclined to accept anything if it would stop the advance of the death machine that seemed to be the only thing that was in working order in Peru...
...There are no official statistics, but there are, IDL has found, thousands and thousands altogether...
...we could finally see the much feared Shining Path members falling like flies, they were off to prison forever and, on top of it all, publicly humiliated...
...To recall this history will help us perceive how profoundly unjust and painful this whole process has been: "How many cubic meters does the cell of an innocent have...
...At base, what it meant was defending the notion that a society under attack has the right not just to defend itself, but to switch roles with the enemy-to Sendero-ize itself: If they don't have values, limits or scruples, why do we have to have them...
...Four more Shining Path terrorists fall, you see it all happen on the nightly news, right after your favorite soap opera...
...recommended for family viewing...
...But, as NACLA reported last year, "as early as 1993, there was growing evidence of a systematic pattern of arbitrary arrest, fabricated evidence and insufficient due process...
...the state, for its part, demanded that we pay the "inevitable cost" of liberties and lives in order to do away with Shining Path...
...Men and women dressed in stripes, with numbers on their chests...
...And to their suffering we must add that of their parents, spouses, brothers and sisters, friends...
...The moral we can can draw from this history is very important, above all because the country is now contesting the historical memory of its era of political violence...
...It's frightening that a space that small can contain so much sorrow," says Hubert Lanssiers, personal witness to the pain of innocent people imprisoned...
...In two months, June and July, there were 33 car bombings in Lima...
...The terrorist threat created a collective willingness to pass over to the dark side of the permissible...
...This scene became our collective Valium...
...The violence of the Shining Path guerrillas and to a lesser extent that of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), seemed to be reaching a peak that year, especially in the cities where civilians were increasingly affected...
...According to this logic, 5,000 or 6,000 people disappeared, massacres like those of La Cantuta or Barrios Altos, a few thousand innocent people in prison were just drops of water in a sea made up of 22 million Peruvians...
...Even after the Commission was disbanded, Fujimori pardoned 33 more people...
...What a relief...
...2. Coletta Youngers and Jo-Marie Burt, "Defending Rights in a Hostile Environment,"NACLA Report, XXXIV, No.1 July-August 2000, summarizes the "In the Name of the Innocent" campaign to date...
...whether among those being paraded out in striped suits there might have been not only Shining Path and MRTA members, but also innocent people, victims of circumstance...
...Paniagua announced that he would keep on doing so until there was not a single innocent person left in jail...
...The majority applauded wildly...
...It was each person's own security that was at stake...
...A dozen...
...Today it's a well-documented fact that many of those arrested for terrorism and paraded around in striped suits didn't have anything at all do with Shining Path, or MRTA, or with attacks and deaths, they were just regular people, usually poor, victims of mistakes and injustice...
...How many innocent people must have been imprisoned, if in spite of the fact that the Ad-Hoc Commission on Pardons depended on the good will of the same government that had caused the problem (at first the Justice Ministry and later Fujimori himself), in its almost three and a half years of existence, this Commission was able to identify 567 innocent prisoners and in its final report the Commission reported 340 other cases were still under study...
...3 It was translated from the Spanish by NACLA...
...How many innocent people must have been imprisoned, if one of the first acts of the democratic government created after the fall of the Fujimori regime and headed by Valentin Paniagua was to pardon more innocent people...
...Open Forum 1. Enrique Bernales, "Confronting Political Violence: Lessons for Peru's Future," in Prospects for Democracy and Peace in Peru (Washington: Washington Office on Latin America, 1993...
...if there are mistakes, they'll be corrected and we'll have a happy ending...
...1 So despite the government's dismal human rights record-Peruvian security forces had been responsible for thousands of disappearances and noncombat killings over the course of their decadelong counterinsurgency effort-there was little public protest when Fujimori suspended many previously existing legal guarantees and created secret military courts to try some of those charged with terrorism...
...And when Fujimori invented the principle of indubio pro societatis as a justification for violating the rights of a minority in order to protect those of the majority, those who were applauding got to their feet and demanded more, more...
...the moral of the story should be: Never again, don't let history repeat itself...
...Much less was it a time for the luxury of worrying about whether mistakes were being made...
...The following is drawn from a history of that campaign published by Peru's Institute for Legal Defense (IDL...
...The introduction was also published as part of an insert to the IDL magazine idee/e, October, 2001...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 4
