In Desperate Straits: Human Rights in Peru after a Decade of Democracy and Insurgency. Copyright (c) August 1990 by Human Rights Watch. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 0-929692-64-0, (Spanish version: 0-929692-65-9). Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-83334. Cover design by AMW Graphics. THE AMERICAS WATCH COMMITTEE The Americas Watch Committee was established in 1981 to monitor and promote observance of free expression and other internationally recognized human rights in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The Chairman of Americas Watch is Adrian W. DeWind; Vice Chairmen, Peter Bell and Stephen Kass; Executive Director, Juan E. Méndez; Research Director, Anne Manuel; Counsel, Jemera Rone. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH Human Rights Watch is composed of five Watch Committees: Africa Watch, Americas Watch, Asia Watch, Helsinki Watch and Middle East Watch. Executive Committee: Robert L. Bernstein, Chairman; Adrian W. DeWind, Vice Chairman; Roland Algrant; Lisa Anderson; Peter Bell; Dorothy Cullman; Jonathan Fanton; Jack Greenberg; Alice H. Henkin; Stephen Kass; Marina Kaufman; Jeri Laber; Aryeh Neier; Matthew Nimetz; Bruce Rabb; Kenneth Roth; Sophie C. Silberberg; Gary Sick; Nadine Strossen. Staff: Aryeh Neier, Executive Director; Kenneth Roth, Deputy Director; Holly J. Burkhalter, Washington, Director; Ellen Lutz, California Director; Susan Osnos, Press Director; Allyson Collins and Joanna Weschler, Research Associates; James Goldston, Orville Schell Intern. Executive Directors Africa Watch Americas Watch Asia Watch Helsinki Watch Rakiya Omaar Juan E. Méndez Sidney Jones Jeri Laber Middle East Watch Andrew Whitley TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS. 1 II. THE SOURCES AND SCOPE OF VIOLENCE IN PERU . 11 A. Overview of the Current Crisis............................................... 11 1. Social and political context........................................ 11 2. The State's response ................................................... 13 B. The Findings of the Bernales Commission ............................ 19 1. The 1980s ................................................................... 20 2. Dead and wounded, 1989........................................... 22 3. Deaths, January-April 1990 ....................................... 24 C. Disappearances........................................................................ 24 III. THE JUDICIARY ............................................................................... 27 A. Prosecution of Terrorism........................................................ 27 B. Administration of Justice........................................................ 31 C. Two Cases of Impunity........................................................... 34 1. Artaza: civilian court.................................................. 34 2. Lurigancho: military court ......................................... 35 IV. PENAL CONDITIONS ...................................................................... 39 A. General Observations.............................................................. 39 B. Security-Related Prisoners...................................................... 40 C. Lurigancho, May 1990............................................................ 41 V. CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES . 45 A. The Melgar Commission: Cayara........................................... 45 B. The Limo Commission: Paramilitary Violence ..................... 49 i VI. VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OF WAR BY INSURGENTS . 53 A. Background: Areas of Insurgent Activity .............................. 54 B. Violations by Sendero Luminoso............................................ 56 C. Violations by the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru........................................ 62 VII. HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN 1989 AND 1990 . 65 A. Background: Army and Police in State of Emergency .................................................... 65 B. Suppression of Peaceful Protest ............................................. 67 C. Raids and Massive Detentions................................................ 69 D. Torture..................................................................................... 72 E. Disappearances........................................................................ 74 F. Extrajudicial Executions ......................................................... 78 G. The Comando Rodrigo Franco .............................................. 81 H. The Role of Self-Defense Patrols........................................... 83 VIII. THE PERSECUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS MONITORS . 91 IX. THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES .......................................... 99 A. Proposed Military Aid ............................................................ 99 B. Background: The Upper Huallaga and U.S. Drug Programs .............................................. 104 C. Military Contradictions and Human Rights Abuses, 1989-90 .................................. 106 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This report was written by Americas Watch Representative in Santiago Cynthia Brown. It is based in part on previous Americas Watch investigations and in part on two visits to Peru, in February and May 1990. On the first of those visits, Ms. Brown was accompanied by Americas Watch Executive Director Juan E. Méndez, who also contributed suggestions to the text of the report. Americas Watch Associate Clifford Rohde provided editorial assistance. Allyson Collins, Research Associate for Human Rights Watch, assisted with research on U.S. aid. The author is grateful for various forms of assistance from the Comisión Andina de Juristas, the Instituto de Defensa Legal, the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos, the Asociación Pro- Derechos Humanos (APRODEH), the Comisión de Derechos Humanos (COMISEDH), the Centro de Estudios y Acción para la Paz (CeaPaz), the Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica (CIPA), the Comisión Episcopal de Acción Social (CEAS), Fr. Hubert Lanssiers, and the research institute DESCO. iii Departments and Emergency Zones (shaded) in Peru, 1989* * From Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL), Peru 1989: En La Espiral de Violencia, Lima, March 1990, p. 15. The Upper Huallaga and Location within Peru (inset)* * From Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL), Peru 1989: En La Espiral de Violencia, Lima, March 1990, p. 59. I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS Peru has reached the end of a crucial and painful decade. Weakened on all fronts, Peru's democracy has resorted to desperate measures to survive, and the cost has been so high that the State can barely sustain it. A new government is about to inherit this crisis, a government elected largely as a protest against traditional leadership and as perhaps the last hope for moderating the violence that grips Peruvian society. A brutal insurgent movement, Sendero Luminoso, undermines the State through terrorism and, ten years into its so-called popular war against the government, is active in most of the national territory. As a result, about half of Peru's twenty million citizens live under sustained state of emergency, effectively governed by the military and lacking basic protections against arbitrary arrest, disappearance, extrajudicial execution by the armed and police forces or the paramilitary groups they tolerate. The nation's elected leadership, faced with an unparalleled economic crisis, has been unable or unwilling to confront subversion with reforms that could reduce the economic, racial, cultural and regional divisions feeding the insurgency. Nor has it been able to curb the corruption that undermines confidence in the rule of law. After initially seeking to control human rights abuses in the emergency zones, the government of Alan García gradually ceded authority to the military, such that abuses not only have continued but since 1988 have notably increased, even spreading outside the zones of conflict. As a major producer of coca leaf, the basis for cocaine, Peru also suffers from the criminality and violence that the drug traffic engenders. This aspect of the national crisis has now become internationalized and may be further militarized, as the United States has determined to train army and marine forces for drug interdiction in the coca-producing Upper Huallaga region. Though not engaged in the processing or distribution of cocaine, peasants in the Upper Huallaga jungle areas already feel the effects of the war against drug traffic and Sendero in their region; there has been a substantial increase in human rights violations, by both Sendero and the official forces, in the past year and a half. These problems emerge from the poverty in which most Peruvians 1 live and the State's historical failure to respond to the needs of this majority. With the brief exception of Gen. Juan Velasco's military regime (1968-75), Peruvian governments of the past forty years have avoided addressing the problems of land tenure that have embittered Peru's rural, largely Indian, population and led many to abandon the countryside for the capital. Social advances that the urban and rural poor were able to achieve under Velasco were diminished or eliminated under succeeding governments, even after Peru returned to democracy in 1980. And although García was elected in 1985 on a platform of social progress, his government instead presided over an economic crisis that has brought Peru to the edge of bankruptcy. Thoughtful Peruvians of varied political views, including some members of the armed forces, argue that the spread