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PERU-RIGHTS Aug-22-2008 (930 words) With photos. xxxi
Work remains in struggle to repair human rights violations in Peru
By Barbara J. Fraser
Catholic News Service
LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- While Peru has begun making reparations to the victims of two decades of political violence, there is still "much work to be done and a long road ahead," said Salomon Lerner Febres, who headed the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In August 2003, Lerner submitted to the government the 17-volume report on the commission's two-year investigation into murders, torture, forced disappearances and other human rights violations committed by two guerrilla groups -- the Maoist Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement -- and Peruvian security forces between 1980 and 2000.
"Five years is not much time," but it is sufficient to see trends in the government's response, said Lerner, the former president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru who now heads the school's Institute of Democracy and Human Rights. "Progress has been made in some areas, but some things are being overlooked, and there is a lack of decisive political action to address issues that lie at the root of the violence."
The commission recommended reparations to individuals and communities who suffered during the years of political violence that left more than 60,000 people dead. That most of the victims were Quechua-speaking peasant farmers in the highlands or members of Amazonian indigenous groups underscored the country's deep social, political and economic inequalities, the commission said.
Recent protests by indigenous groups over government decrees about which they were not consulted and that they say violate their land rights are the most recent manifestation of centuries of discrimination and exclusion, Lerner said.
"Inclusion assumes a series of government policies that have not been created," Lerner said.
He recalled an indigenous man who told the members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "I hope that some day I will be a Peruvian."
While the government has launched social programs in the rural highlands, they are "emergency and handout programs that will eventually have to come to an end," Lerner said. Stronger policies are needed "so that these people feel they are Peruvians."
A government task force on reparations has registered 9,900 individuals and 3,565 communities. In 2007, the government paid more than $2 million to 65 communities, and a similar amount is budgeted for this year. The Ministry of Health also has designed a strategy for mental health care.
But progress is hampered by the task force's limited budget, poor coordination among government agencies, and a lack of technical assistance to the communities that receive the funds, according to an evaluation by the Institute of Democracy and Human Rights.
Progress on government reforms, including changes in the judicial system, also has been slow, Lerner said. While some military officers accused of committing abuses have been tried, other cases have gone unpunished.
In May, forensic anthropologists excavating a mass grave in Putis, a village in the central highland region of Ayacucho, found the remains of 60 people, including children, and said there could be many more. Survivors have said soldiers committed the massacre, but Defense Ministry officials claim records that would show which officers were in charge have been destroyed.
In other cases, too, relatives are finally burying loved ones. Early in August, the remains of 37 people killed by Shining Path in the highland department of Huancavelica were turned over to relatives for burial after being exhumed and identified.
In July, relatives of nine students and a professor abducted from a teachers' college at the edge of Lima in 1992 finally buried their remains in a Lima cemetery. The funeral came shortly after they heard members of an army intelligence service death squad describe how they killed the victims and tried to destroy the remains.
The testimony was part of the trial of former President Alberto Fujimori, who is accused of having approved the death squad's actions in that case and another, in which 15 people were murdered at a party in a low-income Lima neighborhood.
In the case of the students, some of the remains were unidentifiable. The only trace of Raida Condor's son, Armando, was his set of keys.
"My son was never a terrorist," Condor told Catholic News Service. "And even if they (students) were, no one had the right to kill them that way. They killed them, they buried them, then they dug up the remains and burned them."
While the families knew what had happened, hearing witnesses recount the details "was painful. I wanted to die, too. But we have to go on living. We have to know," Condor said.
"I keep wondering why this happened to him, a hard-working student from a poor family," she said. "I was so proud of him. I never went to high school, and he was the first of my children to go to college."
Five years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission finished its work, its conclusions still touch a raw nerve in the country, where human rights workers are often accused of defending terrorists.
"It doesn't surprise me that there is great controversy over the report five years later," said Juan Mendez, president of the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, who was in Lima for a forum sponsored by Catholic University.
The debate shows that the commission's work has not gone unnoticed, he said.
"The report stands on its own merits. It is like a mirror in which Peruvians must examine themselves," he said.
The human rights agenda "is long and will not go away just because some politicians try to ignore it," he said.
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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