Fujimori on Trial :: Fujimori procesado

April 7, 2008

Whether or not Fujimori can be linked to the human rights abuses carried out during his administration (as will be determined by the trial he faces), there is abundant information that these violations indeed occurred.

As mentioned in the post on April 3, 2008, Peruvian journalist Umberto Jara testified that the “low-intensity war” policy had two lines of action: the legal and illegal aspects, the latter included extrajudicial executions of subversive leaders and intimidation measures such as the Barrios Altos murders.

A declassified US government document, sent from the US Embassy in Lima to Washington DC in January 1993 also supports this notion in a report describing Fujimori’s vision of human rights:

Furthermore, the document states that the government didn’t do enough to correct the human rights abuses in military practices:

(U.S. Embassy Cable, [Excised] Comments on Fujimori, Montesinos, but not on Barrios Altos, January 22, 1993, Secret, 10 pp. National Security Archives, www.nsarchive.org.)

Jara, in his testimony, indicated that the US government was involved in the alleged low-intensity war against subversive groups. In response, Rolando Sousa, current Peruvian congressman from the pro-Fujimori Alliance for the Future party, told Peruvian newspaper La Razón, in reference to the recent testimony of Umberto Jara:

“Jara has come up with the absurd idea that the US government ordered Fujimori to start the low-intensity war against terrorism. This is very serious and the North American country’s government should make a declaration on this serious charge since [Jara] is implying the practice of interference in Peruvian internal affairs.”

(April 3, 2008 – Periodista acusó a EEUU de haber impuesto guerra sucia — Journalist accused US of having ordered the dirty war)

But Jara is not the only one to point the finger at the United States. In the video of his interview with Umberto Jara, Santiago Martin Rivas says that Colina’s operations were in line with the training he received in the School of the Americas — a US Department of Defense facility renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001.

Witnesses Ángel Sauñi Pomaya and José William Tena Jacinto — both lower-rank members of the former Colina detachment — also testified that officers received training for the policy of a low-intensity war from the School of the Americas.

To what extent has the United States been involved in Peruvian affairs? Does this evidence support the prosecutor’s case that Fujimori authorized a policy that violated the law?