Men and women dressed in stripes, with numbers on their chests; 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. It was an everyday scene on television, and in the newspapers and magazines, as common as ads for Coca Cola or laundry detergent.
Normal. Imagery appropriate for all ages; recommended for family viewing. Four more Shining Path terrorists fall, you see it all happen on the nightly news, right after your favorite soap opera; the picture of the guys in the striped suits runs over and over again.
This scene became our collective Valium; 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. What a relief!
They were times in which the terrorism-without-limits of Shining Path—SenderoLuminoso—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.
It wasn’t a time for stopping to think that to publicly display people who’d merely been arrested as though they were convicted terrorists was to blow up, in typical Shining Path style, elementary judicial principles and values.
Much less was it a time for the luxury of worrying about whether mistakes were being made; 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.
It was a time in which everybody talked in simple terms about the “costs” of the war. 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; the state, for its part, demanded that we pay the “inevitable cost” of liberties and lives in order to do away with Shining Path.
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.
The majority applauded wildly. 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.
It was each person’s own security that was at stake. The terrorist threat created a collective willingness to pass over to the dark side of the permissible. It was a sensibility whipped up by the authorities: “We’re defending the rights of all Peruvians, not those of the terrorists,” they said.
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.
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?
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! Watch it! These are people we’re talking about here, somebody might be making mistakes, going too far; 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.
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, 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. Just between August 1996 and December 1999, 606 people were pardoned. How many before and how many since? There are no official statistics, but there are, IDL has found, thousands and thousands altogether. How many innocents there must have been, if it was necessary to create a special process for reviewing all the cases: the Ad-Hoc Commission on Pardons.
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. Even after the Commission was disbanded, Fujimori pardoned 33 more people.
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 Valentín Paniagua was to pardon more innocent people. Paniagua announced that he would keep on doing so until there was not a single innocent person left in jail. 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”. . .
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? A dozen? 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. And to their suffering we must add that of their parents, spouses, brothers and sisters, friends; the lives of everyone around the prisoner are brutally disrupted forever.
The moral we 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. The dispute is between the official version and another which attempts to record and process what really happened. 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; if there are mistakes, they’ll be corrected and we’ll have a happy ending.
For us, it’s just the other way around; the moral of the story should be: Never again, don’t let history repeat itself. Finally, let’s try to make this history serve as a means of identifying what still needs to be done. 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ernesto de la Jara is co-director of Peru’s Instituto de Defensa Legal.
NOTES
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).
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. Available online at www.nacla.org
3. Ernesto de la Jara, Memoria y batallas en nombre de los inocentes, Perú: 1992-2001 (Lima: Instituto de Defensa Legal, second ed., 2001). The introduction was also published as part of an insert to the IDL magazine ideele, October, 2001.
