On April 22, 1997, military commandos burst into the residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru, where rebels of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) were holding 72 hostages. The surprise attack began at 3:15 in the afternoon while the MRTA leaders, including top commander Néstor Cerpa Cartolini, were playing a relaxing game of soccer inside the diplomatic compound. The raid, which was broadcast live on national and international television, was deemed an immediate success—71 of the 72 hostages were rescued, and all 14 rebels were killed.[1]Two army commandos were also killed during the assault.
The MRTA takeover of the ambassador’s residence on the evening of December 17, 1996 had caught the government of Alberto Fujimori completely off guard. It had come to believe its own trumped-up rhetoric that the guerrilla movements that had dominated Peruvian politics since the early 1980s—the MRTA and the more lethal Communist Party of Peru, better known as Shining Path—had been defeated and no longer posed any threat. The MRTA’s successful penetration of a well-guarded diplomatic compound during a VIP party that President Fujimori was himself scheduled to attend fundamentally challenged that belief.
During the grueling four months of the hostage crisis, Fujimori repeatedly stated that he would not intervene militarily unless the rebels harmed the hostages. Cerpa’s agreement to release the hostages in exchange for the release of 20 MRTA prisoners—a far cry from his original demand of freedom for 400 of his jailed comrades—seemed to indicate a breakthrough in negotiations. But when Cerpa announced the suspension of medical visits to the hostages for one week in response to Fitimtori’s backtracking on the deal, the government finally found a publicly acceptable excuse to launch a military assault against the rebels. In the aftermath of the assault, it became evident that the government had been negotiating in bad faith, buying time in order train special army commandos and obtain the necessary intelligence to assure a swift victory. From the outset, the total defeat of the MRTA was its preferred solution to the crisis.
This military logic has increasingly come to dominate Peruvian politics. The total defeat of the insurgent movements was the underlying motive behind the autogolpe, or “self-coup,” decreed by President Fujimori in April 1992, in which, in alliance with the armed forces, he shut down Congress and the courts and suspended the Constitution. The capture of Abimael Guzmán, Shining Path’s chief ideologue and strategist, on September 12, 1992 seemed to bring the Fujimori government closer to its objective of total victory. Guzmán’s arrest was followed by a series of arrests of other high-ranking Shining Path leaders and the virtual dismantling of its most important organizational structures. The MRTA had already been effectively reined in earlier that year-with the recapture of its top leadership, including the group’s main leader, Víctor Polay. With the heads of both groups behind bars, the Fujimori government triumphantly declared that the armed forces had defeated subversion.
Unlike other Latin American countries that have experienced internal conflict, Peru’s internal war was ended not by peace negotiations but by a putative unilateral victory of the armed forces over rebel groups. There were no efforts to devise strategies to integrate guerrilla fighters who remained at large into social and political life, nor were there any attempts to address the underlying causes of violence. The government had won the war, and as Fujimori said in response to an appeal by Guzmán in 1993 to hold peace talks, “winners of wars do not negotiate.”
This “triumph over subversion” has been central to the construction of an official historical narrative of Peru’s recent internal conflict in which Shining Path and, to a lesser extent, the MRTA are portrayed as the only forces responsible for the violence, and the armed forces are depicted as the defenders of legality and national honor. In this sense, the military “victory” over the MRTA was a political exigency for the Fujimori regime, allowing it to turn an embarassing situation into an opportunity to bolster its triumphalist discourse and to further consolidate the military’s dominant role in political and social life.
In this official history, Shining Path and the MRTA are responsible for every one of the 30,000 deaths that occurred over the course of the 15-year conflict—despite the fact that human rights organizations have documented that the security forces are responsible for approximately half of those 30,000 deaths, as well as some 6,000 disappearances.[2] Any act of violence or human rights crime committed by the military is portrayed as an act of self-defense against the “terrorist scourge.” The corollary—that the army bears no responsibility for any crimes it might have committed in the war against terrorism—underlies the amnesty law passed in 1995, which not only guarantees impunity for members of the police and armed forces who committed human rights violations between 1980 and 1995, but also sets free all those previously convicted. “The logic of the military,” says Susana Villarán of the Lima-based Institute for Legal Defense, “is that the armed forces defeated the enemy and that society should be grateful.”[3]
As political violence declined in the aftermath of the capture of the top leaders of the MRTA and Shining Path, one might have expected the opening of democratic spaces in Peru. But this has not been the case. On the contrary, the military has tightened its stranglehold on power, and in recent years, has become even more systematic in its efforts to shut down any and all possible sources of opposition. In effect, Fujimori and his cronies have taken advantage of the polarization of Peruvian society—the most lasting legacy of the Shining Path’s “revolutionary” war against the Peruvian state—to consolidate the neoliberal authoritarianism set in place after the 1992 autogolpe.
The ability of Peru’s rulers to use this triumphalist discourse to consolidate their hold on power is a reflection of the disintegration of political life in Peru—a process intimately linked to the economic upheaval and political violence of the 1980s. This official discourse has gone largely unchallenged, partly because of the broad social support for the Fujimori regime in the aftermath of the capture of Guzmán, but also because the government’s militarized logic equates any challenges to its version of history with subversion. As a result, public debate about the role of the armed forces in the recent conflict has been drastically circumscribed. While human rights groups have had some success on specific issues—such as securing the release of hundreds of people who were unjustly convicted of terrorism—social and political actors have remained weak and unable to articulate an alternative discourse explaining what happened in the course of Peru’s internal war. Indeed, conflict over interpretations of the violence remains surprisingly subdued in comparison to other countries in Latin America that have recently emerged from military dictatorship or internal wars. Given that questioning the behavior of the armed forces in the counterinsurgency war is tantamount to terrorism, it is not surprising that struggles over memory have been virtually absent in postwar Peru.
Moreover, the fact that Peru’s internal conflict was resolved militarily but not in political terms means that neither the MRTA nor the Shining Path has been eliminated completely. This is particularly the case with respect to Shining Path, which has reorganized its forces and rearticulated its political objectives under new leadership. While the group does not present a political threat to the state as was arguably the case in early 1992, it does maintain a significant local level presence in specific regions of the country.[4] The continued presence of such groups, in fact, serves to justify the military’s presence in power and corroborates its interpretation of the past. Not addressing the conflict at the political level, in effect, facilitates the ongoing militarization of the country.
Another key element of the government’s interpretation of the war is that its “victory over subversion” was the direct result of Fujimori’s April 1992 autogolpe and the hard-line policies that were adopted in its aftermath. Particularly after Guzmán’s arrest, Fujimori and his allies repeatedly asserted the efficacy of the civil-military government put in place after the coup, contrasting it to the incompetence of civilian elites, who were portrayed as fundamentally incapable of dealing with the economic and political crises that bad engulfed the country by the late 1980s. “Terrorism had infiltrated everything,” said Fujimori, who described the coup as an act of “realism” that sought to reestablish democracy in Peru.[5] “It would have been irresponsible to not consummate the autogolpe, ” he claimed, since it “permitted us to successfully wage the battle against terrorism, combat corruption within the Judiciary and deepen neoliberal reforms.”[6]
Underlying this argument is the belief that civilian politicians are corrupt and weak and that democratic institutions are incapable of dealing with crisis situations. The armed forces are presented as the only institution capable of protecting and strengthening the nation-state—a notion that is deeply embedded in the doctrine of national security, which pervades military thinking in Peru and throughout Latin America.[7] Indeed, the military’s growing frustration over the limitations placed upon its counterinsurgency operations by democratic institutions, coupled with the growing inability of civilian politicians to deal with the spiraling economic crisis and the expansion of the Shining Path, prompted a group of military officers to devise a coup plan in the late 1980s.[8] The plan called for the dissolution of Peru’s civilian government, military control over the state, and total elimination of armed opposition groups. The plan, developed in a series of documents known as the “Plan Verde,” outlined a strategy for carrying out a military coup in which the armed forces would govern for 15 to 20 years and radically restructure state-society relations along neoliberal lines.[9]
The victory of Fujimori in 1990 was a blessing in disguise for the coup mongers within the Peruvian military. When Fujimori defeated novelist-politician Mario Vargas Llosa in second-round elections in 1990, he quickly sought to establish an alliance with the armed forces to fend off a rumored coup. Because Fujimori was a president without a party or a program, he found himself increasingly relying on military institutions to govern.[10] Vladimiro Montesinos, the President’s top advisor and the de facto head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), helped Fujimori secure the personal loyalty of the military high command after Congress passed a law giving the President control over promotions and retirements within the armed forces. Loyal officers were promoted to high- ranking positions, while suspect officers were forced into early retiremtent—a situation that has deeply politicized the armed forces.” By late 1991, Montesinos had convinced Fujimori to adopt the military’s 20-year coup plan as his own, making the dissolution of the Executive branch unnecessay.[12] The military, in turn, agreed to support Fujimori in exchange for a blank check to wage its counterinsurgency war, marking the beginning of the civil-military alliance that has radically militarized political and social life in Peru.
Fujimori’s relentless attacks against Peru’s “traditional” parties must be understood in this context. Employing language strikingly similar to that of the armed forces, he portrays all the country’s political elites—from right to left—as responsible for Peru’s political, economic and social crises. Fujimori rebukes the country’s politicians at every turn, reinforcing popular sentiment against the predominately white and Lima-based political class. Fujimori’s role as an outsider—and as a descendant of Japanese immigrants—sets him apart from Peru’s dominant political elite in the popular mindset. This, in effect, has made it feasible for him to forge an alliance with Peru’s economic elite to reshape the Peruvian state and economy along neoliberal lines. By pitting himself against the old political elite, Fujimori has been able to cover up his alliance with the economic elite.
With the firm support of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, Fujintori and his military allies proceeded to establish their political control. While Fujimori was forced to reopen Congress in late 1992 due to international pressure, especially from the U.S. government, he was able to engineer a governing majority that has passed neoliberal policies with relative ease and has protected the impunity of the armed forces at all costs. In 1993, the new Congress wrote a Constitution giving the army broad powers, enshrining free-market doctrines, and permitting Fujimori to run for a second term.
After his reelection in 1995, some observers argued that Peru had fully returned to the democratic fold. In fact, the civil-military regime put in place after the autogolpe has continued to consolidate its power in Peru. Peru is not a delegative or illiberal democracy, or even an expression of some form of neopopulism, as some have argued.[13] Rather, it is a new kind of hybrid authoritarianism whose architects recognized the impossibility of a traditional military-led coup given the international—primarily U.S.—temperament in favor of democracy.[14] Formal democratic institutions like Congress, the Judiciary and the Constitutional Tribunal are retained, for they maintain the illusion—necessary for international purposes—that Peru is a democratic regime. But when such institutions transgress the limits imposed by those in power, they are subordinated, subverted or otherwise domesticated.
There are numerous examples that demonstrate the true nature of power in Peru today. Perhaps the most illustrative is the case of La Cantuta, which involved the disappearance and murder of nine university students and a professor in July 1992 by a death squad known as the Colina Group made up of members of the SIN and army intelligence (STE). When opposition leaders in Congress sought to open an investigation in April 1993 after evidence emerged implicating members of the armed forces, the military high command refused to cooperate, and the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, General Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, accused the investigating legislators of acting “in collusion with the homicidal terrorists.”[15] The following day, Lima awoke to a parade of army tanks, while the army accused Congress of engaging in a “systematic campaign orchestrated with the sinister objective of undermining the prestige of the armed forces.”[16] Two months later, after the charred bodies of the students had been found, the case was brought before a civilian court. The pro-government majority in Congress maneuvered first to have the case heard by a military court—clear violation of the autonomy of the Judicial branch. After a handful of officers were convicted by the military court of the Cantuta murders, the ruling majority in Congress then engineered an amnesty law to free them. When a judge investigating another massacre in which the Colina Group was also implicated sought to continue her invcstigation, Congress passed a second law obligating the courts to obey the amnesty law, again violating the autonomy of the Judicial branch.
Another case of the government’s authoritarianism is the Law of Authentic Interpretation. While the 1993 Constitution clearly states that a President may bereelected one time to a consecutive term, the same progovernment majority in Congress passed a law in 1996 establishing that President Fujimori was eligible to run for a third term, based on the argument that because the new Constitution was not in force when he was first elected in 1990, his first term did not count. When the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the law was unconstitutional, the dissenting judges were unceremoniously removed. More recently, efforts by opposition groups to hold a referendum on the Law of Authentic Interpretation—a right granted by the 1993 Constitution—have also been thwarted by the ruling majority in Congress. A law passed by the official majority three years ago to prevent a possible referendum on the widely unpopular amnesty law mandated that 48 members of Congress had to vote in favor of holding a referendum for it to proceed—effectively undermining the constitutional right of citizens to call for referenda on unpopular laws. Despite the fact that opposition leaders had collected 1.4 million signatures in favor of the referendum on the reelection law, they fell three votes short of the required 48, effectively killing the referendum.
These examples illustrate the way democratic institutions have been trampled on by the Executive and the ruling majority in Congress. But the military’s influence goes beyond the political realm, reaching into the interstices of Peruvian society. The military continues to hold de facto power in the regions that are still under states of emergency, which currently comprise approximately 16% of the national territory.[17] Through its control over the rondas campesinas, the campesino self-defense units organized throughout the central highlands to combat Shining Path, the military also has a significant presence in much of the countryside.[18]
Perhaps the most notable sign of the militarization of society came this past May, when the Executive passed 11 decree laws to deal with the growing problem of crime. Drawing on the doctrine of national security, these laws define common crimes such as robbery, homicide, kidnapping, rape of a minor, and extortion as “aggravated terrorism,” allowing authorities to hold anyone accused of such a crime for up to 15 days before being brought before a judge.
These offenses, moreover, can be tried in military courts, where sentences are disproportionately severe and where individuals are tried as adults starting at the age of 16. In these courts, someone convicted of furnishing information in the planning of a crime in which a person is killed would receive the same 25-year sentence as the person who actually committed the murder.
The decree laws are based almost entirely on the regime’s 1992 anti-terrorist legislation, which has been widely criticized for undermining the right to a fair trial and which led to the conviction of hundreds of innocent people on charges of terrorism.[19] Like in the terrorism cases, the police report can be used as evidence, but there are no mechanisms to oversee how the information is obtained or to guarantee that it is not falsified. The authors of the report, moreover, cannot be cited as witnesses. Most disturbing is Decree No. 899, which defines “pernicious gang activity” as aggressive acts on the part of youth between the ages of 12 and 18 that threaten the life or physical integrity of other individuals, harm public property, or create disorder. Because the terminology is so vague, students participating in anti-government protests could easily be prosecuted under this law and sentenced to 25 to 35 years in prison.
The anti-crime laws are just one example of the hardening of the Fujimori regime since the end of the MRTA hostage crisis. Attacks against the press have also increased notably over the past year. The best known case is that of Baruch Ivcher, who was stripped both of his Peruvian citizenship and control of his television station after running stories on the government’s espionage on 197 opposition leaders, Montesinos’ inexplicably high income-tax return, and the torture of former army intelligence agents who had presumably leaked information about the Cantuta murders to the press. Since then, a pattern has emerged in which journalists who investigate the dealings of Peru’s rulers are the targets of repression. For example, when Angel Paez, an investigative journalist for the opposition daily La República, reported on military corruption in the purchase of weapons, he began receiving death threats, while the tabloids began slandering him and accusing him of being a terrorist sympathizer. In another case, Delia Revoredo, one of the three magistrates removed from the Constitutional Tribunal for voting against the reelection law, was repeatedly harassed after publicly criticizing the government’s authoritarianism, forcing her to flee the country. The national tax agency then began to harass her husband, who has also sought asylum. This hardening of the regime over recent months suggests that things in Peru are likely to get worse before they get better.
One of the remarkable changes in Peru’s current political landscape is the relative weakness of the guerrilla groups that just a few years ago seemed poised to take control of the Peruvian state. There is little doubt that the capture of Guzmán and the “strategic defeat” of the Shining Path has radically altered the course of Peruvian politics, but analysts who focus on the “defeat” of the Shining Path as the central event in their analysis of contemporary Peru play into the logic of the armed forces’ discourse of “total victory.” Political developments since 1991 need to be examined through a process-oriented framework rather than one focused on a particular event. What needs to be analyzed is the process of the militarization of Peruvian politics and society—a process that began when Shining Path took up arms in 1980, expanded as democratic administrations ceded authority to the armed forces to quell the insurgency, and culminated in the 1992 autogolpe that established a civil-military regime in which democratic institutions are completely subordinated to the will of the Executive and the armed forces.
Such a framework also allows for an examination of the role that both, the armed forces and armed guerrilla movements have played in this process of militarization, how the conflict has contributed to the polarization of Peruvian society, and how the Fujimori regime has taken advantage of these circumstances to consolidate and perpetuate its hold on power. As long as the war is discussed in terms of victory and defeat, the real processes at hand—the militarization of society, the subordination of democratic institutions, the unrelenting assault on the political opposition and the repression of social inovements—will remain obscured.
The ongoing fear and intimidation that became part of daily life during the war have had the effect of obscuring alternative readings of Peru’s recent past. Victims’ groups, for example, remain relatively isolated, stigmatized because their members are poor campesinos and because of their relatives’ presumed affiliation with Shining Path. Human rights groups have been at the forefront of the struggle to secure the release of the hundreds of Peruvians unjustly convicted of terrorism, and they have extensively documented the abuses committed both by Shining Path and by the armed forces during the war. But they too remain isolated, largely due to Fujimori’s relentless accusations that they defend “terrorists” and are in fact front groups for the Shining Path.
But memory has a way of emerging in unexpected and often surprising ways. While the government has retained strict control over the commission which reviews the cases of prisoners unjustly convicted of terrorism, the same commission is beginning to review other issues related to the legacy of the war, such as draconian prison conditions and the status of repentant guerrillas.[20] Other groups are trying to raise the issue of the disappeared. Last October, for example, one victims’ group, the National Association of Relatives of the Abducted-Detained- Disappeared from the Emergency Zones of Peru (ANFASEP), petitioned the Ombudsman’s Office to initiate an investigation into the 2,000 disappearances it has documented in the Ayacucho region.[21] Since 1995, all judicial investigations into such cases have been blocked by Fujimori’s amnesty law. Some human rights groups, moreover, have called for a truth commission to render a full and unbiased accounting of the atrocities committed during the conflict. They harbor few illusions, however, that such a commission will materialize as long as Fujimori and his military allies remain ensconced in power.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jo-Marie Burt is editor of NACLA and a doctoral candidate in political sciencp at Columbia University.
NOTES
1. One hostage, Carlos Guisti, a respected judge, reportedly died as the result of a heart attack during the military raid.
2. Author’s interview, Susana Villarán, Institute, de Defensa Legal, June 23, 1998. See also the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Hurnanos, Situación de los derechos humanos en el Perú de 1997(Lima, 1997).
3. Author’s interview, Susana Villarán, June 23, 1998.
4. Author’s interview, Carlos Reyna, DESCO, June 29, 1998. See recent issues of DESCO’s monthly publication, Reporte Especial. Violencia y seguridad en el Perú de hoy.
5. As cited from La República (Lima), DESCO Database, May 27, 1996.
6. As cited from major Lima newspapers, DESCO Database, March 31, 1993.
7. For Peru, see Philip Mauceri, State Under Siege: Development and Policy Making in Peru (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). For Latin America, see Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., eds., The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
8. For an excellent discussion of the coup plan, see Fernando Rospigliosi, “Las Fuerzas Armadas y el 5 de abril. La percepción de la amenaza subversiva como una motivación golpista,” Documento de Trabajo No. 73 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1996), p. 3.
9. Fernando Rospigliosi, “Las Fuerzas Armadas y el 5 de abril.”
10. For an excellent review of the evolution of Fujimori’s relationship with the armed forces, see Enrique Obando, “Fujimon and the Military: A Marriage of Convenience,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol 30, No. I (July/August 1996), pp. 31-36.
11. Enrique Obando, “Fujimori and the Military.”
12. Fernando Rospigliosi, “Las Fuerzas Armadas y el 5 de abril.”
13. On the concept of delegative democracy, see Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” in Larry Diamand and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Demorracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 94-108. On illiberal democracy, see Fareed Zakana, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 1997), pp. 22-43. On neopopulism, see Kenneth Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America: The Peruvian Case,” World Politics, No. 48 (1995), pp. 82-116.
14. Fernando Rospigliosi, “Las Fuerzas Armadas y el 5 de abril.”
15. As cited in APRODEH, De la tierra brotó la verdad. Crimen e impunidad en el caso La Cantuta (Lima: Associación Pro-Derechos Humanos, 1994).
16. APRODEH, De la tierra brotó la verdad.
17. Author’s interview, Susana Villarón, June 23, 1998.
18. On the rondas campesinas, see Orin Starn, “Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in Peru’s Andes, ” in Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 223-249. See also Carlos Ivan Degregori, ed., Las rondas campesinas y la derrota de Sendero Luminoso (Lima Instituto de Estudios; Peruanos, 1996)
19. Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos, “Informe sobre la legislación de seguridad nacional” (Lima), June 23, 1998, from Website http://www.derechos.og/cnddhh.
20. Authors interview, the Rev. Hubert Lanssiers, June 29, 1998,
21. Author’s interview, Gino Costa, Defensoría del Pueblo, July 6, 1998.
