RIGHTS-PERU: Death Squad Member Implicates Fujimori

[Judi Lynn]

Source: IPS News

RIGHTS-PERU: Death Squad Member Implicates Fujimori
By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Jan 29 (IPS) - In the early 1990s, the administration of then Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori negotiated an amnesty for an army death squad in exchange for keeping secret the government’s involvement in two massacres in which 25 people suspected of being left-wing guerrillas were killed.

Pedro Supo, a former leader of the Army Intelligence Service’s (SIE) Colina death squad, revealed that information when testifying Monday in the trial against Fujimori, who ruled the country from 1990 to 2000 and is now being tried for corruption and human rights abuses.

Supo told the court that as part of the agreement with the government to let off the hook the Colina group members who killed 15 people at a barbecue in the Barrios Altos neighbourhood in Lima and 10 others at the La Cantuta University in the early 1990s, the officers were to be paid 100,000 dollars each and the non-commissioned officers 50,000 dollars.

The aim "was not to put the subversives at the disposal of DINCOTE (the anti-terrorism police), but to track them down and identify and eliminate them," he said.

The former army intelligence agent said he took part in five operations to "eliminate" supposed Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

The operations included the murders of 15 local residents of Barrios Altos on Nov. 3, 1991; of six small farmers in the town of Pativilca on Jan. 29, 1992; of six more farmers in the town of Santa on May 2, 1992; and of journalist Pedro Yauri and six members of the Ventocilla family on Jun. 24, 1992.



Read more: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40982

[bemildred]

1. Oh good.

Another weasel held accountable.
:popcorn:

[L. Coyote]

2. I can't wait until the same happens everywhere. Bring political murders to the bar of justice.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Defense Witness Says Peru `Dirty War' Predated Fujimori -AFP

Defense Witness Says Peru `Dirty War' Predated Fujimori -AFP

LIMA (AFP)--Peru's "dirty war" against leftist insurgents dated to before Alberto Fujimori's 1990-2000 presidency, a defense witness and former death squad member said Friday at the trial of the former leader on charges of human rights abuses.

"Many (military) officers are now human rights defenders, but earlier they kept quiet. There were abuses before" Fujimori, former intelligence agent Angel Sauni told the court.

Sauni, a self confessed member of the Colina Group, a team of select army intelligence operatives accused of killing 25 people in two massacres in 1991 and 1992, said the strategy used against the leftist Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement came directly from teachings and manuals of the " School of the Americas."

This notorious former military school in Panama has been held responsible for many of the human rights abuses committed by South American military forces in their war against leftist insurgencies during the 1970s and 1980s.

More:
http://www.international.na">~~~~ link ~~~~

(Is it possible the School of the Americas is encouraging writers to claim it's in Panama, now, since the world is starting to take this American school for Latin American military leaders far more seriously now that everyone knows they've been teaching torture all those years? It hasn't been located in Panama since 1984, when Panama took its canal back.)