Peru Confronts a Violent Past:
The Truth Commission Hearings in Ayacucho
From April 8 to 12, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission held its first public hearings in the cities of Huamanga and Huanta, in the rural department of Ayacucho. Sebastian Brett of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch attended some of the hearings as an international observer. This is his report.
The Right to be Happy
Liz Rojas Valdez was barely a teenager when her mother Marcela, a school teacher and single parent, went out one afternoon to buy a sack of potatoes and never returned. Shining Path guerrillas had organized a strike in Huamanga that day and the town was without electricity, adding to the girl's anxiety when dusk fell and Marcela did not reappear. With her baby brother Paul in tow, Liz set off in the dark to search for her mother. A family friend told Liz that her mother had been arrested and taken to the headquarters of the investigations police, but the police denied holding her. Liz was unable to sleep that night.
After days of pleading for information, Liz was finally able to get an officer to speak to her secretly. He told her that Marcela had been taken to an army base for torture, and that she might have been raped, killed, and her body incinerated. Up to now, Liz has been unable to find out what really happened to her mother and to see those responsible for her mother's "disappearance" brought to justice. But she told the audience at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's April 8 hearing that she knew exactly who they were.
Liz last saw her mother on May 17, 1991, but the emotional impact of her account, the depth and precision of its detail, made the events seem much more immediate.
"I need to see my mother's bones so that I can bury her."
"It's been like a shadow over my life. There is not a single moment in which I can feel happy. I had my first child when I was fifteen. I was on my own and there was no one to help me. I need to see my mother's bones so that I can bury her. Everyone has somewhere to go to say farewell to their dead. I have a right to be happy, too," sobbed 23-year-old Liz, as long suppressed rage about her stolen childhood burst to the surface.
Several of the commissioners listening to Liz's story seemed to be concentrating hard to hold back the tears. It was a scene that was to repeat itself over and over during the next few days.
A Healing Process
Ayacucho was the birthplace of the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla force that brought terror to Peru's cities and countryside in the early 1980s. By the mid-1990s the worst of the war was over, but the human cost was enormous: at least 30,000 had perished at the hands of the insurgents and the government's security forces. Police and army units are believed responsible for more than 6,000 "disappearances," for notorious massacres of civilians, and for the systematic torture of thousands picked up as guerrilla suspects, often on the basis of rumor and hearsay. In 1995 President Alberto Fujimori passed an amnesty law intended to ensure permanent impunity for the military and police officials responsible for these abuses.
More:
http://www.hrw.org/americas/peru/