Annotation of
Healing the Past, Protecting the Future. By Alejandro Toledo. Americas Quarterly. July 13, 2009.
~ The Editors
In this month’s centerpiece, “Healing the Past, Protecting the Future,” the former President of Peru (2001-2006), Alejandro Toledo, discusses the role of his government in addressing the human rights abuses committed by the Peruvian state and the armed opposition groups during the internal armed conflict that lasted over twenty years between 1980 and 2000. “When I became president of Peru in 2001, one of the first items on my agenda was restoring the democratic institutions that had suffered from a steady deterioration during the previous decade. Moreover, our country needed a full accounting of the atrocities that had occurred in previous decades.”
It was under Toledo’s administration that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was constituted to provide a democratic and institutional setting in order to examine, for the first time in two decades, the human rights violations committed by both the rebel groups, Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, as well as the state of Peru. “It was a harrowing document, and it was of unquestionable historic importance not only for our country, but for the entire world. It revealed, for the first time, the structural causes of amerciless violence that led to more than 70,000 deaths or disappearances at the hands of subversive organizations or state agents who acted without regard to our legal institutions.”
One of the main findings of the Commission was that the violence perpetrated by the armed opposition groups and State officials aimed at the most vulnerable sectors of the Peruvian society, namely, the indigenous and peasant communities, who had limited economic resources and lower education levels than the national average. Furthermore, the TRC finds that the severe racial, social and gender discrimination that exists in Peru contributed to the silence and inaction of the powerful Peruvian groups despite the killing of thousands of Peruvian men and women. “For many reasons, some of which probably have to do with my own ethnic and social origins, I am among those who believe that knowledge of the historic truth helps to achieve national reconciliation, which in turn can truly become an engine for development and integration. To see and recognize ourselves in the same mirror as a society helps us to acknowledge our diversity and to respect our legitimate differences. In Peru, a country of contrasts, we are all different; but at the same time, we are one.”
Yet, as indicated by the contributors, post-conflict situations require the consolidation of democratic institutions and the expansion of civil, economic and social rights to all citizens regardless of societal identity. Peru is still in an arduous struggle toward generating a more just, representative, inclusive and equitable form of government for all its citizens. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a significant step towards that direction. It does not only document the extent of human rights abuses, but it also points out clearly to the idea that persistent social, racial and gender discrimination could fuel future mass atrocities and gross human rights violations. The Peruvian TRC was also a key landmark in opening the space for future trials in search for justice, as illustrated by the recent conviction of former President Alberto Fujimori. As one of our contributors highlights: “Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent.”
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
November 2009: Human Rights in Peru
Annotation of
Healing the Past, Protecting the Future. By Alejandro Toledo. Americas Quarterly. July 13, 2009.
~ The Editors
The Hidden Costs of Terror
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“Torture, disappearance and rendition carried out in the name of a “war on terror” is now being exposed, repudiated and punished in the South. Will the North ever follow suit?”
In this month’s featured article, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) gives a thoughtful and insightful account of how post-atrocity accounting and reconstruction feels ‘from the top’. What can an incoming head of state possibly do or say that will redress and repair the social and human costs of decades of violence? What about the centuries of injustice and inequality that fuelled the flames? In fact Toledo did perhaps as much as he could, and more than many thought he would be able to, in recognising and beginning to address the ethnic, class, and institutional faultlines that tore Peru apart between 1980 and 2000.
While no administration is perfect, Toledo’s underwrote the valiant and painstaking work of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as it picked its way through the wreckage of almost 70,000 lost lives. Importantly, the Commission’s report apportioned blame in a country that had grown used to skirting around both the truth and its consequences. In this way, the groundwork for the recent landmark trial and imprisonment of former autocrat Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was also laid. Fujimori’s 2008 trial and 2009 conviction made history: the first American head of state ever to be held to account by his own people for corruption and crimes against humanity.
Toledo is right to draw attention to the importance of the InterAmerican Commission and Court on Human Rights: it was an early ruling from them that spurred Peruvian judges to reject attempts at domestic self amnesty. The ruling found an echo with other judiciaries in the region too. These days, at least in the southern part of the continent, the ideal that there should be ‘no safe haven’ for torturers is finally being made a reality. The northern part of the Americas could perhaps take note and learn lessons. Torture, disappearance and rendition carried out in the name of a ‘war on terror’ is now being exposed, repudiated and punished in the South. Will the north ever follow suit?
The parallels are more exact than the US and its allies would find comfortable. The ‘war’ against Shining Path guerrillas in Peru was finally won by conventional police work, not by massive ‘homeland security’ operations. (Shining Path ideologue and founder Abimael Guzmán was traced to a Lima hideout and arrested by civilian detectives following regular, patient, surveillance procedures.) Attempts to make a propaganda coup out of his downfall, putting him on public view in a striped convict suit in a makeshift cage, only created a backlash recruitment drive and escalation of action from increasingly fanatical followers. Is any of this sounding ominously familiar?
The promise of zero tolerance (read: ‘scorched-earth’ tactics, ending violence by escalating it), helped sweep Fujimori to power in the first place and later led a substantial portion of Peru’s population to collude enthusiastically in its own repression. Fujimori systematically dismantled Peru’s never-robust checks and balances, introducing hand-picked, anonymous judges to hand out life sentences in closed proceedings. He closed down Congress altogether, a move which went down particularly well with a public dazzled by the promise of a strong leader who would save them from amorphous, ever-present danger. In the end it was money scandals, more than moral outrage, that caused Fujimori’s downfall. The public was left to contemplate the dilapidated remnants of Peru’s democratic political fabric.
The maxim that we often don’t value what we have until it’s taken away couldn’t be more apposite. And unless we think ourselves somehow inherently smarter, luckier or less accident-prone than the Peruvian nation, Peru’s trajectory should help us remember the value of constitutional freedoms, international legal regimes, and all the other limits to what states can do in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
The Peruvian Precedent
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"The trade-off between truth and justice has not born out, however, and today hundreds of Chilean military human rights cases have been legally processed, and many human rights violators are behind bars. The Guatemalan generals are certainly not out of the woods. Peru has also powerfully defied this logic, best illustrated by the conviction of former president Alberto Fujimori. Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent"
In the early days of September 2009, former Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) president Salomón Lerner received a series of sick anonymous messages: “We will do to you what we did to your dogs.” Lerner’s two pet dogs had been fatally poisoned. The poisoning and the death threats against Lerner joined other vicious retaliations, including continuous attacks on another powerful human rights symbol, Lika Mutal’s “The Eye that Cries,” a sculpture in Lima that mourns the tens of thousands of Peruvian victims of internal armed conflict. In a twisted way, the poisoning, death threats, and attacks show that Peruvian human rights work is successfully striking a nerve.
The TRC’s task was complicated. Systematic human rights violations took place under
three democratically-elected presidents from distinct political parties and alliances (Fernando Belaúnde from 1980-1985, Alan García from 1985-1990, and Alberto Fujimori from 1990-2000), each confronted with a powerful and extremely violent guerrilla movement, the Shining Path. Both state security forces and guerrilla combatants committed massive abuses, and the vast majority of the atrocities took place in the highlands against the indigenous. In addition, local and regional indigenous communities organized self-defense committees—at times in collaboration with state security forces, but often not—who fought the Shining Path and killed suspected Shining Path militants and collaborators. Other indigenous joined the Shining Path. The TRC thus faced the formidable task of investigating a range of cases in which local and national elected politicians were implicated in repression and denial, and in which members of the indigenous communities collaborated in the killings. In addition, the commission was charged not only with investigating the abuses during the major internal armed conflict (1980-1993), but also with documenting president Fujimori’s increasing abuse of power after militarily defeating the guerrilla movement (1993-2000).
Influenced in part by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Peruvian TRC conceptualized its mission as one of promoting reconciliation through extensive documentation and analysis of two decades of violent conflict; close attention to communities that had been the most directly affected by the conflict; nationally televised public hearings (though unlike the South African process, no one was amnestiable); and detailed recommendations of the institutional reforms deemed necessary to facilitate reconciliation and prevent future conflict. To demonstrate their commitment to investigating abuses in the highlands, truth commissioners bore witness to several mass exhumations.
The Peruvian commission produced a nine-volume report that addressed the range of perpetrators and facilitators of violence at the national, regional and local levels, from state security forces to elected local and national officials, political parties, vigilante groups, and guerrillas—all implicated, according to the TRC, to one degree or another in the violence. The report challenged Peru’s largely urban middle class to address the structural marginalization of the countryside and, inherently, the racist general character toward indigenous populations.
Death threats aside, few Peruvian politicians celebrated the work of the TRC in the way former president Alejandro Toledo ‘s “Healing the Past, Protecting the Future” would encourage. Those on the Right denounced the TRC for condemning the military abuses, which the Right claimed saved the country from the Shining Path. Politicians on the Left questioned the framing of the report as one in which the security forces were only reacting to a growing guerrilla threat while established political party leaders across the spectrum failed the country. In addition, commentators both Left and Right have raised questions about how the TRC calculated the numbers of dead, claiming the figure of 69,000 was too high.
In spite of the intense criticism of the TRC, the Peruvian report has proved a catalyst for ongoing dialogue, fueled by educational institutions, an active press, and a range of non-governmental organizations that include both vibrant human rights advocacy groups and think tanks. To accompany the report, the TRC also mounted a sophisticated, evocative photo exhibit that has traveled both within the country and abroad. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Lerner are leading a new commission to establish a memory museum in which the photographic exhibit will be the centerpiece.
Calls for truth commissions around the globe have proliferated. The Brazilian government has now decided the time has come for an official truth commission to investigate the 1964-85 dictatorship. In the most recent round of negotiations to reinstate democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya to his office, negotiators have included a truth commission to investigate the events that led to deposing him. And on March 4, 2009, US Senator Patrick Leahy chaired a panel exploring the possibility of establishing a truth commission on the national security policies of the previous US administration “so that we might learn from past errors.” Leahy claimed, “We can’t turn the page unless we first read the page.” Critics immediately denounced Leahy’s call for a truth commission as a “witch hunt,” somehow placing upstanding former US administration officials “at the same level as apartheid or Argentinian juntas.”
One can read these various calls for truth commissions cynically. Conventional wisdom once held that truth commissions were the next best thing to honest to goodness criminal investigations, that given the correlation of forces governing most transitions from human rights violating regimes to democratizing ones, there was an unfortunate but necessary trade-off between official acknowledgment of past atrocities, on the one hand, and putting still powerful past violators in jail, on the other. Echoing this logic sometime during the mid-1990s, a Guatemalan general said that his military would allow a truth commission in his country as long as it followed the Chilean model—truth, no trials. Indeed, like human rights memorials, or small compensation checks to families of the dead and disappeared, truth commissions are in good part symbolic political mechanisms to recognize past wrongs, toward a “never again.” Truth symbols are important but they fall far short of due process.
The trade-off between truth and justice has not born out, however, and today hundreds of Chilean military human rights cases have been legally processed, and many human rights violators are behind bars. The Guatemalan generals are certainly not out of the woods. Peru has also powerfully defied this logic, best illustrated by the conviction of former president Alberto Fujimori. Let the fitful, volatile but persistent truth and justice process of Peru serve as a powerful global precedent.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
From Atrocities to Security: A Parable from Peru
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"As with many cases of human rights violations, the victims in Peru were dehumanized before they were abused (…) To combat dehumanization, societies must re-humanize the vulnerable and the persecuted, including the victims of human rights violations. Truth commissions have a vital role to play in this re-humanization: they give a forum to victims, validating their testimony and providing them with some catharsis, vindication, reparation and compensation.”
I have no expertise on the domestic politics of Peru, but I know that its often violent past shares much with its Latin American neighbours. Though not a practice confined to this region, I also know that events in the region have made notorious the chilling euphemism “disappearances.”
Since 1994, the UN has endorsed the ideal of “human security,” which emerged from critiques of simplistic, growth-oriented development and realist conceptions of national security (see further the work of scholars such as S. Neil McFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong). The grim accounts of gross human rights violations, corruption, impunity and authoritarianism in Peru (see, for example, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Amnesty International’s response in 2004:) provide an appalling inventory of many of the ways that international human rights and humanitarian law can be violated: torture, massacres, genocide, sexual violence and slavery, the use of child soldiers, displacement, discrimination of all kinds, extrajudicial executions, forced sterilizations, coercive and illiberal anti-terrorism legislation, abuses by the police, army and intelligence services, disappearances, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and mistreatment of the poor and indigenous peoples.
Since this history is a negation of human security and dignity it can only be reversed by embracing democracy, the rule of law, economic security and what might be termed humanization. While there is sure to be a vast literature on Peru’s truth commission, in itself and comparatively—that addresses the usual concerns over the balance between the aims of retributive (or deontological) and restorative justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption, peacebuilding, deterrence, commemoration and reconstruction—in the following I concentrate on reconstruction.
In an interview for Foreign Policy in 2008, Toledo said that “It is not sufficient to be elected democratically. The hardest thing is to govern democratically.” This is a wise insight. Peru should aspire, as should other countries, not to have a hollow democracy chained to the ballot box, crucial though elections are, but to create a liberal, social and constitutionalist democracy. It is sometimes thought that the liberal (I mean in the rights-oriented sense) is incompatible with the social. But this is not true. Liberals like John Stuart Mill, and the founders of the United States of America, were right to guard against the dangers of the dictatorship of the majority and its potential to endanger the welfare of groups and individuals. There is nothing wrong with constraining majorities in this constitutionalist sense. However, the state need not be the enemy if it acts with the public welfare (remember Cicero’s exhortation) as its priority. If it does so, the concerns of traditional national security and the “newer” conceptions of human security can be reconciled. Given the pioneering role of Latin America in promoting social democratic rights, for example in the Bogota Declaration of the 1940s, such reconciliation is fitting.
Second, Peru needs to identify with greater precision, and then institutionalize, the core aspects of the rule of law. The principles of the rule of law prescribe an inelastic minimum standard for legality, one familiar to students of the common law. Laws should, for example, be prospective, transparent, democratic, in accordance with constitutional process and substance, reasonably coherent and interpreted and reviewed by a tenured, impartial judiciary. Peru’s judiciary has often been at the mercy of the military and the executive and thus susceptible to undue influence. The separation of powers did not exist.
Third, as Toledo has recognized (for example, in June this year in an address at UCLA), economic security is vital. Without it, economic growth and development do not deliver wealth equitably. The very concept of human development built on the insights of economists who recognized the potentially misleading nature of GDP and per capita income as barometers of social justice, an adequate standard of living and a dignified life. Moreover, connections between poverty and civil and international strife are clear. Indeed Peru’s Truth Commission recognized the links between inadequate education, poverty, inequality and violence: the majority of victims were peasants, many poor and poorly educated people in rural areas were recruited by the Shining Path and their low status meant that many privileged Peruvians turned a blind eye to their plight.
This brings me to my final point. As with many cases of human rights violations, the victims in Peru were dehumanized before they were abused. This is evident not only in the violations committed against peasants and indigenous peoples but in the sexual violence towards women, and in assaults on gay, lesbian and transgender persons. Additionally, systematic discrimination helps to maintain the poverty of the worst-off and reinforces the stigma that attaches to them. To combat dehumanization, societies must re-humanize the vulnerable and the persecuted, including the victims of human rights violations. Truth commissions have a vital role to play in this re-humanization: they give a forum to victims, validating their testimony and providing them with some catharsis, vindication, reparation and compensation.
To say that the struggle of Peru will be an arduous one is an understatement. Only recently the former president of the Truth Commission, Dr Salomón Lerner Febres, has been harassed and intimidated by its opponents; they even killed his dogs as a warning of what he might suffer. Such cruelty reflects the kind of dehumanization I have been discussing. Let us hope that, as Toledo said, there has been “enough death” and that Peru can move steadily from atrocities to security.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins andDevelopment (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
The Limits of Executive Action for Human Rights
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
“Since 2006, Toledo has found a useful perch in academic and NGO institutions in this country, such as working with the Carter Center on election monitoring. It would have been interesting to hear his views on how his outlook on these matters has been shaped by his American experiences— and how his Peruvian and Indio life may have lead him to see the weaknesses of the American approach to human rights."
Between 2001 and 2006 Alejandro Toledo served as President of Peru. He entered office committed to, in his words, “restoring the democratic institutions that had suffered from a steady deterioration during the previous decade,” (that is, during the rule of former President Alberto Fujimori). Moreover, he took up the task of providing Peruvian society with “a full accounting of the atrocities that had occurred in previous decades.” This personal commitment to re-establishing a functioning democracy based on the rule of law, a commitment based in part on his participation in the anti-Fujimori demonstrations, lead him to seek an honest accounting of past human rights abuses as a basis for a transition from decades of violent guerrilla warfare and government repression to a functioning democracy.
In this, Toledo followed a path familiar to other transitions to democracy such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Upon taking office, Toledo appointed a commission of scholars, clergy, leaders of civic organizations and former government (including military) officials. The formal submission of the TRC’s report in 2003 was invested with heavy public symbolism. Previously, Toledo had already performed another of those customary rituals of transitional justice, the public apology. Further acts of public symbolism followed, including a commemoration of murdered journalists.
In thus making human rights a basic element in the consolidation of Peruvian democracy, Toledo could build on existing institutions: a human rights commission and especially an active judiciary. However, his institutional heritage is questionable. Whether or not he runs for the presidency in 2011, his Peru Posible party fared poorly in recent congressional elections. Both Toledo and his successor (current President Alan Garcia) have been accused of (but escaped formal prosecution for) corruption or electoral fraud. Although the Peruvian courts continue to hear cases of human rights abuses from the decades between 1980 and 2000, the work of human rights advocates, including the TRC, has been subject to political attack. While some members of the Catholic clergy have been active in human rights work, others, especially those associated with the Opus Dei order, have strongly opposed further investigations.
Although Toledo has linked his human rights commitment to his Indio background, such developments as the upsurge in protests by indigene inhabitants of the Amazonian districts of Peru, some of which have been accompanied by violence, find no place in the article reviewed here. Yet these controversies raise important issues of human rights, such as group rights, cultural diversity, economic rights, and Peru’s possible status as (in Valerie Sperling’s term) an “altered state” with those accountable for human rights abuses beyond the reach of domestic jurisdictions. In the light of his assertion that his visit, with TRC members, to Lucanamarca, a remote Andean town (the scene of an atrocity perpetrated by the Shining Path guerillas) “represented a journey to a world rarely visited or even acknowledged by our elites,” this omission is indeed puzzling.
Nor does he explore the vexing issue of upholding human rights in an era of violent conflict, as that which raged between the Peruvian government, the “Maoist” Senderistas of the Shining Path, as well as the Tupac Amaro organization. Reparations and apologies are laudable, indeed necessary, but such policies from the standard human rights menu do not address the issue of political and ethnic reintegration. “Forgive, and never again!” he cried out in Lucanamarca— but who is to forgive whom? How will Peruvian society develop to prevent these conflicts from emerging again?
His comments on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are cursory at best. These bodies do have an extensive record in helping to correct human rights abuses; it is certainly to Toledo’s credit that he accepted the Court’s judgment against Peru, although the crimes involved took place prior to his administration. Indeed, it should be said that Toledo’s efforts on behalf of human rights seem to have been more extensive, more politically risky, and with more of a legacy, than this article presents.
Since 2006, Toledo has found a useful perch in academic and NGO institutions in this country, such as working with the Carter Center on election monitoring. It would have been interesting to hear his views on how his outlook on these matters has been shaped by his American experiences— and how his Peruvian and Indio life may have lead him to see the weaknesses of the American approach to human rights.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
Posts
