Aliados

 Lima, Peru--On Wednesday, July 16th, the Denver Justice & Peace Committee's human rights delegation attended the trial of ex-President Alberto Fujimori during the testimony of General Nicolás Hermoza Ríos, the powerful ex-Commander General of the Armed Forces during the Fujimori regime.

In his testimony, Hermoza Ríos dismissed the prosecution's suggestion that human rights violations--in particular torture, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings-- formed a fundamental part of the military's counterinsurgency strategy. He insisted that the military's primary objective in the fight against the Shining Path and the MRTA was to win over the population and that massive human rights violations were antithetical to that goal.

Furthermore, he denied that the doctrine for military intelligence had changed in the early 1990s from an exclusive focus on intelligence gathering to one that included the "elimination of subversives". In reponse, the prosecution asked him to read from the military's 1991 anti-subversion operational handbook, which clearly detailed the new mission: "prevent, detect, locate, identify, neutralize, and/or eliminate subversive leaders." Interestingly, Hermoza Ríos skipped over "and/or eliminate" in his reading. The court promptly corrected his omission, saying that he had received a blurry copy of the manual.

The general then explained that "in a war, eliminate does not mean 'to kill people.'" Rather, he said eliminate meant "remove the subversives from their context" so that a compotent tribunal could charge them for their crimes. 

Asked whether military intelligence had committed excesses while implementing this strategy, he said that war itself was an excess and added somewhat disingenuously that he hoped "one day war would be unnecessary" and that we could "solve all our problems through diplomacy."

Military intelligence officers executed 25 people in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta Massacres for which Fujimori stands trial. Hermoza Ríos is currently serving out a prison sentence for corruption and embezzzlement; he will faces charges for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta Massacres this fall.

--Photos by Jonathan Moller, text by Hayden Gore