By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Sep 25 2008 (IPS)

U.S. State Department documents that have been kept secret until now contradict former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s claims that he did not know about human rights abuses committed by the country’s intelligence services during his two terms of office, from 1990 to 2000.

“The declassified documents show that very early on, Washington was pressuring Fujimori directly over the activities of the Peruvian military and their human rights violations,” Peter Kornbluh, an analyst at the National Security Archive (NSA), a non-governmental research institute located at the George Washington University in Washington D.C., told IPS.

Kornbluh is an expert on declassified documents containing information about the “dirty wars” waged by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s – information that has been used as evidence in the courts against those responsible for the repression.

Fujimori is currently on trial for the murders of 25 civilians, committed in 1991 and 1992 by the “Colina Group,” a death squad made up of Army Intelligence Service (SIE) agents.

“Fujimori cannot claim he had no idea about the activities of the armed forces until 1993. The declassified documents record that the former United States ambassador to Peru, Anthony Quainton, spoke to Fujimori on the subject in December 1991,” Kornbluh said.

On Nov. 3, 1991, a month before the conversation between Fujimori and Quainton took place, the “Colina Group” murdered 15 people attending a barbecue in the central Lima neighbourhood of Barrios Altos. The victims, who included an eight-year-old boy, were suspected of belonging to the Maoist guerrilla organisation Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).

The documents were accepted into evidence by the court that is trying the former president for his role in the Barrios Altos murders, as well as further killings committed at La Cantuta University on Jul. 18, 1992.

Fujimori’s defence lawyers allege that the documents are based on information from newspaper reports and hearsay testimony. But Kornbluh flatly contradicted this view.

“They record statements by members of the military, some of whom are still on active duty, and by several people who were in contact with former presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos,” the second most powerful man in the Fujimori regime, “as well as by members of the special intelligence groups that carried out the illegal executions. They are not rumours,” he stated.

On Sept. 8, NSA analyst Kate Doyle testified as an expert witness before the court that is trying Fujimori, about the relevance of 21 U.S. State Department documents related to human rights violations in Peru.

The documents “reveal that the extra-legal operations were a part of official state policy and not a result of out-of-control rogue elements of the military, police or intelligence services,” she said.

Doyle testified there was evidence that Fujimori had a “secret, clandestine strategy of aggressively fighting ‘subversion’ with the use of state-sponsored terrorism. The operations were conducted outside the state’s legal process, with no respect for the rule of law or basic human rights.”

One of the most important declassified documents records statements made by a former SIE officer to two high-level officials at the U.S. Embassy in Lima, according to which torture and murder were systematically used against persons suspected of belonging to Shining Path.

On Jun. 15, 1994, the U.S. Embassy’s Polcouns (political counsellor) and Poloff (political officer) met with a former senior army officer, who provided detailed information about his direct participation in an army commando unit and in the SIE, the document says.

The Peruvian ex-officer told them he had taken part in systematic operations that had been officially approved, including murders, torture and threats against suspected terrorists and opponents of the government, as part of the Fujimori administration’s counterinsurgency policy, the document says.

When a detainee suffered physical harm during an interrogation, he would almost always be killed, the former SIE agent told the U.S. diplomats.

The source said his favourite torture method was to submerge the victim in a tank of water, obliging him to stand on tiptoe to catch a gulp of air in order to breathe. Eventually, the victim would become exhausted and would drown, says the text of a cable sent by the embassy to the U.S. State Department.

In December 2007, Argentine Judge Ariel Lijo convicted officers of Argentina’s 601st army intelligence battalion, one of several groups that kidnapped and murdered people suspected of “subversion” during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, which was responsible for the forced disappearance of about 30,000 people, according to human rights groups.

At the request of lawyers for several of the victims in Argentina, the NSA made available declassified documents detailing the structure of the army intelligence battalion, which aided the prosecution and conviction of the army officers involved.

Declassified documents provided by the NSA have also been used in the trial in Uruguay of former President Juan María Bordaberry, who was the country’s democratically elected president from February 1972 to June 1973, and from 1973-1976 ruled by decree as the figurehead of a military dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

Kornbluh told IPS “there is a document dated July 1990, just as Fujimori became president, which outlines a double policy on terrorism: a public policy based on respect for the rule of law and human rights, and a clandestine and secret policy, outside the framework of legality.”

“Another document, dated December 1991, after the Barrios Altos massacre, refers to the meeting between Fujimori and Quainton at which the ambassador told Fujimori that the military could have been involved in the crime, and that an investigation was necessary. In other words, at that time the connection between the army and the murders was already being discussed,” he said.

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