Stories written by Ángel Páez
Ángel Páez has extensive experience working in Peru as an investigative journalist on stories about corruption, drug trade, political violence, arms trade and other forms of organised crime. He joined IPS as a correspondent from his country in 2005. Born in 1963, Páez studied journalism at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima and started working at the daily newspaper La República in 1985. In 1990 he founded the Unidad de Investigación, a collective of journalists that uncovered the corruption scandals surrounding the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). Páez was the first to publish a story on one of those cases, which later led the Chilean courts to hand in the perpetrator to the Peruvian authorities. A correspondent in Lima for the Argentinean newspaper Clarín and the Mexican magazine Proceso, Páez is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based organisation that promotes global investigations.

CORRUPTION-PERU: Officials Charged in Oil Contract Scandal

By Ángel Páez
An anti-corruption Peruvian prosecutor brought charges against one current and three former high-level officials and 10 other people in a scandal over alleged bribes in lucrative oil contracts awarded to Discover Petroleum, a Norwegian company.

POLITICS-PERU: A Helping Hand from the Left

By Ángel Páez
A centre-left Peruvian governor who spent years in prison on terrorism charges, Yehude Simon, has been given the task of heading the new cabinet of Peruvian President Alan García, which has been shaken to its core by a corruption scandal.

RIGHTS-PERU: Declassified US Documents Undermine Fujimori’s Claims

By Ángel Páez
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.
Forensic experts exhuming mass grave at Putis. Credit: Courtesy of La República

RIGHTS-PERU: Military Wants to Keep Massacres Buried

By Ángel Páez
The Peruvian army continues to withhold information from the legal authorities who are investigating the murders committed by members of the military during the country’s 1980-2000 armed conflict.

RIGHTS-PERU: Another Blow to Military Impunity

By Ángel Páez
The reopening of the investigation into the death of Marco Barrantes, a second lieutenant in the Peruvian army accused of spying by the military, revived his family’s hopes for justice and may lead to the filing of a lawsuit against the state by the widow of the Ecuadorean soldier murdered along with him.

PERU: Courts Move Closer to Clarifying Accomarca Massacre

By Ángel Páez
"They entered the village and called all the peasants together, tortured them to make them say who were terrorists, and killed them because they didn't talk," testified former soldier José Contreras, one of those involved in the 1985 killing of 69 people in the southern Peruvian village of Accomarca.
Credit: Peruvian Defence Ministry

PERU: Secret Arms Deals – An Invitation to Corruption?

By Ángel Páez
The Peruvian government will devote at least 514 million dollars this year to modernising and upgrading its military equipment, a figure surpassed only by the Alberto Fujimori regime in the 1990s, when arms buying was the main wellspring of corruption.

PERU: President Turns Blind Eye to Price Rises

By Ángel Páez
"War on the people by the oil producing companies and countries" is to blame for today’s soaring food prices and for the fact that poor people in Peru are not benefiting from the economic growth, said Peruvian President Alan García.
Alan García, right, with his former interior minister Agustín Mantilla. Credit: Courtesy of La República newspaper

RIGHTS-PERU: Aprista Party Members Under Investigation for ’80s Crimes

By Ángel Páez
The Peruvian justice system is to prosecute members of the governing American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA, or Aprista Party) for creating the Rodrigo Franco Commandos (CRF), a paramilitary unit alleged to have murdered five people during the first administration of current President Alan García (1985- 1990).
Montesinos makes Fujimori smile. Credit: La República newspaper

PERU: Montesinos Defends Fujimori, Then Clams Up

By Ángel Páez
Vladimiro Montesinos, the second most powerful person in the regime of former President Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990-2000), has admitted in court that crimes were committed during intelligence operations he directed.

PERU: Rights Groups Warn of Authoritarian Tendencies

By Ángel Páez
The government of Peruvian President Alan García has demonstrated an authoritarian bent in its intolerance of social protest or any form of criticism, and has sponsored draft laws that treat demonstrations as criminal activity, say human rights groups and academics.

PERU: Second Coca, Cocaine Producer for Nine Years Running

By Ángel Páez
Drug trafficking is still good business in Peru, the world’s second largest producer of coca and cocaine for the ninth consecutive year, according to the latest report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

PERU: Something Fishy About Imported Military Rations

By Ángel Páez
Army troops from Peru and the United States are fighting very different enemies in extremely different geographical areas. But now they are eating the same rations, purchased from the U.S.-based International Meal Supply company.

PERU: Acquittals for Lawmakers Accused of Taking Bribes

By Ángel Páez
A court in Peru acquitted nine former lawmakers accused of taking bribes to switch party allegiance and vote with the government of former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), so as to assure him majority support for his initiatives.
Victims of Putis massacre. Credit: Courtesy of Asociación Paz y Esperanza.

RIGHTS-PERU: Unburying the Evidence of Biggest ‘Dirty War’ Massacre

By Ángel Páez
It was not hard to find the remains of the victims, some of whose bones were actually exposed to the elements. But it took 24 years for the people of the highlands village of Putis in southern Peru to get a response to their insistent requests for exhumation and identification of the remains.
EU-LAC summit Credit: EU-LAC

EU-LATIN AMERICA: Rhetoric Crowns Fifth Summit

By Ángel Páez
The heads of state and government taking part in the Fifth European Union-Latin America and the Caribbean (EU-LAC) Summit in Peru signed the Declaration of Lima Friday, an 11-point document full of generic proposals and expressions of goodwill.

PERU: Summit Discusses Climate Change as Glaciers Melt

By Ángel Páez
Peru is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which is already having perceptible effects in this country. According to a report by the National Environment Council (CONAM), the area of glaciers in the Andes has shrunk from 2,042 to 1,596 square kilometres in just 25 years.

PERU: All-Out War on Remnant of ‘Shining Path’ Guerrillas

By Ángel Páez
The armed forces have launched a major offensive against the most combative remaining column of Sendero Luminoso (the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas) which is operating in the jungle valleys of the Ene and Apurimac rivers in southeastern Peru, where most of the country’s coca leaf and cocaine is produced.

PERU: Government Lashes Out at Human Rights Groups

By Ángel Páez
The Peruvian government, with the backing of the parliamentary bloc that supports former President Alberto Fujimori, has unleashed a campaign against non-governmental organisations that defend human rights, according to activists and lawyers.

RIGHTS-PERU: Fujimori Hemmed In

By Ángel Páez
After 50 days of hearings, the Peruvian court trying former President Alberto Fujimori has heard virtually incontrovertible evidence that the former president was responsible for kidnappings and for two massacres of civilians perpetrated in the early 1990s, according to prosecutor Avelino Guillén.

RIGHTS-PERU: Death Squad Convictions May Doom Fujimori

By Ángel Páez
In a ruling that has far-reaching consequences for the trial of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, an anti-corruption court sentenced former chief of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) Julio Salazar to 35 years in prison for approving the operations of the Colina death squad, which killed nine students and a professor at the University of La Cantuta in July 1992.
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