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Articles by J.K. Marga

A supporter of the International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Dr. Abimael Guzmán

Refuting the "Big Lies" about Peru

 October 1992

Paper will accept anything that is printed on it and a television set will simply repeat whatever it receives, but thinking people shouldn’t. The major news organizations and far too many journalists have been unashamedly repeating whatever Big Lie they get from "official sources," when just a little thought and the barest of facts show the complete absurdity of these sloppy fabrications. Let’s look at four of the biggest lies.

"Responsible for 40,000 deaths"

"What about the 40,000 deaths you’re responsible for?" shouted someone in the crowd of cops and reporters when Abimael Guzmán was paraded before the press September 24. The figures vary, but the idea is to paint Abimael Guzmán as the biggest mass murderer of our times. This from people who have nothing to say about Bush, Major, Kohl and Mitterrand, who inflicted at least 100,000 deaths on Iraq in a matter of days!

Here are the Peruvian government’s own figures for the total deaths during the 12 years of the war in Peru, up until August 31st (quoted from El País, 9/20/92):

First, the government itself takes credit for the majority of the people killed. But these "presumed subversives" include thousands of unarmed civilians, since as Peruvian General Cisneros once explained, "It is necessary to kill ten peasants to kill one guerrilla." Of the fallen revolutionary fighters, many were murdered not in battle but in captivity. (About 300 prisoners were slaughtered in 1986. Last May, when prisoners took over Canto Grande to avoid a repetition of this event, about 50 were taken out and shot AFTER the government had retaken the prison.)

Second, as for those counted as "civilians" in the regime’s figures, most foreign journalists have said that many thousands died at the hands of the Armed Forces. The Times (9/28/92) admits that the Peruvian Armed Forces "use the same brutal tactics" as the revolutionaries are accused of. Repeatedly over the last several years, the Peruvian press has reported the discovery of mass graves-and the Bernales Commission of the Peruvian parliament presented testimony that it was the Armed Forces that filled them with mutilated bodies. One of the most notorious incidents to come to light was in the village of Cayara, in the department of Ayacucho, in 1988, where the guests at a peasant wedding were seized by soldiers angry about having been ambushed earlier that day. The peasants were taken to the village church where they were hacked to pieces or shot. At least 28 bodies were later discovered. (One account of this is in Simon Strong’s Shining Path.) Brigadier-General Valdivia, in charge of these troops and the later cover-up, was promoted and the case officially closed.

Large parts of the country, notably in the Alto Huallaga jungle and the mountains of Ayacucho, are considered free fire zones. All villages are presumed to harbor subversives and many have been strafed by helicopter gunships and attack planes. In Lima, the government carries out the same policy in a slightly disguised form. For instance, at the press circus with Abimael Guzmán, he was accused of killing journalists with letter bombs. According to the legal opposition magazine, Cambio, which lost a young woman reporter this way, this and similar murders are the work of government death squads.

Third, Peruvian President Fujimori has made a keystone of his counterinsurgency plan the use of civilian paramilitary groups, called rondas. Although Fujimori likes to appear at well publicized ceremonies in the countryside and Lima to distribute arms to these groups, they are often unarmed or poorly armed, because the government doesn’t trust them. They are made up of peasants forced to participate under the threat of being labelled subversives and led by current and retired military personnel, landowners and criminals. (Comandante Huayhuaco, the most infamous rondero leader, was a drug trafficker released from prison especially for this job.) Sometimes these ronderos are made to walk ahead of an Army patrol fearful of mines or an ambush. The policy of forcing people to serve in rondas is linked to the policy of clearing peasants out of their villages and imprisoning them in "strategic hamlets" under Army control. All this is exactly what the U.S. did in Vietnam-and the Peruvian officers learnt it from their U.S. instructors. So who is using the peasants as cannon fodder? Who is carrying out assassinations and massacres? Who are the blood-stained criminals who should be on trial? The government tries to explain away these atrocities by pleading that they are fighting a war, but the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) is fighting a war too. The PCP say their policy regarding government troops is to guarantee them good treatment if they surrender. The PCP also says it works in the strategic hamlets to rescue the peasants. They say they execute government bigshots, Armed Forces officers, local officials in revolutionary areas who refuse to heed warnings to resign, and informers. Not innocent civilians. The government cannot even make that claim in front of anyone who has read the Peruvian and international press because it would be a lie on the face of it-murder is their official policy.

"The rebels are financing their war through narcotics traffic"

The Peruvian government would have fallen long ago if it were not for the drug trade, which represents at least half, if not much more, of the country’s total exports. It is the most important source of the dollars on which the country depends for importing raw materials, food and other goods. These dollars end up in Peruvian banks, where they are purchased by the government with inflated Peruvian currency. So neither the government nor the U.S. has any real interest in abolishing the drug traffic.

The Peruvian government is involved in drugs up to its eyebrows. Fujimori just announced he wants ex-President García extradited to stand trial for corruption and drug-money laundering. But Fujimori’s own general Arciniega, who formerly ran the Army in the main drug-growing areas in the jungle, was himself accused in the U.S. Congress of being a drug kingpin. Garcia is charged with working hand-in-hand with the now notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the world’s biggest money laundering and main world drug trade finance center-which was in turn an instrument of the American CIA.

If it were true that the PCP is receiving big money from somewhere, where is it? Why aren’t they spending it? Why do they rely on captured Army weapons, homemade mortars, etc. and cheap small arms? One journalist sarcastically commented that they must be stashing it all away in Swiss bank accounts because there is no evidence of any big spending by the PCP in Peru. Even Simon Strong concludes that Fujimori and the U.S. are hurling drug charges against the PCP so that U.S. intervention can be "justified not only under the traditional banner of defending international democracy but also on the ‘morally superior’ grounds of fighting cocaine." Actually, the main reason why this excuse is needed is to keep the U.S.’s moves from reminding people of Vietnam.

The PCP has a clearly-stated policy on drugs: they are completely opposed to their production and use. They say that where the revolution has political power, drug use is not allowed, and the peasants who had been beholden to the drug barons are protected and freed from their clutches. It has also been reported in the Peruvian magazine Sí that the PCP has done what the government has never done-helped the peasants in these areas gradually replace coca-leaf production with food crops. Again, who is financing their war with drug money?

"Abimael Guzmán is a traitor"

Fujimori accuses Abimael Guzmán of treason to Peru.

This from Fujimori, the man who took all power into his own hands in a military coup only a few months ago! What right has he to accuse anyone else of violating the Constitution, let alone betraying the country?

Fujimori’s regime has been guided by two principles: to crush the rebellion and to please the international bankers and their governments. He ran for president on a platform of opposing the IMF’s proposed "shock" scheme for Peru, and then turned around and implemented it completely. One of the main elements in his treason charges against Abimael Guzmán is that the revolutionary war has cost Peru 20 billion dollars. But Peru is currently staggering under the burden of payments on the 24 billion dollars in loans to U.S. and European banks and governments, money Peru had to borrow to sustain the import-addicted economy. In order to pay those loans-which with interest mean that the financiers are getting their money back several times over-Fujimori has implemented some of the most drastic "readjustments" ever seen, following the IMF’s instructions in full. The economy has shrunk by a third, 15 out of Peru’s 22 million people live in extreme poverty, and even Lima’s sewage recycling plants have been shut down so that the money used to import expensive chemicals can be sent to New York and London instead. As a direct result, thousands of Peruvians have died in a cholera epidemic, an epidemic whose devastation is being limited in other Latin American countries where there are still at least a few clinics and vaccination programs left.

Just as the economy is run by the IMF, the Peruvian Armed Forces are increasingly "advised" by the U.S. military and the police by the CIA. It is noteworthy that the capture of Abimael Guzmán took place while Fujimori was off fishing in the jungle, and his Interior Minister similarly far from his office, occupied hosting guests. The U.S. recently completed a program to revamp Peru’s intelligence services. Perhaps the reason Fujimori was apparently not notified in advance of the most important event of his presidency is that someone on a higher level was already in charge.

So who is the traitor to Peru?

"The PCP is terrorist"

The Peruvian Armed Forces and police amount to 140,000 men. Widely varying newspaper estimates put the number of fighters under the PCP’s leadership at from 5,000 to 25,000.

One might ask how the PCP and its army managed to grow from a small handful to what it is today. Can terror ever really create and keep together an army, especially where another army-and another state-is already in control?

The government’s Armed Forces are able to conscript at will-but its troops have been deserting at a spectacular rate, sometimes with their weapons. Those that don’t desert often don’t fight. Officer requests to resign from the service became such a headache that the government has forbid them. Fighters in the PCP army could flee to government areas if they wanted to, and they would certainly be welcome, but the People’s Guerrilla Army is, by all accounts, growing by leaps and bounds.

Over half of Peru’s territory and a slightly lower percentage of its population is in "emergency zones," areas where revolutionary political power is emerging or has already been established. The Huallaga River Valley in the northeastern jungle, the country’s central "breadbasket" in Junín, the southwest mountain departments and so on-vast areas of the country are under an arising new regime, the People’s Republic of Peru, as Abimael Guzmán has called it, under "people’s committees." The PCP describes them as being made up of peasants, small merchants, school teachers and other local middle-class forces, and Party representatives. The Party’s Program calls for "destroying imperialist domination," "destroying bureaucrat capitalism by confiscating monopoly capital," "destroying feudalism . . . (by giving) land to the tiller," and "support for medium-sized capital." This is the program they intend to implement throughout Peru. Some media people have dismissed this as a fantasy, as proof that the PCP is not in touch with reality. But the U.S. State Department does not share this opinion. Gordon McCormick, an analyst for the RAND Corporation working under U.S. government contract, has written several monographs published by the U.S. State Department. In March 1990, he wrote:

His conclusion:

Apparently the U.S. government believes that possibility is to be taken very seriously-in theory and in action.

A few years ago, the Peruvian government and its supporters pointed to Lima’s Villa El Salvador, a "model" slum visited by the Pope, where forces opposed to armed revolution seemed to have control through extensive grassroots organization, money from the Peruvian and European governments, and of course the backing of the Armed Forces. Now Villa El Salvador is considered "Sendero territory"-the Peruvian press reports that pro-PCP people have even been elected to head the district’s Small Businessmen’s Association!

Can anybody really argue that the PCP did this by intimidating people, or by simply diabolically good organization and cleverness?

What can explain the PCP’s spectacular success? Can there really be a plausible explanation at all, besides ardent and growing support from Peruvian peasants and shantytown dwellers, the "Indians" and "cholos" and all the "invisible masses," and people from other classes as well? What else could explain the undeniable fact that millions of people look to Abimael Guzmán and the PCP?

Isn’t it really Fujimori & Co., and their foreign backers, who have little to rely on but terror? Isn’t, in fact, this "trial" being staged as a way not only to silence Abimael Guzmán and his Party, but to terrorize all those in Peru who cannot accept the future Fujimori represents?

Fujimori and the Drug Trade

October 1992

Fujimori and the Drug Trade Just as the Reagan administration used money from arms sales to Iran to buy narcotics, whose sales in turn financed the U.S.'s Contra army in Nicaragua, so it seems that the Bush administration is now aiding and abetting the Peruvian government and Armed Forces' involvement in the drug trade. But more than that, not only is the drug trade a vital part of how the Peruvian government is able to sustain the war against the insurgents in Peru-it appears to be the heart of the mechanism by which the CIA has seized direct control of political and military affairs in Peru.

Fujimori was elected president of Peru in 1990. The legal requirement to vote was backed up by death threats from the military, combined with chicanery. The Armed Forces "suspended" Peru's traditional method of marking each voter's index finger with indelible ink after they cast their ballot to prevent multiple voting. The justification was that the PCP (Communist Party of Peru, or Shining Path, as it is often called by the press) guerrillas might cut off the fingers of voters. No such incidents were reported. The PCP's call for a boycott was such a success that in the first round abstentions, blank and spoiled ballots outdistanced any of the candidates. (See The Shining Path of Peru, edited by David Scott Palmer)

During Fujimori's first year in office, his regime won the distinction of having "one of the world's most dismal human rights records." (Current History, February 1992) On April 5, 1992, beset by dissension within Peru's ruling circles and parliament, he staged what has been described as "a palace coup" ("autogolpe"), taking all power into his own hands with the backing of the military. At a subsequent meeting of the Organization of American States to consider measures against Fujimori's government, the Bush administration blocked proposals for economic sanctions. The International Herald Tribune reported that the resolution passed by the Foreign Ministers of the Latin American countries and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker "avoid(ed) condemning or deploring Mr. Fujimori's actions and did not approve any sanctions against his government. The resolution effectively lent the cooperation of the Washington-based organization to Peru's president, despite the disapproval that the regional body has voiced since his coup de force." (5/20/92). The same article quoted Fujimori as being "very satisfied" with the OAS' stand, which he qualified as "ample generosity."

A month after the coup, Fujimori sent his troops storming into the Canto Grande prison, where many suspected PCP members were held. Soldiers carrying lists of names selected out and murdered forty men and women. Not only did Fujimori refuse a request by a visiting OAS human rights commission delegation to enter the prison, he even refused to meet with them, an act unprecedented in 33 years of OAS history. This time the OAS didn't even issue a formal protest. The U.S. said nothing.

Following the April coup, the U.S. announced the suspension of its Congressionally approved $320 million in financial and military payments to the Peruvian government. This is considered only a temporary measure. But meanwhile, the use of the narcotics traffic to finance the Peruvian government's war seems to have become institutionalized as official (though secret) U.S. policy. The man who engineered the coup, sometimes referred to as Fujimori's Rasputin, is Vladimiro Montesinos. The Madrid daily La Vanguardia called him "the second most powerful man in Peru, after the president." (11/05/92) This may turn out to be an underestimation. Montesinos was an Army artillery captain and aide to one of Peru's leading generals when he was recruited by the CIA, according to Peruvian Army Major José Fernandez Slavatecci, in his autobiography Yo Acuso (I accuse). At that time Peru was under a military government that had bought weapons from the USSR. Slavatecci claims that in the 1970s Montesinos met regularly with U.S. intelligence officials working out of the U.S. Embassy. La Vanguardia says that Montesinos was sacked from the Army at the end of the decade, when the Peruvian Ambassador happened to spot him at the Pentagon in Washington, where he had traveled on a phony passport. After a few years in exile to avoid a prison sentence on treason charges as a U.S. spy, Montesinos returned to Peru in 1983. He worked as a lawyer for drug kingpins until 1990, when he successfully intervened to squash tax evasion charges made against presidential candidate Fujimori. He became unofficial "national security advisor" when Fujimori took office. (Officially, his only post is Fujimori's personal lawyer.)

According to Gustavo Gorriti, considered Peru's most internationally prominent journalist, Montesinos had been under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for "his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers." (Interview in New York Review of Books, 5/25/92) Maximo San Román, formerly Fujimori's vice president, who was removed by the coup along with the parliament, said that with the ascension of Montesinos "I fear that my country will fall into the hands of the Mafia." (Spain's El País 5/22/92) Similar charges were made by Fujimori's main 1990 electoral opponent, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. The accusation that Fujimori is connected to the highest echelons of narcotics traffic have been repeated in the press the last few months by, among others, the Peruvian-born international economist Hernando de Soto, who is allied with the U.S. Republican Party. De Soto had negotiated the pact under which the Peruvian government was enlisted in Washington's "war on drugs," and was considered Montesinos' main rival for Fujimori's ear. (El País, 2/1/92) All of these men are now in exile.

Before Fujimori took office, Montesinos had been banned from ever setting foot again on a Peruvian military installation. Now he hand-picked the Armed Forces Joint Command. Montesinos also chose his new Chief of Staff, General José Valdivia, who had been accused of covering up the Armed Forces massacre of 28 peasants at a wedding in the Ayacucho village of Cayara in 1988. (A dozen witnesses in that case were murdered-see Simon Strong's Sendero Luminoso for another account of that affair.) Even more importantly, it was at that point that Montesinos renewed his relationship with the CIA, if, indeed, it had ever been interrupted. Gorriti says that in addition to reorganizing the Armed Forces and putting "men who owed him favors" in key positions, "in late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service he controlled began to organize a secret ant-drug outfit with funding, training and equipment provided by the CIA." The Miami Herald (5/30/92) indicates that the CIA invited Montesinos to return to Washington for talks. After that he began to receive secret funding from the CIA and to send men to the U.S. for intelligence training. Gorriti describes Montesinos' National Intelligence Service as a kind of autonomous force answerable only to the U.S. "As far as I know," Gorriti continues, "the secret intelligence unit never carried out anti-drug operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest."

According to Gorriti, in one of the first actions taken after the coup, "army intelligence officers had ransacked archives in the judiciary and in the prosecutor's offices mainly to get hold of all the cases in which Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's closest advisor, was involved as a lawyer for drug traffickers and perhaps other documents that Fujimori does not want the public to know." La Vanguardia quotes Peruvian Senator César Barrera as saying they were searching to "destroy evidence that Montesinos maintains close relations with the CIA despite the fact that the CIA knew he was protecting drug traffickers."

One factor that precipitated the coup ahead of the date that had been set, apparently, was the public "Fujigate" scandal, when Fujimori's wife, Susana, accused his government of corruption. A few days later the coup shut down the newspapers and TV stations that covered the story. Gorriti and his personal computer (with its data) were seized by the Army and held until the Spanish government intervened to get the Peruvian correspondent for El País out of the country. All the data on his hard disk were erased.

Gorriti says that it was common knowledge that the coup was coming-it merely caught him off guard by coming earlier than scheduled. There was little attempt to hide it. The Madrid daily El Observador reports that ten days before the coup, "a man very close to President Fujimori" confided to the newspaper's Buenos Aires-based correspondent what was about to happen. (4/7/92) At the moment of the coup, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson was present in Lima. A few weeks earlier Aronson had issued a strong statement urging all possible aid to Fujimori "to avoid a holocaust comparable to Hitler's gas chambers or Pol Pot's death camps." Such a statement, El Observador's correspondent implies, amounted to giving Fujimori carte blanche. The U.S.'s Ambassador to Peru is Anthony Quainton, former head "anti-terrorist" specialist in the U.S. State Department and U.S. Ambassador in Managua during the CIA's terrorist bombings and sabotage campaign against the Sandinista government (Holly Sklar, Washington's War on Nicaragua, quoted in the Fall 1992 issue of the U.S. magazine Covert Action.) Quainton conspicuously made no public statement on the coup preparations, even though Gorriti says it was the main topic at diplomatic cocktail parties, and despite the fact that he must have been aware that Montesinos was meeting all but openly with Armed Forces officers in the days before it was launched.

These events carry grave implications.

Who was in charge of the Dincote ("Anti-terrorist police") raid that day? The Dincote is responsible to the Armed Forces Joint Command and the National Intelligence Service directly oversees it. Who could possibly have had so much unchallenged authority that the President and Interior Minister were left out entirely of the picture? It seems likely that they were not even informed about the impending event, the biggest in recent Peruvian history.

Gorriti once wrote that in the Fujimori government, "the ministers have no real power" (La Vanguardia, 5/11/92). The same article quotes a "military chief who asked not to be identified" as saying Montesinos "runs the security forces." San Ramón put it this way: "I would go so far as to say that he is the one who really runs the government." (El País, 5/22/92). But Montesinos is not his own man. Just as de Soto's role was to tell Fujimori what the IMF expected of him, so Montesinos has no other reason for political existence than to serve as the CIA's conduit.

After Abimael Guzmán's capture, several reports quoted unnamed U.S. official sources as offering knowing "no comments" to questions about U.S. involvement. A PCP supporter interviewed in Lima stated that the security forces were now using methods such as computerized analysis of electricity and telephone bills-methods far more sophisticated than the Dincote's previously nearly exclusive reliance on brutish torture techniques, and which again point to the hand of the CIA. (The Independent, 10/3/92)

In the wake of Dr. Guzmán's trial, Fujimori announced that he had decided to award a million dollars to the 50 security officers who actually carried out the capture. This they received not by check in an honors ceremony but in bank notes stuffed into a paper bag. (The Independent, 10/7/92). Is this hush money?

Given even what is publicly known and admitted, the U.S. government is clearly the main pillar holding up what all serious foreign journalists have described as a very shaky government. But even more than that, there is even reason to suspect that the hand of the U.S. reached in to carry out its dirty work directly in the case of the capture of Abimael Guzmán.

A Reply to Peter Archard, of Amnesty International

October 1992

Don't Snuff Out the Rights of Political Prisoners in Peru - Defend the Life of Abimael Guzmán - When will Amnesty Act? The leading member of Amnesty International's Secretariat responsible for Peru affairs, Sir Peter Archard, was recently interviewed by a Lima news magazine, Caretas, while visiting Peru. This visit could not have been more cruelly ironic.

For six months, tens of thousands of people all over the world, on all continents, have been waging an intense campaign to defend today's most outstanding political prisoner. Thousands of concerned people, including many Amnesty members, have been anxiously pressing AI's international office in London to end their stubborn silence on the threat to the life of Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Communist Party of Peru.

What has been Amnesty's stand on this case? On October 2nd, it issued what Sir Archard calls a "request to the authorities to inform AI as to the guarantees being offered Abimael Guzmán in this trial". Despite a secret "trial" in front of anonymous black-hooded judges, a military tribunal which delivered the guilty verdict and life sentence for "treason" that had been announced in advance by the man who is President, Chief Magistrate and Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief, Amnesty had almost nothing more to say about it.

Before and since the trial Peru's President Fujimori has declared his determination to see Dr.. Guzmán dead. Recently he announced that the new Peruvian Constitution being written under his direction will reinstate the death penalty, and that it will be applied retroactively to Dr.. Guzmán. What has been Amnesty's response to this threat? It wrote Alberto Fujimori a letter saying that while "persistent atrocities by the armed opposition" made the demand for Dr.. Guzmán's execution understandable, "numerous studies carried out on the death penalty have not proved that it has a deterrent value greater than that of other penalties".

Alfredo Crespo, Dr. Guzmán's attorney, personally wrote to Sir Archard's office informing them that since the trial neither he nor anyone else had been allowed to see his client, who is being held in solitary confinement in an island military prison. He asked Amnesty to intervene in the face of a grave situation running counter to all international law. Amnesty leadership ignored this letter and kept it secret. Shortly afterwards, Dr. Crespo was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for "apology for terrorism", along with Jorge Cartagena, another prominent defense attorney for political prisoners. Amnesty had little to say about this either.

Now Sir Archard himself has finally gone to the scene. This is an indication of the great importance Amnesty gives to Peru. Yet while there, what does he say in this interview? "I am not particularly familiar with the trial of Abimael Guzmán". How can it be that a leading officer of Amnesty International responsible for Peru affairs is not familiar with one of the most grotesque, patently illegal by international standards and well-known trials of the century? Not to mention the fact that the staff of the International Emergency Committee was constantly in touch with Sir Archard. What he really meant in the interview is that he had already made up his mind and had his own agenda that did not include letting AI even consider taking up the case of Dr. Guzmán.

Why did Sir Archard go to Peru? Certainly not to "familiarize himself with the trial. Not to object to the death threats against Dr. Guzmán, nor to inquire into the potentially fatal conditions of his imprisonment . No, Sir Archard went to Peru principally to condemn the party Dr. Guzmán leads, and, by implication, the defense of Dr. Guzmán. It is no exaggeration to say that Sir Archard went to Peru to throw his weight against the international campaign to defend the life of Abimael Guzmán.

Peter Archard's claim to be "unfamiliar" with this case is by itself enough to cast doubt on his motives. But he says something just as inherently preposterous. In reply to the question "Who is the principal violator of human rights in Peru?", he answers: "I've had indications from a highly respected and reliable source that in terms of numbers, SL commits more violations, more unjustifiable assassinations, than the forces of order, but that is a preliminary indication. We have information that in 1992, the number of defenseless civilians killed by SL dramatically exceeded the number of civilians killed by the armed forces in their counterinsurgency operations."

It may be true that someone "informed" Sir Archard that SL (Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, as he calls them) has killed more people that the Armed Forces. After all, a man who has just shot someone can technically claim, "I never touched him!" But it is doubly dishonest for Sir Archard to lend his authority to a statement that cannot possibly be true, while distancing himself from it by attributing it to unknown sources and calling it "a preliminary indication" that he had not yet been able to "evaluate and corroborate".

The Peruvian government's own figures stated that during the 12 years of war in Peru through the end of August 1992, half of what it counts as 24,000 dead were "presumed subversives" and others killed by the Armed Forces, and that "civilians" -- with no reference to who killed them -- accounted for 42% of the dead. The exhaustive Bernales report the Peruvian Senate compiled a few years ago and Amnesty's own reports throughout the 1980s and up through 1991 all conclude that the vast majority of the dead in this uprising were killed by the Armed Forces. When, in the history of revolution anywhere in the world, has it ever been different?

Since Alberto Fujimori's April 1992 military coup, and especially since the capture of Dr. Guzmán last September, Lima has become as sandbagged and full of soldiers as Saigon. Soldiers swarm through the slums at night. The Association of Democratic Lawyers in Peru has been banned, its leaders killed or imprisoned, and international delegations that have gone to Lima have been expelled. The opposition press has been shut down or tamed by the arrest of its editors. Parliamentary committees were abolished along with the parliament. Opposition politicians are pouring into exile. Repression has been escalated and been extended to people formerly considered part of the camp of order. This has made it all but impossible for anyone not linked to the regime-except Sir Archard-to do any investigation, let alone publish the results in Peru. Now, all of a sudden, when President Fujimori has outlawed any criticism by Peruvians, labeling those who talk of the rights subversives "useful tools of subversion" to be brutally silenced, along comes Peter Archard and tells us that he has some anonymous, and, by his own admission, unverified "information" that runs counter to the thrust of the reports that appeared in the twelve years previous. Now, at the very moment when repression has reached its highest point, and when there is every indication that the number of killed and "disappeared" is rising sharply, it is the PCP, according to Sir Archard, who "commits more violations" of people's rights!

It has been established by many detailed reports, including AI's own, that since the beginning of this civil war, under three different presidents, Armed Forces policy has been to kill all prisoners and wipe out, from the ground or air, any village suspected of rebel sympathies. Dozens upon dozens of such massacres have been well documented, including, again, by AI itself. There has never been any evidence that the guerrillas have systematically followed an analogous policy-not even in Sir Archard's examples, which are based on mysterious, McCarthyite, pro-government "information" -- with no details and no sources-but contain just enough information to lack credibility. Here we will examine each and every specific accusation on the basis of what Sir Archard and Amnesty itself have said, as well as on information that has come out in the Peruvian press and television.

Given this, how can Sir Archard expect to be believed when he says "AI is neither a pro-Senderista nor an anti-Senderista organization. We hold no position in regards to the Sendero Luminoso organization, its ideology or its goals. The only concern of AI is that SL as well as the forces of order comply with respecting the life and physical integrity of every civilian who is not involved in this war and the same with the lives of the prisoners and wounded. "Sir Archard's own actions as head of Amnesty, including in this interview, which constitutes a message to all those following the case, are those of a man who believes that rebels have no rights.

In fact, his organization's officially stated stand on the civil war in Peru, given in its report, is that "Amnesty International does not question the right of the Peruvian government to conduct counterinsurgency operations against armed opposition groups. The difficulty faced by the Peruvian security forces in combating violent opposition groups is fully recognized by the organization. However, it is precisely in these circumstances that the government must act with extra vigilance to protect human rights, in order to ensure that the actions of armed opposition groups are not used to justify human rights violations by the security forces." This is bad enough, because it amounts to a blanket endorsement of the forces of order in Peru and a rejection of the right to revolution. But Amnesty's practical position is even worse. While unabashedly supporting the Fujimori regime's right to wipe out the rebellion, people like Archard do everything they can to slander the rebels and will not allow Amnesty to demand the minimum guarantees for Dr. Guzmán's life as a political prisoner that the International Red Cross demands for the captured soldiers in wartime.

The Amnesty leadership, as Sir Archard recalls, used to refer to the guerrillas and the Armed Forces as "two fires" between which the Peruvian people were caught. Now he is only interested in opposing "one fire". This is the unavoidable conclusion. It must be pointed out, however, that the "two fires" position formerly held by Amnesty and the kind of position represented by the quote above have served as political preparation for the active pro-counterinsurgency role being played by Sir Archard & Co. today.

It would seem that the more the Peruvian government abandons all preference and tramples upon the rights of the people, the more sternly Sir Archard and others condemn those who have risen up in arms against it. One reason why the AI leadership's position has gone from bad to worse on this issue is that the conflict in Peru has sharpened and the issue of which side will hold nationwide political power is now on the agenda. Whatever other considerations people like Archard may have, they find the prospect of PCP-led victory an evil that outweighs any possible "abuse" committed by the Peruvian government.

The international context also bears reflection. The U.S., Britain and other Western governments have long had their own reasons for manipulating talk about "human rights". Today Western governments are increasingly active in the "human rights" arena. One aspect of this is using it as pretext to invade. Another is mounting a campaign, with Amnesty and similar groups playing a crucial supporting role, in which insurgencies, rebellions and liberation movements are divided into acceptable or unacceptable according to the interests of the big powers. For instance, Kurdish fighters in Saddam Hussein's Iraq are good, Kurdish fighters in NATO Turkey are bad. Rebels fighting for the independence of East Timor against Indonesia, who enjoy some sympathy from Portugal and other quarters, may be good, but Tamil nationalists fighting in Sri Lanka are bad. PCP in Peru, supported by no foreign power, is the worst and anyone who talks about the rights of the Peruvian people is a terrorist or pro-terrorist.

In 1991, an Amnesty meeting in Yokohama, Japan, took a far-reaching decision to put more emphasis on condemning "human rights violations" by rebels as well as governments. In his interview, Sir Archard concedes that some earlier Amnesty reports had been "misunderstood" (!!!) as representing a position against the Fujimori regime. He attributes Amnesty's evolving position on Peru to an application of the Yokohama "mandate" to take into account "a broader range of victims": "Before (the mandate) centered around disappearances and the detained. This time we are here to investigate cases in which defenseless civilians are murdered. And secondly, it also includes the murder of members of the forces of order who are killed while in detention.

At first glance, this statement does not make sense, since throughout the Eighties AI did investigate massacres of civilians by the Armed Forces-but this is exactly what Sir Archard means to repudiate. As for "members of the forces of order killed while in detention", at first this seems even stranger, since no one has ever charged PCP with doing anything to captured soldiers other than offering them the choice of joining the guerrillas or going home. But again, what Sir Archard means is not exactly what he says-what he means to say is that under AI's new "mandate", in which "the forces of order" and the system they represent have the right to oppress and kill the people while the people have no right to resist through violence, now he is free to proclaim PCP the "principal violator" of the "human rights" of the Peruvian Army, Navy, Air Force, police, the Fujimori government and all the powers that back it. Here everyone can see the full application of the Yokohama "mandate": the head of one of the world's most disreputable dictators. A frank word must be said about Amnesty's faint criticisms of the Fujimori regime. Speaking in the U.S. in 1991, President Fujimori said, "I want Amnesty International and Americas Watch to denounce the human rights violations committed by the Peruvian government, by the Army or police. But I am also asking very clearly and loudly that [they] denounce the horrible crimes Sendero commits". Important U.S. State Department officials have made the same point from a different angle, saying that human rights organizations must continue to criticize the Peruvian government in order to retain their credibility in attacking the revolutionaries. It could be fairly said that without his unenthusiastic criticism of the Fujimori regime, Sir Archard's basically pro-regime stance would be worthless to President Fujimori and his supporters at home and abroad.

Amnesty's position on Peru has moved in lock-step with that of the U.S.: in 1991 the U.S., to create a more favorable political climate for further moves, temporarily suspended its aid programme to Peru, citing "a systematic pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights". That year, Amnesty issued its "Between Two Fires" report which purported to take an even-handed position against both sides in Peru. In 1992, after Alberto Fujimori's military coup and the suspension of Peru's Constitution, the US reinstated those programs, and prevented the Organization of American States from criticizing Mr Fujimori. US State Department representative Bernard Aronson told Congress, "the international community and respected human rights organizations must focus the spotlight of world attention on the threat which Sendero poses". Again, Amnesty followed suit. In September 1992, the US Senate passed a unique unanimous resolution congratulating the Fujimori regime for having captured Abimael Guzmán. US Congressman Torricelli, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs told Congress after Dr. Guzmán's arrest, "Personally, I think he should be executed." What has been Amnesty's response?

When the interviewer comments, "AI made and ambiguous statement when Abimael Guzmán was captured and put on trial. Do you continue to hold the same opinion or has it changed?" Sir Archard replies, "Our attempt was that the adequate proceedings for the carrying out of the appropriate process be established."

If Amnesty International wants to call itself an organization that defends "prisoners of conscience", then it must go much further than merely condemning the fact that Dr. Guzmán was given a military trial-which Sir Archard does vaguely question as "a special jurisdiction by which civilians should be judged", as though that were the most important issue and the whole thing would have been acceptable if only the judges had not been military officers. It must go further than condemning the trappings of the trial, though the fact that Amnesty has not come out against one of the most flagrant trials of the century even on formal legal grounds can only reveal to what extent Amnesty, by implication and silence, has already taken a very partisan position on the case of Dr. Guzmán.

The most important issue is that the only charge against Abimael Guzmán, who friend and foe alike recognizes as the leader of millions of poor Peruvians, was "treason"-leading a rebellion. If Amnesty is going to take the stand that rebel leaders may be killed or cruelly punished for their rebellion, then it should replace its symbol of a candle with a hangman's noose.

Many of the political prisoners that Amnesty has defended in the past, and the movements they led, have been accused of all sorts of things by the governments that held them. But this kind of position against a political movement-which under current circumstances, is nothing more than a underhanded way to take a position against a political prisoner - is unprecedented in AI's history. It is a crime-and an intolerable precedent that no one concerned with the people's rights can let stand.

If the Amnesty leadership tries to sustain this increasingly unsustainable position, they will find that rather than isolating the movement to defend the life of Dr. Guzmán, they are isolating themselves from an enormous and growing number of progressive people of all walks of life who will not tolerate the hypocrisy of those who claim to fight injustice but are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.