Military Promotes Officer Convicted of Mass Murder
Had ordered torture and killing of 69 peasants suspected of being PCP sympathizersFrom Peru Action & News, Summer 1999. The following are direct excerpts from Associated Press, May 29, 1999:
An army officer convicted of ordering the worst massacre of civilians in recent Peruvian history is still in active service and has risen through the ranks, human rights groups said Saturday.
Lt. Telmo Hurtado was sentenced to six years in prison in 1992 by a military court for ordering his troops to torture and kill 69 villagers in 1985 in the mountain village Accomarca, 250 miles southeast of Lima. All the victims were Indian women, children and village elders. The women were raped before they were killed. The young men had left the village. Hurtado suspected residents of cooperating with leftist Shining Path guerrillas.
But human rights investigators this week found Hurtado serving on the Milagros military base in Bagua, near the border with Ecuador in Peru’s Amazon jungle. He had been promoted from lieutenant to major and put in charge of a local civilian militia formed to fight rebels.
“Accomarca was the most powerful symbol of human rights violations in Peru, Hurtado’s case shows how the armed forces use the military justice system as a mechanism for impunity,” said a human rights worker. Activists don’t know if Hurtado served any prison time, but suspect he served little or none. In 1995, President Alberto Fujimori granted a blanket amnesty to all soldiers charged with human rights violations.
Hurtado’s battalion arrived in Accomarca, an impoverished village of subsistence farmers in the Andes Mountains, at 7 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1985, and separated the women from the rest. The women were raped, then led into a hut. The boys and elderly were put into a second hut. Soldiers then riddled the flimsy hovels with machine gun fire, tossed in grenades and set the hovels on fire, witnesses testified.
In testimony before a military investigation committee, Hurtado had said he thought his actions were justifiable and that “he would do it again.”
New Letters from Revolutionary Prisoners
People in Peru are facing horrendous crimes being committed by the government against political prisoners. These atrocities against the people cannot be allowed to go on. Our voices of protest must be heard, especially here in the U.S.— the main backer of the fascist Fujimori regime.Political prisoners at the Women’s Maximum Security Prison in Chorrillos, and their families, wrote an open letter to the international community about their conditions. Minimal nutrition is provided once a day consisting of oatmeal, bread, rice, a potato, and sugar water (sometimes laced with sedatives). Three people are crammed into cold and humid 8x8 foot cement cells, including the space for toilet and drainage. They receive food through an opening at the floor level, a short distance from the hole that serves as toilet. They are kept locked-down in these cells 23 hours a day, with almost no light. “The treatment given our relatives is comparable to that given to animals at a zoo.” There is a long list of debilitating medical conditions that prisoners suffer because of this treatment.
These life-threatening conditions exist at all the prisons that house political prisoners in Peru. There is also a letter from male prisoners at Lima’s Canto Grande Prison. The inhuman treatment is an attempt to break the spirit of the more than 4,000 people who have been imprisoned under the Fujimori regime’s draconian justice system— instituted as part of the US-led counter-insurgency against the People’s War led by the Communist Party of Peru. Even those merely suspected of sympathizing with the revolutionary struggle can face being railroaded into prison by secret military and civilian tribunals.
International pressure has made a difference. In a recent appeal for increased activity in defense of the political prisoners, Will Harrell of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild, wrote:
“The inhuman conditions of the prisons in Peru have been a matter of common knowledge internationally for years. (Even noted, if minimally, in the New York Times.) But the Fujimori regime continues to employ the most brutal means to try to crush all resistance. [These letters] come from women and men inside two of the worst hell holes. We urge you to copy, circulate and publicize [their] appeal and to contact Amnesty International and other appropriate organizations to urge them to intensify efforts to expose, condemn and demand changes in these horrific prison conditions.”
- Petition from Families and Detainees of the Women's
Maximum Security Prison in Chorrillos, Sept 1998 - Petition from Men Prisoners at Canto Grande, Sept 1998
Nationwide Protests Target Dictatorship
From Peru Action & News, Summer 1999
[The regime] has only achieved transitory and partial gains that go to the exclusive benefit of a handful of Peruvian and foreign exploiters. The general crisis is gnawing away at them . . . In the interests of this handful of bloodsuckers they have had to go down on their knees before imperialism, principally Yankee imperialism, and throw the entire Peruvian people into deeper ruin.
-– 1998 PCP document
