Alvaro Vargas Llosa: How a once-untouchable strongman, Fujimori, was brought low
[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the editor of "Lessons from the Poor."]
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison this week by Peru's Supreme Court in connection with two massacres committed by a death squad known as the Colina group, as well as the kidnapping of a journalist and a businessman. The precedent-setting trial, which international observers have said met high standards of due process, establishes the responsibility of those who govern over dirty wars conducted without written orders.
Between 1991 and 1992, the Colina group, an army detachment charged with combating the terrorist organization Shining Path, killed at least 50 Peruvians in nine separate actions. Fujimori's trial focused on two of them--the deaths of 15 people in November 1991 during a barbecue in the poor Lima neighborhood of Barrios Altos, and the kidnapping and killing, in July 1992, of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University. Fujimori contended that the absence of written or audiovisual proof that he had given the orders warranted his acquittal.
But prosecutors built a devastating case demonstrating Fujimori's responsibility for the strategy, the operational structure and the political cover-up related to the Colina group's activities. The key figure in unlocking the case was Vladimiro Montesinos, a jailed army captain with a history of treason who would never have commanded the colossal power that he did without the only person who could delegate it to him--Fujimori himself....
Read entire article at New Republic
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison this week by Peru's Supreme Court in connection with two massacres committed by a death squad known as the Colina group, as well as the kidnapping of a journalist and a businessman. The precedent-setting trial, which international observers have said met high standards of due process, establishes the responsibility of those who govern over dirty wars conducted without written orders.
Between 1991 and 1992, the Colina group, an army detachment charged with combating the terrorist organization Shining Path, killed at least 50 Peruvians in nine separate actions. Fujimori's trial focused on two of them--the deaths of 15 people in November 1991 during a barbecue in the poor Lima neighborhood of Barrios Altos, and the kidnapping and killing, in July 1992, of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University. Fujimori contended that the absence of written or audiovisual proof that he had given the orders warranted his acquittal.
But prosecutors built a devastating case demonstrating Fujimori's responsibility for the strategy, the operational structure and the political cover-up related to the Colina group's activities. The key figure in unlocking the case was Vladimiro Montesinos, a jailed army captain with a history of treason who would never have commanded the colossal power that he did without the only person who could delegate it to him--Fujimori himself....
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