Jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori told state prosecutor Jose Antonio Peláez today that two laws passed during his administration inadvertently benefited members of the Colina group death squad, which was responsible for killing 25 people suspected of collaborating with the Shining Path insurgency.
Fujimori said the 1994 Cantuta law and 1995 Amnesty law were intended to stabilize Peru after 15 years of internal conflict. “I considered it necessary to look for a peaceful solution after 14 or 15 years of internal war,” said Fujimori. “They were part of a general plan by the government to lead Peru to peace.”
The Cantuta law allowed members of the Colina group to be prosecuted for the La Cantuta murders in a military court, where the head of the death squad, Major Santiago Martin Rivas, received a 20-year prison sentence.
A year later, he and the rest of Colina group were pardoned under a sweeping Amnesty law, which provided immunity for police officers, military personnel and civilians convicted or accused of human rights violations during the internal war.
Fujimori told prosecutors on Monday he first learned of the Colina group’s existence in 1993, when his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, told him “there was the possibility that this group, of Martin Rivas and the others, had committed the crimes.”
Fujimori is accused of authorizing the Colina group to kill 15 people in Lima’s Barrios Altos district in 1991 and nine students and one professor at La Cantuta University in 1992. At the time, Fujimori temporarily resided in the intelligence headquarters that the Colina group used as its base of operations, and decorated its members with medals of honor soon after the Barrios Altos massacre.
He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
