Crime, Human Rights, Law & Justice, Politics

Alberto Fujimori to Face Trial in Pativilca Case

Alberto Fujimori, home with his children, after being granted a presidential pardon.

When former President Alberto Fujimori was granted his controversial pardon on Christmas Eve last year, one of the questions was whether this would exclude him from any pending investigation or trial.

This week in a unanimous vote, the National Criminal Court ruled that the pardon did not include exemption from this new trial, in which Fujimori is a defendant. The trial is set to begin in June this year.

“This is a historic decision,” said criminal lawyer Carlos Rivera of the Legal Defense Institute, IDL.

Fujimori is charged with command responsibility in the murder in 1992 of six men in the town of Pativilca, a coastal farming area of sugar cane fields near Barranca, 195 km north of Lima.

But Fujimori is only one of the defendants.

Also being charged in the case are Fujimori’s former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos,  the former commander in chief of the armed forces Gen. Nicolás Hermoza, former intelligence chief Julio Salazar Monroe, and 20 other defendants.

At the tomb of Cesar Rodriguez Esquivel, who was 29 years old when he was murdered by the Colina Group death squad in Pativilca. Source: Diario UNO

In late January 1992, on orders from General Hermoza, some 20 members of the Colina Group death squad drove north from Lima for three hours to Pativilca, where between 2:30 and 4 a.m.  they searched for and forcibly removed six men from their homes, including a school teacher, farmers and an 18-year-old mechanical engineering student. The victims were tortured before being killed —burn marks from a blow torch were just one of the harsh methods used— and their bodies were left in a nearby cane field.   A witness said there was a woman in the death squad, that they carried assault weapons and drove military pick-up trucks.

The court documents allege that a businessman, in a dispute over lands in the area, falsely accused the people who lived on the properties of being Shining Path rebels, and had asked a relative of General Hermoza to “lend a hand” in solving the issue.

A similar crime was committed by the Colina Group in May the same year, further north, in the province of Santa in the Ancash region, where nine men were murdered, just two months before the assassination in Lima of nine students and a professor from the La Cantuta teaching university.  According to Rivera of the Legal Defense Institute, similar assassinations were carried out in Ayacucho and Huancavelica.

The allegations have been under investigation for many years, but it was only in February 2007 that a solid case began to take shape when one of the members of the Colina Group death squad confessed to the crime, one of many “special operations”, and alleged that President Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos knew of the orders given by General Hermoza.    Martin Rivas, who headed the death squad, said the orders for all operations came from “very up high.”

There was insufficient evidence at the time to include the case in the request that Peru filed months later in Chile to extradite Alberto Fujimori. The extradition file included seven criminal charges, five of which were accepted by Chile.

By last year, however, a full case had been prepared and Peru filed the request before the Chilean Supreme Court, which ruled to include this case in the extradition file.

“Such unlawful violation of fundamental human values deserves such a strong rejection of the universal conscience that no convention, pact or positive law can repeal, incapacitate or disguise them,” reads part of the Supreme Court ruling.

Just months after he was elected for a third (illicit) term in July 2000, Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan when videos surfaced of bribes being paid by Montesinos not only to members of Congress to switch benches under cover, but to owners of communications media.

Fujimori claimed his Japanese citizenship and unsuccessfully ran for a parliament seat in the Japanese Diet.  Then late in 2005, he suddenly arrived in Chile, allegedly to surreptitiously cross the border into Peru and begin campaigning for the next presidential elections in 2006.

Fujimori was extradited to Peru in late 2008, and was tried and convicted of crimes in five different cases. He was still serving the 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity (the La Cantuta and Barrios Altos case) when he was pardoned at Christmas in 2017.

 

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