The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights, known as Movadef, has appealed a resolution that prevents the group from registering as a political party and participating in elections, daily El Comercio reported.
The appeal was presented on Friday to the National Election Board, or JNE. “With the appeal presented, the JNE will program a public audience in the next few days to receive the arguments from the claimants,” said Virgilio Hurtado, the director of the JNE’s electoral school. The time frame for the decision is 30 days.
The JNE rejected Movadef’s request last week. In its resolution, the JNE said that Movadef did not fulfill the requirements for registering as a political party. It said the group “was not committed” to the country’s democratic order.
Movadef has close ties to the Shining Path insurgency, which waged a bloody conflict against the state in the 1980s and 1990s leading to some 70,000 deaths.
Jaime Antezana, an expert on drug trafficking and terrorism, says Movadef is part of a plan by the Shining Path to launch a “political fight without arms.”
“[The Shining Path] affirms that the popular war it began on May 17, 1980 in Peru is over and that since 1993 the party is living a new and fourth stage of a political fight without arms,” Antezana was reported as saying by daily Peru.21. “The participation in the elections is a necessity of the moment.”
He says the defeat of the Shining Path, which included the 1992 capture of its founder Abimael Guzman, has led to a battle of ideas. “It isn’t enough to ban [the group], there is a necessity to battle it ideologically and politically,” Antezana says.
