Human rights crimes committed in Peru in the 1990s – initially amnestied but later tried in court – will be presented in the trial of Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón as evidence that crimes against humanity cannot be legally pardoned.

THE SPANISH Supreme Court charged Baltasar Garzón with overreaching his judicial powers in his attempts to investigate crimes committed during Spain’s 1936-1939 Civil War and the early years of the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco – crimes that were amnestied in 1977, two years after the dictator’s death.

Garzón rose to international fame in 1998 when he issued the warrant that resulted in former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s (1973-1990) arrest in London, where he was held under house arrest for 16 months for crimes against humanity. That move gained a foothold for the concept of “universal jurisdiction”: every state has an interest in bringing perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity to justice, regardless of where the crime was committed, or of the nationalities of the perpetrators or victims.

Fight against impunity

The Spanish magistrate is credited for breaking ground for establishing the legal principles that have led to trials for crimes against humanity committed during past dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay. Now Garzón has requested that attorney Ronald Gamarra present the Peruvian case at his trial, which is expected to take place later this year. Gamarra represented the families of the 15 victims of the 1991 massacre in Barrios Altos, a neighbourhood in central Lima, committed by a “death squad” of the Army Intelligence Service.

For authorising the massacre and the 1992 assassination of nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University, Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The perpetrators of both crimes benefitted from an amnesty that the Fujimori government issued in 1995 for human rights crimes committed by civilian or military agents dating back to May 1980. That year is considered the beginning of the armed conflict between Peru’s security forces and leftist guerrillas, and which lasted for two decades in this Andean nation.

Jo-Marie Burt, a visiting professor at Pontificate Catholic University of Peru, and associate professor at George Mason University in the US state of Virginia, is an expert on the Fujimori case. She told IPS, “Gamarra played a fundamental role in the fight against impunity in Peru, and that is why Garzón has asked him to testify at the unfortunate trial being brought against him.

Gamarra would serve “as witness that a current of legal interpretation exists, based on the expansion of International Criminal Law, which favours the persecution of those crimes committed in the context of crimes against humanity, despite the time passed since they were perpetrated and above the so-called laws of pardon,” states the missive. “Such testimony would have to be supported by the concrete cases you know,” the letter says. Gamarra has spent several years representing victims of the state-led repression during Peru’s internal conflict.

Crimes against humanity unpardonable

He was head of the human rights unit at the Ad Hoc Prosecution Office created in 2000 to investigate charges against Fujimori and his intelligence advisor, fellow convict Vladimiro Montesinos. Gamarra also participated in the process of extraditing the former president back to Peru from Chile. He now serves as secretary general of the National Human Rights Coordinator, a collective of more than 50 Peruvian non-governmental organisations.

Gamarra said that Garzón had rightly pursued the trials of Latin American dictators, like Chile’s Pinochet “establishing that crimes against humanity are unpardonable and that no ‘full stop,’ ‘forgive and forget,’ or ‘amnesty for all’ laws are above the jurisprudence that penalises authors of violations of human rights.”

ÁNGEL PÁEZ
IPS