Peruvian judge orders 118 military arrests
A Peruvian judge has ordered the arrest of 118 current and retired soldiers for their alleged involvement in the 1988 massacre of peasants in an Andean village.
Judge Miluska Cano Lopez issued the arrest order in connection with the torture and killing of more than two dozen villagers in Cayara on May 14, 1988, and other human rights violations in two neighbouring hamlets in the region of Ayacucho, 250 miles south-east of Lima.
The initial attack was in response to the ambush of an army patrol by Maoist Shining Path guerrillas operating in the area.
Cano Lopez’s order announced yesterday comes a month after another judge issued arrest warrants for 29 current and former military officials for a similar 1985 massacre of 72 peasants in Accomarca, another village in the Ayacucho region, where the Shining Path was founded.
The arrest orders pit Peru’s civilian courts against its military justice system, which historically has jurisdiction over military personnel implicated in human rights abuse cases but rarely metes out harsh punishments.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in February 1992 concluded the Peruvian army massacred at least 26 peasants in Cayara on May 14, 1988, then a week later executed three more peasants, before embarking on a systematic murder spree of eight witnesses.
A ninth, and final, witness, a 22-year-old nurse, was murdered in September 1989, human rights groups said.
The nurse’s parents and neighbours said they watched, helpless, as eight men in army uniforms, their faces hidden by black ski masks, broke down her front door in Ayacucho, dragged her into the street and fired three bullets into her head and chest.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the judicial arm of the Organisation of American States, refused to take up the Cayara case because it was filed after the statutory deadline.
The case was revived by Peru’s government-appointed truth commission, which in its final 2003 report blamed state security forces for the deaths of nearly half of an estimated 70,000 people killed during Peru’s bloody insurgency between 1980-2000.
