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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Peru's Shining Path Leaders to Face Trial |
| 2004-10-19 |
| Peru plans to hold a new trial next month before a civilian court for imprisoned Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman and 17 other top leaders of the Maoist insurgency, court officials said Monday. The trial is to begin Nov. 5 in a newly equipped courtroom inside the maximum security naval base prison where Guzman has been held for the last 12 years. The trial date was announced on the Web page of Peru's judiciary. Guzman, 69, was captured in September 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for treason by hooded military court judges under strict anti-terrorism laws approved by then-President Alberto Fujimori, who fled Peru in 2000 amid mounting corruption scandals. Guzman was granted a new trial with his jailed co-defendants last year after Peru's highest constitutional court struck down Fujimori's anti-terrorism measures in January 2003 for failing to meet international standards of due process. Among his co-defendants are Elena Iparraguirre, his longtime lover and top guerrilla aide, who occupies a neighboring prison cell, and Oscar Ramirez — also known by his nom de guerre "Feliciano" — who led the Shining Path after Guzman's arrest until his capture in 1999. Prosecutors will seek life sentences for Guzman, Iparraguirre, Ramirez and six other top leaders, and 22- to 25-year sentences for the nine remaining defendants. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Guzman was known to his followers as President Gonzalo, inspiring cultish obedience from a guerrilla army that grew to as many as 10,000 armed fighters before his capture in a Lima safehouse. By the time he called for a cease-fire a year after his capture — as part of a deal to obtain better prison conditions — guerrilla violence had claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced at least 600,000 people and caused an estimated $22 billion in damage. A government-appointed truth commission reported in 2003 that Shining Path was responsible for more than half of the nearly 70,000 people killed between 1980 and 2000 by rebels and military forces sent to crush the insurgency. The self-proclaimed "Fourth Sword of Marxism" after Marx, Lenin and Mao, Guzman preached a messianic vision of a classless utopia based on pure communism. He advocated a peasant revolution in which rebels would first gain control of the countryside, then advance to the cities. Shining Path rebels bombed electrical towers, bridges and factories, assassinated mayors and massacred villagers to cross what Guzman called the "river of blood." The violence dropped off after Guzman's capture, although several hundred guerrillas continue to operate in Peru's highland jungles, where they run protection for cocaine traffickers. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Peru's highest constitutional court struck down Fujimori's anti-terrorism measures in January 2003 for failing to meet international standards of due process. I guess Peru's highest court espouses the JFKerry "global test" theory of abdication of national sovernity. |
| Posted by: RN 2004-10-19 9:13:57 AM |