RIGHTS-PERU: Death Squad Member Implicates Fujimori [View All]

Source: IPS News

RIGHTS-PERU: Death Squad Member Implicates Fujimori
By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Jan 29 (IPS) - In the early 1990s, the administration of then Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori negotiated an amnesty for an army death squad in exchange for keeping secret the government’s involvement in two massacres in which 25 people suspected of being left-wing guerrillas were killed.

Pedro Supo, a former leader of the Army Intelligence Service’s (SIE) Colina death squad, revealed that information when testifying Monday in the trial against Fujimori, who ruled the country from 1990 to 2000 and is now being tried for corruption and human rights abuses.

Supo told the court that as part of the agreement with the government to let off the hook the Colina group members who killed 15 people at a barbecue in the Barrios Altos neighbourhood in Lima and 10 others at the La Cantuta University in the early 1990s, the officers were to be paid 100,000 dollars each and the non-commissioned officers 50,000 dollars.

The aim "was not to put the subversives at the disposal of DINCOTE (the anti-terrorism police), but to track them down and identify and eliminate them," he said.

The former army intelligence agent said he took part in five operations to "eliminate" supposed Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

The operations included the murders of 15 local residents of Barrios Altos on Nov. 3, 1991; of six small farmers in the town of Pativilca on Jan. 29, 1992; of six more farmers in the town of Santa on May 2, 1992; and of journalist Pedro Yauri and six members of the Ventocilla family on Jun. 24, 1992.



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