Peru Under Pressure to Enforce Torture Law

LIMA, Peru — Traveling salesman Miguel Andahua was entering a pharmacy in a sleepy Amazon jungle town to peddle medicine when armed men in sunglasses grabbed him and hurled him into a truck.

They took Andahua, 35, to a military base in Aguaytia, 235 miles northeast of Lima, and savagely beat him, demanding he confess to being a Shining Path rebel and name his contacts, he says.

Soldiers crushed his testicles and forced a wooden club into his rectum, he says, trembling, eyes averted. They sent scorching currents of electricity through his body and held his head under soapy water repeatedly until he almost drowned.

Andahua was released after four days with no explanation. His arms and legs are dotted with red scars where electric cables were attached, and he is undergoing psychiatric treatment.

Human rights groups are pressing to have Andahua’s and other cases of alleged torture tried under a groundbreaking 1998 law that makes torture a crime in Peru.

They hope the law will end the practice, which became common during the government’s war against leftist rebels that left 30,000 dead and thousands missing before winding down in the early 1990s.

A policeman in the highland department of Ayacucho, a former guerrilla stronghold, is the first person charged under the law. Capt. Augusto Gutierrez is accused of fatally torturing farmhand Lucas Huaman, 65, in an attempt to make him confess to stealing $600 from his boss.

Human rights activists say the case is a litmus test for this impoverished Andean country.

“The law is a small but important first step toward ending the practice of torture in Peru,” said Carlos Rivera, a lawyer with Peru’s Legal Defense Institute, an independent judicial watchdog. “It is a chink in the armor of impunity that has traditionally protected torturers.”

For the first time, the law allows soldiers and police officers to be tried in civilian courts.

Military and police torturers were previously tried by secret military courts in cases of “serious injury” or “abuse of authority.”

Penalties were light and did not include jail time, Rivera said. No soldier or police officer, besides Gutierrez, is in jail for allegedly torturing suspects, he said.

President Alberto Fujimori granted a blanket amnesty in 1995 to all security force members charged with human rights violations. The new law covers only torture cases that occurred after its enactment.

Under the law, torturers face prison sentence of five to 10 years, or eight to 20 years if a victim dies.

The law, which applies to both civilians and security forces, defines torture as any action that inflicts physical or mental suffering “to obtain a confession or information from a person or third party, punish a person for an act he or she did or are suspected to have done, or intimidate or coerce that person.”

Rights activists say torture of rebel or criminal suspects is still common in military and police bases across Peru despite a sharp reduction in political violence since the capture of top rebel leaders in 1992.

Methods in Peru include beatings, electric shocks, near drowning, rape and hanging victims by ropes tied to their hands behind their backs, according to a 1998 U.S. State Department human rights report.

The torture law is a step toward healing the wounds left by the war, said Congressman Daniel Espichan, a close ally of the military who headed the commission that drafted the law.

“In Peru, there was no law against torture. Given the nation’s new reality, we judged that one was needed,” Espichan said.

Rebels still operate in remote parts of Peru’s Amazon jungle and Andes mountains. About 20% of Peruvians live in emergency zones where civil rights are suspended and soldiers are free to detain suspects at will.

“We have found the same torture methods used on police and military bases across Peru, suggesting the methods are taught,” said Sofia Macher, director of Peru’s National Human Rights Coordinating Office.

Macher recounted a 1997 trip that a human rights delegation she led made to a remote hamlet in the jungle where troops were searching for a group of Tupac Amaru rebels.

Soldiers had rounded up the hamlet’s young people and beat and tortured many to extract information about the rebels’ whereabouts, she said.

“When we got there, the young people were in terrible shape. The car batteries with cables and tubs of soapy water used to torture them were still sitting in the field,” she said.

Local prosecutors in remote areas where military authorities wield complete control are often too scared to press charges and victims are too frightened to file charges, Macher said.

“The law alone is not enough,” Rivera added. “We are also going to need courageous prosecutors, judges and victims if we are going to end torture in Peru.”