Human Rights
Latin America and BeyondFall 2003
The Peruvian Commission on Truth and Reconciliation
Speech of Presentation of The Final ReportSalomón Lerner Febres
Your Excellency President of the Republic, President of the Council of Ministers, distinguished Ministers of State, Congressmen and women, People's Ombudsman, high authorities of the State, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Armed Forces, General Commanders of the Institutes of the Armed Forces and the National Police, members of the diplomatic corps accredited in Peru, representatives of victims' organizations, ladies and gentlemen:
Today Peru is confronting a time of national shame. With anteriority, our history has registered more than a difficult patch, lamentable times of deep depression or social deterioration. But, most surely, none of those moments deserves to be stamped as firmly with the seal of shame and dishonor as that which we are obligated to relate here.
The two final decades of the 20th century are-it's necessary to say without beating around the bush-a mark of horror and dishonor for the Peruvian State and society.
Utter Exclusion
When the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation was set up two years ago, we were given a vast and difficult task: to investigate and make public the truth about two decades of political origin that began in Peru in 1980. As we finish our labor, we would like to present this truth with a fact that- although it is overwhelming-is at the same time insufficient to understand the magnitude of the tragedy experienced in our country: the Commission has determined that the number of fatal victims in the last 20 years most likely exceeded 69,000 Peruvian men and women, dead or disappeared at the hands of subversive organizations or State agents.
It has not been easy and even less pleasurable to arrive at this figure, a statistic that seems ridiculously high even as I speak it. And, nevertheless, it is one of the truths with which Peru today is going to have to learn to live if it truly wishes to become what it proposed when it became a Republic. That is, a country of human beings equal in dignity, in which the death of each citizen counts as its own misfortune, and in which each human loss-if it is a result of an attack, crime or abuse-puts into motion the wheels of justice to compensate for the loss and to punish those responsible.
Nothing like this, or almost nothing, happened during the two decades of violence we were called upon to investigate. Neither justice nor restitution nor sanctions. Even worse, there has never even existed the memory of what occurred. That leads us to believe that we are still living in a country in which exclusion is so absolute that it is possible for tens of thousands of citizens to disappear without anyone in the integrated society-the society of the non-excluded-even noticing.
Effectively, we Peruvians tend to say, in our worst previous case scenarios, that the violence left 35,000 lives lost. What does it say about our political community, now that we know that 35,000 more of our brothers and sisters are missing that no one missed then?
Concrete responsibility must be established and made public; the country and the State cannot permit impunity. We have found much proof and indications that point in the direction of those responsible for serious crimes and, respecting the proper procedures, we will turn our findings over to the appropriate institutions so they can carry out the law. The Commission on Truth and Reconciliation demands and encourages Peruvian society as a whole to accompany it in this demand that criminal justice system act immediately, without a spirit of revenge, but in an energetic way and without any hesitation.
A Double Scandal
We were asked to investigate the truth about the violence, Mister President, and we assumed this task with seriousness and rigor, without shrillness. However, at the same time, we decided not to spare our fellow countrymen and women from even an iota of the history they have the right to know about. In this manner, we have had to rescue and pile up one by one, year after year, the names of dozens of Peruvians who once existed, who ought to exist now and yet are no longer. And the list that we hand over to the nation today is much too long for Peru to keep talking about errors or excesses by those who participated directly in these crimes. And the truth that we have found is also too sweeping for any government authority or ordinary citizen to claim ignorance as a defense.
The report we hand over today, therefore, is a double scandal. To a large degree, it is the scandal of murders, disappearances and torture. It is also a scandal about the ineptitude, slackness and indifference of those who could have stopped this humanitarian catastrophe and didn't.
The statistics are shocking, but at the same time, they disgracefully do not express the real severity of the facts. The numbers are not sufficient to illustrate for us the experience of suffering and the horror that stamped out its victims. In this report, we faithfully carry out the task we were given, as well as the task we set for ourselves to publicly expose the tragedy as the work of human beings being made to suffer by other human beings. Of every four victims of the violence, three were peasants whose native tongue was Quechua, a large segment of the population that has generally been overlooked-and on occasions disdained-by the State and by the urban society that does enjoy of the benefits of a political community.
Racial insult-verbal aggression against dispossessed persons-rings out like an abominable chorus preceding a blow, a son or daughter's kidnapping, a point-blank gunshot. One gets angry listening to strategic explanations for why this was indicated as a byproduct of war to wipe out this or that peasant community or to subject entire ethnic groups to slavery and forced displacement under threat of death. Much has been written about the cultural, social and economic displacement persisting in Peruvian society. Neither State authorities nor citizens have done much to combat such a stigma on our community. This Report demonstrates to the country and to the world that it is impossible to leave with disparagement, that it is a sickness that causes tangible and permanent damage. As of today, the name of thousands of dead and disappeared will be registered here, in these pages, to remind us of these individuals.
Concrete responsibility must be established and made public; the country and the State cannot permit impunity. We have found much proof and indications that point in the direction of those responsible for serious crimes and, respecting the proper procedures, we will turn our findings over to the appropriate institutions so they can carry out the law. The Commission on Truth and Reconciliation demands and encourages Peruvian society as a whole to accompany it in this demand that criminal justice system act immediately, without a spirit of revenge, but in an energetic way and without any hesitation.
However, there is something deeper here than accessing individual responsibilities. We have found that the crimes committed against the Peruvian population disgracefully were not isolated acts attributable to isolated perverse individuals who transgressed the norms of their organizations. Rather, our field research with testimonies from 17,000 victims has allowed us to categorically denounce the massive perpetration of crimes, in many cases coordinated or planned by the organizations or institutions taking part directly in the conflict. In these pages, we show the manner in which the annihilation of communities or the devastation of certain villages were systematically anticipated in the strategy of the so-called "Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path." The captivity of defenseless populations, systematic mistreatment, cruel murder as a way of setting an example and inspiring fear, made up a methodology of terror at the service of a single objective: the achievement of power, considered even greater than human life, through a bloody revolution. The invocation of "strategic reasons," which camoflagued the will for destruction above all basic rights, was a death sentence for thousands of Peruvian citizens. Such a will towards death embedded in the Shining Path doctrine cannot be distinguished from its essence as a movement in these twenty years. The sinister logic spelled out without evasion in the declarations of the representatives of this organization was ratified in their willingness to inflict death through the most extreme cruelty in order to achieve their objectives.
There was an enormous challenge, and it was the obligation of the State and its agents to defend the life and integrity of the population with legal arms. Democratic peoples support and demand order, based on their constitution and legal institutions, but that order can only be one that guarantees the right to life and respect for personal integrity. Disgracefully, within the struggle that the State and its agents did not initiate and whose justification was the defense of the society that was under attack, those in charge of this mission sometimes did not understand their obligations.
In the course of our investigation, keeping in mind the norms of international law that regulate the civilized life of nations and the norms of a just war, we have sorrowfully concluded that agents of the Armed Forces and the Police participated in the systematic or generalized practice of human rights abuses and therefore grounds exist to point out the commission of crimes against humanity. Extrajudicial executions, disappearances, massacres, torture, sexual violence, directed principally against women, and other equally condemnable crimes-because of their repeated and widespread nature-make up a systematic pattern of human rights violations that the Peruvian State and its agents must admit and rectify.
So much death and suffering cannot take place and escalate just because of some mechanical action by some members of an institution or an organization. It needs, as a complement, the complicity, the consent or, at the very least, the willful blindness of those who had the authority and therefore the capacity to prevent these actions. The political class that governed or had some quota of official power in those years have to do a lot of serious explaining to Peru. We have carried out a faithful reconstruction of this history and we have become convinced that the history would not have been so terrible without the indifference, the passivity or the simple incapacity of those who held the highest public offices at that time. This Report points out that the responsibilities of this political class, and leads us to think that political class should assume more seriously the blame for the tragic fate of the fellow countrymen and women that they governed. The people who asked for the votes of the citizens in order to have the honor of leading our State and our democracy; those people who took an oath to enforce the Constitution enacted by Peruvians as an expression of their freedom, chose too easily to surrender to the Armed Forces those powers the Nation had vested in them as elected officials. In this manner, the institutions of a recently achieved democracy were left under guardianship; the impression was fomented that constitutional principles were noble but inadequate ideals for governing people who were disparaged to the point of ignoring their clamor, repeating in this fashion the old practice of relegating their petitions to the place the voice of the humble has always been relegated in the course of our history: oblivion.
The armed struggle unleashed in our country by the subversive forces bit by bit involved all sectors and institutions of the society, causing terrible injustice and leaving in its wake death and desolation. Faced with this situation, the nation has known how to react with firmness, although a tardy fashion-interpreting the sign of the times as an opportune moment to make a conscientious examination about the meaning and causes of those events. We have made the decision not to forget, to recuperate memory, to try to find the truth. This time of national shame must also be interpreted as a time for truth.
Making the nation's desire its own, the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation has assumed as its task the clarification of truth understood fundamentally in an ethical sense. In this manner, we take up the voluntary decision to submit to an investigation motivated by the clear conscience that grave injustices have been committed among ourselves that require explanation and accountability to bring about reconciliation in our society. The roots of our concern for the truth, as well as the expectations we have for its discovery, demonstrate the strictly moral dimension of this undertaking. We have sought to commit the entire nation to the activities of listening to and investigating what happened in Peru so that the truth will be recognized among all of us Peruvians.
It is at the same time negating oblivion and pulling away from the culture of covering things up. To bring to light that which has lurked in the shadows and to recuperate memory are different ways of referring to the same thing. Already in the dawn of our civilization, the common reference point that unites both experiences is the relationship between humankind and justice.
Indeed, the ethical exigency of memory arose in reaction to the excess with which mankind forgot the divine and resorted to hubris, the arrogance that led men to believe they were gods. Memory-the act of not forgetting-served to remind us that we are mortals in the open world. It is thus justice reigns giving everyone his or her place.
The transgression of the social order through war and violence is precisely the excess that forgets the essential, that hides the essence of our nature as human beings. In the face of this, memory is necessary to cast a light and thus assign responsibility. Truth that is memory can only be fully realized in the carrying out of justice.
Because of this, this time of shame and of truth is also a time of justice.
The blood of tens of thousands fellow countrymen and women cries out for the nation from the traces of the tragedy: the murders and selective and collective executions, the common graves, the displaced population, the suffering mothers and children, the disappeared and the dispossessed. We cannot remain indifferent before a truth of this nature. "Because we suffer," declared Sophocles in the heart of tragedy, "we recognize that we have acted badly." In effect, it is a matter of human suffering deliberately and willfully produced. We are not looking at a fatality, as in the case of a natural catastrophe, but at an injustice that could have been and should have been avoided.
Who is responsible?
In the strict sense of the penal code, the responsibility falls on those who directly cause the crime, on its instigators and accomplices and, above all, on those who-having the power to prevent the crime-evaded their responsibility. They will all, then, be identified, put on trial and sentenced according to the law. The Commission on Truth and Reconciliation has compiled for this purpose materials and files on specific cases, and will turn over this information to the judicial officials of this country so that they may act in accordance with the law. But in a deeper sense, precisely in the moral sense, the responsibility falls on all those people who, in one form or another, through action or omission, for their position and the role that they played within the society, did not know how to do what was necessary to impede the tragedy that was being produced nor did they stop the tragedy from reaching such magnitude. On their shoulders falls the burden of a moral debt that cannot be shaken off.
Now then, ethical responsibility is not restricted to our relationship with the acts of the past. For the country's future, that future of harmony to which we aspire, in which violence is brought to an end and more democratic relations reign among Peruvians, we all share responsibility. The justice that is demanded is not only of a legal nature. It is also a demand for a more rewarding life in the future, a promise of equity and solidarity, precisely because it is rooted in the feeling and conviction that we did not do what we should have at the hour of the tragedy. Because it has arisen from the questions about the suffering of our fellow countrymen and women, the responsibility for the future of the country has been imposed as a direct and urgent obligation, both in the personal and institutional sense.
The hour has come to reflect on the responsibility that is incumbent on all of us. It is a moment to commit ourselves to the defense of the absolute value of human life and to express with actions our solidarity with those Peruvians who have been unjustly treated. In that manner, our time is one of shame, of truth and of justice, but also one of reconciliation.
There are those who consider the history of our country in a fatalistic sense, as if the evil occurring here was atavistic or inevitable, and there are those who tend to consider Peru's history in a sarcastic manner as if the evil did not have anything to do with our own lives and took place in an alien setting that can be subject to ridicule. Both attitudes reveal a problem of identity and of self-esteem that do not let people find in themselves or in the national memory the forces that will help to change, to improve, the couse of things. The national shame, which we all feel when we become aware of the tragedy, should not just be a negative experience nor should it prevail over the hidden richness of our past. Only in this way can we adopt a constructive attitude toward the future. In the present hour, we ought to overcome the attitude of the spectator who succumbs, filled with shame, to the temptations of fatalism or sarcasm. In the present hour, we ought to adopt the attitude of an agent capable of finding in our own history the moral force for the necessary recuperation of the nation. It is the ethical sense of responsibility that permits us to assume our damaged identity with an attitude of hope.
Gathering up the traces of our memory as a nation, we cannot refrain from warning about the similarity between the present situation and the special circumstances that the country experienced in the transition toward the 20th century. The clearest of the motives that sparked the discussion for the so-called "Generation of 900" was precisely the tragic outcome of the War of Pacific. Moreover, the experience of war was directly associated with the perception of a national failure. This explains the introspective look that all the protagonists shared, as well as the pleading tone to remake the country from the ruins of defeat. The historical moment was conceived, from the ethical-political point of view, as a unique opportunity to contemplate a collective effort for national reconstruction.
As if in a crucible of dreams and frustrated expectations, debates emerged that would be a foretaste of the tragic evolution of the 20th century. One must rescue from these experiences the positive aspects and that can provide lessons in regards to the profound fracture that the country would later suffer. The reflections carried out by the Generation of 900 expressed in ideal terms on one hand the fragmentation and disintegration of the Peruvian memory, and on the other hand the urgent need to understand ourselves.
Today, as in yesteryears, because of the nature of the conflict lived through, as well as for the severity of social problems and the accompanying ideological confrontations, there is no doubt that the central question for the rethinking of the national memory is to link it closely with the question of future reconciliation. As in the case of last century's debates, there is also now a lived experience that can convert itself into an opportunity for imagining the ethical transformation of society. In order to truly take advantage of this opportunity, many conditions will have to be fulfilled, and the Final Report that we present now wishes to be the first step in that direction. Many others steps will have to be added to this first one before it can be considered that a new form of living together among Peruvians has been established and before the progressive construction of full citizenship for all. The banishing of exclusion and violence, the response from the State in a just manner towards the society it represents and the assumption of responsibilities by institutions and persons for the worth contained in life and human dignity are some of the guideposts that mark the advance of a long and difficult path.
We live difficult and painful times in this country, but they are also equally promising times, times of change that represent an immense challenge to the wisdom and freedom of all Peruvians. It is a time of national shame in which we ought to shudder deeply as we become aware of the magnitude of the tragedy lived by so many of our fellow countrymen and women. It is a time of truth, in which we must confront ourselves with the crude history of crime that we have lived in the last decades and we also ought to become conscious of the moral significance of the effort to recall what was lived through. It is a time of justice: to recognize and repair to the degree possible the suffering of the victims and to bring to justice the perpetrators of the acts of violence, And finally, it is a time of national reconciliation that should permit us to recuperate our wounded identity in an optimistic fashion to give ourselves a new opportunity to forge a social agreement in truly democratic conditions.
Mr. President:
The report that we present to you, and through you to the entire nation, contains a serious and responsible effort of collective reflection about the violence that Peru has lived through since May 1980. The report has been elaborated on the basis of 16,986 testimonies collected throughout the national territory from the mouths of thousands of Peruvian men and women, most of them from humble backgrounds, who opened their doors and hearts to us, who consented to remember-for the instruction of their fellow countrymen and women-a truth that any person would want to forget, who had the courage to point out those responsible for grave crimes, and who had the integrity to share their pain and also their stubborn hope to be, someday, remembered as Peruvians by their fellow countrymen and women.
The voices of anonymous Peruvians, ignored and disparaged, that have been collected in these thousands of pages should be-are-higher and cleaner than all those others who, from the comfort of power and privilege, have been quick to get up in the last few weeks and to deny beforehand, as they have so many times in the past, all credibility of the testimonies and to close the way for any sort of solidarity with the humble.
We believe, Mr. President, that it will no longer be possible to silence the testimonies gathered here and put at the disposition of the entire nation. No one has the right to ignore them, and even less than anyone, the political class, those citizens who had the aspiration-legitimate, if not always understood with rectitude-to be rulers and thus to be servants of their fellow countrymen and women, as ordered by democratic principles. It would be evil for politicians, it would be evil for all of us, to pretend that this truth, that these voices, do not exist, and shrug our shoulders in the face of the mandates that arise from them.
To assume the moral obligations that emanate from this report-the obligation to do justice and let truth prevail, to close the social gap that set the stage for the disgrace experienced-is the task of statesman, that is, of a man or a woman determined to govern to improve the future of his or her fellow citizens.
In making you, Mr. President, the repository of this report, we trust that we are leaving it in good hands. We do not do anything more, in any case, than return to the State, which you represent, the honorable task assigned us dutifully completed, in which we have gathered the truth and only the truth that we have been capable of discovering for the knowledge and reflection of our fellow citizens.
Mr. President, fellow citizens, friends: I began by affirming that this report talks of shame and dishonor. I should add, nevertheless, that in these pages we have collected the testimony of numerous acts of courage, generous gestures, signs of intact dignity that show us that the human being is especially honorable and magnanimous. Here are found those who did not renounce the authority and responsibility their neighbors confided in them; here are found those who defied abandonment to defend their families, turning their work tools into arms; here are found those who cast their lot in with those who suffered unjust imprisonment; here are found those who assumed their obligation to defend the country without betraying the law; here are found those who faced uprootedness for defending life. Here they are found: in the center of our memory.
We present this report as a homage to all of them. We present it, moreover, as a mandate for the absent and the forgotten to the entire nation. The history here told talks about us, that which we were, and that which we ought to cease being. This history talks of our tasks. This history begins today.
Salomón Lerner Febres, rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is the president of the Peruvian Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. This essay is a shortened version of the speech he made in the presentation of the Commission?s final report to President Alejandro Toledo in Lima on August 28, 2003. A longer version in English and Spanish may be found at http://drclas.harvard.edu.