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A Peruvian worker removes the remains of some of the nine students
and their professor dumped in a mass grave on the outskirts of Lima
after being killed by an army death squad at La Cantuta university in
1992 in this file picture of August 1993. Former President Alberto
Fujimori will stand before justices of the Andean country's Supreme
Court on Monday to face charges he violated human rights during his
1990-2000 rule.Picture taken August 1993.REUTERS/Mariana Bazo/Files(PERU)Peru: The Case of "La Cantuta"
The Fujimori dictatorship is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of ten university students and staff.
By Manuel Garcia Irigoyen
(Supporter of the International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Dr. Abimael Guzmán)
Translated from Spanish
June 1994
While the university is officially named The National Education University Enrique Guzman y Balle, it is better known as "La Cantuta". La Cantuta is the Quechua word originally given by the Incas to the Clavellina, an Andean flower that has red petals. The flower was believed to be magical, and was worshiped. The students of this Peruvian university are called "Cantutos", and because of their continuous and disciplined struggle to defend student rights, the reactionary Lima press has given them the same nickname as the colour of the flower: reds.
Months before the case which became known as "La Cantuta", the University was infiltrated by eight agents of the Army Intelligence Service who had been personally trained by Major Santiago Martin Rivas (commonly known in military circles as "Bronco" or "Fuhrer") and Captiain Carlos Pichiligue ("Panther"), who in turn were responsible to Vladimiro Montesinos Torres (called "Rasputin" because of the power he held behind the scenes). Montesinos was a Captain in the Artillery who was expelled from the Peruvian Army due to his shameless and public links with the North American CIA and drug trafficking, but who is now principal advisor to the President of the country, Alberto Fujimori. In addition to being infiltrated, La Cantuta University, like seven other universities, had been occupied by a detachment of more that a hundred soldiers who controlled the comings and goings of the students day and night. Then, after the press carried out an insulting and poisonous campaign on behalf of the current Fujimori regime, Vladimiro Montesinos gave the order to initiate an operation involving the kidnapping and murder of members of the University. (While General Julio Salazar Monroe is the nominal head of the National Intelligence Service, it is Montesinos, and not Monroe, who is its real head. The General is merely a front man, and is in practice an accomplice of Montesinos.)
The facts: kidnap and murder
In the early hours of the morning of July 18, 1992, one of the intelligence agents who had infiltrated the university residence pretended to sleep while the death squad, leb by Major Santago Martin Rivas, broke in. The soldiers, with their faces hidden by falaclava hoods, kicked and hit students and professors with their rifle butts. At the same time they selected those they were going to kidnap: nine students (seven men and two women) and Professor Hugo Munoz Sanchez. They accused Professor Munoz, without any proof whatsoever, of being the one in the University who was responsible for the People's Intellectual Movement, an organization established by the Communist Party of Peru (called "Sendero Luminoso" by the reactionary media). While being beaten continually, they were forced into to one of five pick-up trucks that made up the death squad's convoy. All of the pick-ups had license plates with the letters KG, the code of the Intelligence Service. All the weapons of the kidnappers (machine guns, pistols and revolvers) were fitted with silencers. On the way to Lima (a distance of 35 kilometers) they continued "speaking to the Senderistas with blows", according to the lumpen way of speaking for NCO Jesus Sosa ("Chato"). The convoy stopped near to the Government Palace to drop off the agent who had infiltrated the university. Then the caravan made its way to the Army General Headquarters, an expensive and ludicrous bunker called the "Little Pentagon". The feared Army Intelligence Service under the control of Colonel Alberto Pinto Cardenas, alias "Ugly Duck", is located on the North side. According to an article by Gustavo Gorriti (in the Lima magazine "Caretas", no. 1299), "at the time of the La Cantuta events, Fujimori lived - as is documented in many places - in the headquarters of the Army Intelligence Service (SEI). Furthermore, Fujimori is what those in the business schools would call a 'petty businessman', who needs to see and approve every detail as part of his perception of power". The basement of this military facility, which had originally been designed for the storage of records and other materials, had been transformed by the dictatorship into dungeons and real torture chambers. It was here that they dragged the professor and students, and then submitted them to intense torture. The professor, who was a heavy man, was considered the "leader", and was therefore subjected to the worst atrocities. According to whispered testimony published in the Lima magazine "Si" (no. 326), discontented soldiers revealed that the professor and students were in the Army Intelligence Service facilities for two days. They also said that because the families of the detainees immediately went to the press and pressured them to find out where their children and relatives were, the kidnappers decided to transfer the group to the Army Officers School, whose Commanding Officer was Colonel Edmundo Oregon Val Verde, a section of the Special Forces Division (DIFE), commanded in turn by General Luis Perez Document. Colonel Obregon, outraged that such a transfer had been made without consultation and recognition of this authority, ordered Santiago Martin Rivas to take the prisoners from his complex. After a bitter argument, Martin Rivas obeyed the order and took the detainees away. "They were in a deplorable state, only partly human", said one source who say them there. Fifteen days later Obregon died in a "terrorist" attack that was attributed to "Sendero Luminoso". The attackers were "immediately captured", but nobody has seen them to this day. General Luis Perez Document (called by his comrades in arms "Tuto" and "big Hand" - the latter nickname due to his reputation for pocketing the property of others) was implicated in the assassination of Colonel Obregon. Perez Document was proposed to be the military attaché to the Peruvian Embassy in Madrid, but the nomination was not put into effect because of international accusations implicating him in human rights violations.
The next that was heard of the kidnapped, or what remained of them, was ten months later when a General of the Engineers Division, Rodolfo Robles, third in the high command of the Army, made an accusation during an interview given to the Spanish daily newspaper "El Pais" (May 19, 1993). He said that in the very heart of the Peruvian Army there was a "mafia core in uniform". From his fortified refuge in the Argentine capital where he had fled, Robles went to great lengths to accuse the Presidential advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos, of having formed a death squad dalled the "Colina Group" and of being the mentor of multiple operations carried out by the murder squad, among them the massacre at Barrios Altos and at the universities of La Cantuta and Huancayo. He also confirmed that the professor and students from La Cantuta had been murdered. The only thing that remained for him to do was to five the whereabouts of their remains in order to begin legal action. Robles also accused the Supreme Chief of the Army, General Nicolas de Bari Hermosa, of covering up these crimes as well as others committed against lawyers, journalists, doctors, teachers, etc. The massacre of Barrios Altos, (the name of a poor area of Lima) was another act which was recognizably the work of the "Colina Group", headed by Martin Rivas, where they fired at close range, killing fifteen people, including women and children, who were celebrating a family party in November 1991. The only crime of the massacred was their place of origin (they were immigrants from the province of Ayacucho and, therefore, "they were suspected of being Senderistas") and who, furthermore, had bothered the neighboring barracks with their noise. Robles also said that he had no serious doubts about whether Fujimori knew of the secret plans of Vladimiro Montesinos and General Nicolas de Bari because of the backing that they had from the President and because of the obstacles that Fujimori put in the way of any investigation into what had happened in La Cantuta. However, the accusing General is not free of guilt, even though he tried to justify himself for not having disclosed these crimes earlier by saying he "had no knowledge of them" and he "believed that they dealt with anti-subversive maneuvers". So what are we left with? That he was the only one in the military high command who did not know of this homicidal practice? Or perhaps he supposed that the accusations of the families, which appeared for months in any press that was not totally submissive to the dictatorship, were also subversive maneuvers" The answer lies in the history of privilege that the military has always enjoyed in Peru, and which it still enjoys. In fact, General Robles only lifted the lid from the rotten pot when he was denied his transfer to the Interamerican Defense Administration, with its headquarters in Washington D.C., and where he would have received a monthly salary of $7,000 as well as an additional amount for travel and other expenses.
More:
http://www.csrp.org/iec/lacantuta.htm
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