Former Peru spy chief given another jail sentence for 1993 forced disappearances
Source: Guardian
Former Peru spy chief given another jail sentence for 1993 forced disappearances
Conviction of Vladimiro Montesinos, who executed two students and a professor in federal agency basement, proves there was state terrorism, victims father said
Dan Collyns in Lima
@yachay_dc
Wednesday 28 September 2016 16.23 EDT
Perus former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos has been sentenced to 22 years in jail for the forced disappearance of two students and a university professor, whose bodies were burned in the basement of the countrys intelligence agency.
The students, Kenneth Anzualdo and Martin Roca, and professor Justiniano Najarro were tortured, interrogated then executed in 1993, the court found.
Montesinos, 71, who is already serving multiple sentences for human rights crimes, corruption and arms and drugs trafficking, is widely regarded to have been the éminence grise to the former president Alberto Fujimori, who is himself serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and authorising death squad killings.
. . .
Human rights groups have welcomed the ruling as confirmation that a secret detention centre existed at the army headquarters in Lima known as el Pentagonito, or the little Pentagon and that an oven was used to cremate the remains of victims on its grounds.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/28/peru-spy-vladimiro-montesinos-sentenced-forced-disappearances
Judi Lynn
(160,452 posts)Former Peru spy chief given another jail sentence for 1993 forced disappearances
Conviction of Vladimiro Montesinos, who executed two students and a professor in federal agency basement, proves there was state terrorism, victims father said
Dan Collyns in Lima
@yachay_dc
Wednesday 28 September 2016 16.23 EDT
Human rights activists have hailed the conviction of Peru's former head of intelligence as a landmark decision. The former spy chief is considered the mastermind of a brutal crackdown on opposition in the early 1990s.
28.09.2016
A Peruvian court on Tuesday convicted Peru's former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for his involvement in the forced disappearance of a professor and two students in 1993 amid a widespread crackdown in the South American nation.
Montesinos, along with the former army chief Nicholas Hermoza, received 22-year sentences for abducting the professor and students, and burning their bodies in an oven located in the basement of the army's intelligence division in Lima.
Human rights activists described the verdict as a milestone for justice, marking the first time a Peruvian court acknowledged that ex-President Alberto Fujimori's government had burned the bodies of its victims during a decade-long crackdown on dissent.
Montesinos is considered one of the masterminds behind Fujimori's bloody repression of his political opponents.
Mc Mike
(9,111 posts)Last edited Fri Sep 30, 2016, 05:53 AM - Edit history (1)
That's what allowed his opposition to feasibly claim to the Peruvian public that he was from Japan, and ineligible to lead Peru.
Remember when Poppy's brother Prescott got caught lobbying for the Yakuza, and didn't give the money back to the business fronts he was lobbying for, after it was revealed? No matter what other "legit" Japanese business interests Fujimori represented in Peru, cocaine and the yakuza were a big factor.
Yakuza is a creation of right wing US intel/business and post WW II Japanese fascists. It stands to reason, we occupied that nation militarily, controlled everything when they rose to power.
The press coverage of Sendero Luminoso tactics and actions in the late '80's made me wonder if they weren't like M-19 over in Colombia. There is a very real possibility that the organization, if it wasn't created outright by the far-right in Peru and the US, was thoroughly infiltrated, so some factions were going after progressives that Fujimori and his predecessors hated. They did so while the Peruvian far right went after progressives using the excuse that they were suspected of being part of the Sendero boogeyman organization. So the population was being squeezed "from both sides", like M-19 did in Colombia. (Of course, maybe it's just that anybody can say "I'm with Sendero" and since it's an underground org, nobody can fact check the claim. I doubt it. Still, the fact that the IRA issued "coded warnings", and this was held to be accepted standard procedure by the press and governmental authorities, says someone else was sometimes blowing up stuff, then trying to pin it on the IRA. There really were only 2 sides in that fight, and noted British citizen George Orwell posited that the totalitiarian gov of Oceana would launch missiles into it's own population and claim the "enemy" had attacked. It keeps the population on war-time footing, buying the propaganda about how they should be afraid of the evil enemy, how they need to be protected by big brother; and it excuses war time austerity measure shortages the public has to suffer because the gov's glorious 10 year plan didn't pan out, production-goals-wise.)
There's a good movie called The Formula, with Brando and George C. Scott. During the action in the movie, some radical "Red Brigade" German "lefties" were performing certain terrorist actions at the behest of a Nazi war criminal, who was working for a US oil company nazi with US intel ties. There was another one called The Package, with Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones, where some "radical German lefties" tried to pull an assassination in Germany that the US far right wanted, in an area where Hackman's US MP officer character had his squad detailed as security. There was no actual old-line Odessa-kameradenwerk-ratline character in that movie, but a military prisoner that Hackman guarded, who escaped, wound up getting involved with neo-nazis and skinheads in Chicago, on the way to being set up as a triggerman for an assassination on US soil.
I'm glad Montesinos is getting his comeuppance, this stuff tracks right back to Poppy, his business buddies, and his agency people. Hopefully Fujimori rots in peace. I see that his kid is involved in Peruvian politics.