Truth commission revises numbers

UNITED NATIONS -- In a dramatic upward revision of the number of victims, a Peruvian truth commission found between 40,000 and 60,000 people died or disappeared in the two decades when government forces battled a brutal insurgency by Shining Path guerrillas, the commission's president said Tuesday.

Previous estimates held that 30,000 were killed and 6,000 disappeared during the 1980 to 2000 violence.

The new figures emerged as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission neared the end of its two-year investigation, which included interviews with nearly 18,000 victims.

As a result of cross-referencing data and consulting international experts, commission president Salomon Lerner Febres said "we have felt that there is a minimum of 40,000 deaths and it might be ... 60,000 -- that's the ceiling." This includes 7,000 to 8,000 people who disappeared, the majority at the hands of "the forces of order," he said.

Lerner told a news conference at U.N. headquarters that no one will ever know the exact total because there are "many, many variables that we're not in control of."

According to the testimony, the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group seeking to overthrow the Peruvian government, was responsible for killing about half the victims, said Carlos Ivan Deregori, a commission member.

The Maoist-inspired rebel movement nearly drove Peru's government to its knees in the early 1990s with a campaign of car bombings, political assassinations and massacres of peasant communities that refused support.

The capture of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman in 1992 and an anti-terrorism crackdown helped crush the rebel campaign. But earlier this month Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo blamed "remnants of the Shining Path" for kidnapping 71 workers from a pipeline construction camp in the Andes Mountains. They were rescued.

The commission also found that 75 percent of the victims spoke Quechua, the language of Peru's highland Indians, as their mother tongue, he said.

Peru's indigenous people represent less than 20 percent of the population, and are concentrated in the poorest, most isolated part of the country -- but they suffered most, said Sofia Macher, another commission member.

The commission's mandate provides for it to determine the causes of the violence, find ways to compensate the victims, recommend reforms to prevent future atrocities, and if possible gather information to identify human rights violators for state prosecutors.

Lerner said the commission's final report, to be submitted in August, will conclude that the subversive movements and authoritarian governments flourished in a climate where the government denied citizenship rights to every Peruvians and where "there has been and there still is discrimination, exclusion, together with poverty."

"We believe that reconciliation ... can be achieved only through vigorous citizenship policies and institutional reforms in great depth," Lerner said.

The commission has submitted six cases for possible prosecution and legal action has been initiated in three cases, Macher said.

Lerner said Peru's authoritarian former President Alberto Fujimori refused to meet with him in Tokyo, but he expects the government to formally present a request for his extradition "in a few weeks."

Prosecutors have charged Fujimori with treason, illegal wiretapping, corruption, abandoning office and authorizing death squad killings. In March, Interpol placed him on its most wanted list. Fujimori fled political scandal in Peru and took refuge in Japan which will not extradite him because he holds Japanese citizenship.

Lerner said the truth commission also wants to question him about human rights violations during his term, "and in particular to explain the existence of paramilitary groups -- and apparently everything indicates he knew about this."