Thousands Protest Against Pardon to ‘Dictator’ Fujimori in Peru
Image Courtesy: EPA-EFE/ERNESTO ARIAS
Thousands of people took to the streets across Peru to protest against the pardon granted to former President Alberto Fujimori, which exempts him from completing a 25-year prison sentence for human rights violations.
In Lima, some 6,000 people demonstrated peacefully on Monday. It ended with at least one arrest and the police dispersed the demonstration with tear gas, reports Efe news.
The protesters at first wanted to march towards the Government Palace, headquarters of the executive, or to the clinic in which Fujimori is hospitalised, but instead was ended in front of the Palace of Justice.
The demonstrators demanded that the pardon be quashed, given that it favours impunity for Fujimori.
Fujimori was convicted of crimes against humanity for his role in killings by the Grupo Colina death squad during his government's war against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s.
He was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for his responsibility in the massacres of 25 people in Barrios Altos in 1991 and La Cantuta in 1992, perpetrated by the undercover military group Colina, and the kidnapping of a journalist and a businessman in 1992.
He was extradited in September 2007 from Chile, where he was arrested in November 2005. Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent had earlier escaped to Japan in 2000 and maintained a self-imposed exile. The Peruvian Congress of Republic rejected his resignation sent over by fax, which preferred to remove him from presidency through the process of impeachment.
To suppress the militant communist movements in Peru, Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), Fujimori formed Grupo Colina death squad. The Amnesty International noted that "the widespread and systematic nature of human rights violations committed during the government of former head of state Albert Fujimori (1990–2000) in Peru constitute crimes against humanity under international law.”
Fujimori’s administration was also accused of organising a forced sterilisation campaign against poor, indigenous and rural women in 1996. The campaign resulted in some 200,000 women in rural and marginalised urban communities were sterilised without their consent. The forced campaign was supported by US aid agency USAID giving around $ 35m.
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski signed the pardon for Fujimori, 79, on Sunday, only three days after he narrowly survived an impeachment vote by Congress, due to the 10 votes from Fujimori's party, led by Kenji Fujimori, son of the former president, who had called on several occasions for a pardon for his father.
The pardon was granted for humanitarian reasons, allegedly because Fujimori is suffering from a "progressive, degenerative and incurable disease" and is at risk of aggravation due to prison conditions, according to a statement from the Presidency of Peru.
According to the report by the medical board that recommended the pardon, Fujimori is suffering from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, hypertension, mitral insufficiency, tongue cancer that has needed six operations and a lumbar hernia.
Fujimori was transferred on December 22 from the prison and is currently hospitalised in a clinic in Lima, where on Sunday his children brought him the news of the pardon.
Demonstrations against the pardon also took place in other cities such as Arequipa, Ayacucho, Puno, Tacna, and Trujillo, among others.
(inputs from IANS)
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