Victims of the Juliaca massacre, Peru. Photo: AFP.
By Carlos Noriega – Mar 30, 2023
The right wing tried to prevent the presentation of Amnesty International’s annual report. It did not succeed. The worldwide report, in the case of Peru, denounces serious human rights violations, including the death of demonstrators by gunshots of the security forces and arbitrary detentions in the repression of the social protests against the government of Dina Boluarte.
The municipality of the Lima district of Miraflores, administered by the ultra-right wing that governs with Boluarte, ordered the closure of the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM), a space of memory and reflection on the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s and human rights violations, where the Amnesty report was to be presented on Tuesday. The closure of the LUM took place hours before the presentation of this report. After a quick last minute effort by Amnesty, the report was presented Tuesday night at a hotel in Lima.
The report
The Amnesty report, whose presentation was prevented, denounces “the illegitimate use of force,” including shooting with rifles, against the protests demanding Boluarte’s resignation and early elections. Since the protests broke out after Pedro Castillo was dismissed and imprisoned on December 7 and replaced by Boluarte, 49 demonstrators have been killed by police and military gunfire. The total number of deaths in the protests is 67. There are more than a thousand injured, many of them by firearms. The highest government authorities have backed the security forces accused of firing on the demonstrators. Amnesty has defined the government repression as “crimes against international law” and denounced that it has “a racist bias.” Most of the victims are from Andean Quechua and Aymara populations.
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“The human rights situation in Peru is very worrying,” said Marina Navarro, executive director of Amnesty International Peru. “The racist bias in repression has been decisive. Impunity is one of the main concerns. There are many dead in the protests and no one has been arrested for that. We ask for investigation throughout the chain of command. If justice is not done in Peru, we will have to take it to international platforms,”
The left has requested, in Congress, the dismissal of Boluarte for the repression of the protests. This Thursday, there will be a debate on whether to admit to initiate the impeachment process of the president, for which 52 votes of the 130 congressmen are needed, a difficult goal in a Congress dominated by the right. If those votes are reached, Boluarte will have to go to Congress to answer for those killed during the repression. However, her support from the right and the ultra-right shields her from possible impeachment, for which 87 votes are required.
The censorship attempt
The untimely closing of the LUM sought to prevent the presentation of the Amnesty report, but it is a decision that goes beyond that. From the right, they want to end this important space of memory opened in 2015, where the violence of the state and the armed groups Sendero Luminoso and MRTA between 1980 and 2000 is remembered—violence that left about 70 thousand dead, 75 percent of them Quechua-speaking Andean settlers. The right wing seeks to rewrite history by hiding and making people forget the massacres of peasant communities, kidnappings, tortures, extrajudicial executions, and disappearances produced by state violence. As part of this, they aim to close the LUM, which presents the complete history in a balanced way.
The decision to close the LUM was made by the mayor of Miraflores, Carlos Canales, the district where the museum is located, in a building financed by the German government on the cliffs facing the sea. Canales, of the ultra-right Popular Renovation party, wanted to play down the importance of this closure, saying that it was temporary due to the lack of an updated security certificate for the facilities, which is currently being processed.
This decision of the mayor of Miraflores is in line with what was announced by his political boss, the provincial mayor of Lima, the fascist Rafael López Aliaga, president of Renovación Popular and former presidential candidate. Upon taking office as mayor in January, Lopez Aliaga, known as “Porky”, threatened to close the LUM, or hand it over to the armed forces for them to tell “their story” of the internal armed conflict. “Enough of these memory and reconciliation museums,” said Lopez Aliaga, a statement issued as an order to the mayor of Miraflores, a member of his party.
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Abusive and illegal censorship
Manuel Burga, director of the LUM, has described its closure as “abusive and illegal.” He has pointed out that LUM complies with all safety standards and that the renewal of the certificate required by the municipality is being processed. He denounced that in order to justify the closure, the municipality questions “things like the fact that the smoke alarm is vertical and should be horizontal, or that a staircase has many steps.” The Ministry of Culture, on which the LUM depends, issued a communiqué supporting the municipal decision to close it.
In declarations to Página|12, Gloria Cano, director of the Pro Human Rights Association (Aprodeh), pointed out that the lack of a municipal certificate “has been a pretext for the closing of the LUM when the Amnesty report, which is conclusive about the violations of human rights in the country, was going to be presented.” She warned that the objective is for the LUM to disappear. “The right wing that is governing with Boluarte feels empowered, and that is why they are running over the LUM. They are in the mood to obstruct the museum’s mission, which is to maintain remebrance. The intention is the definitive closure of the museum.”
