Amnesty International says torture still prevalent in Peru

June 26, 2002

LIMA, Peru - Amnesty International charged on Wednesday that torture remains widespread in Peru's prisons, police stations and military bases despite the country's recent return to democratic rule.

"Torture and ill-treatment continue to thrive in a culture of impunity," Carlos Marin, the human rights group's Peru specialist, said in a statement.

"Since torture was criminalized by law under President (Alberto) Fujimori's administration in 1998, only two cases have resulted in perpetrators being sentenced."

In a report released Wednesday, Amnesty International said convicted prisoners, jailed criminal suspects and military recruits suffer abuse such as electrical shocks, near-drowning and depravation of food. Torture victims include children and adolescents, the London-based group said.

Amnesty International said its report details more than 30 cases of torture from the past three years.

Peru's National Prison Institute and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, had no immediate comment on the report.

President Alejandro Toledo, a former business professor and U.S.-trained economist, took office last July after winning clean elections. For the previous eight months, a transition government had governed following the collapse in a corruption scandal of Fujimori's decade-long authoritarian rule.

Under Fujimori, who was democratically elected in 1990 but became increasingly autocratic as his administration continued, Peru garnered one of the worst human rights records in Latin America.

Many of the violations occurred as the country's security forces struggled to quell a guerrilla insurgency that has resulted in 30,000 deaths since 1980.

In its report, Amnesty International said that Toledo's government has taken important steps to crack down on torture and protect human rights but that many more measures are needed to produce "real change."

The report said confessions extracted under torture are still widely used as evidence in Peruvian courts. It also singled out conditions in Peru's maximum-security prisons, where many convicted rebels are held, as "cruel, inhuman and degrading."

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