Prisoners Seeking Pardons Become Forgotten ‘Hostages’ of Peru Crisis

LIMA, Peru — Over the past six weeks, the Peruvian government has demanded freedom for the diplomats, political leaders and police commanders being held hostage in the Japanese ambassador’s mansion here. The barricaded guerrillas of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement have demanded the release of hundreds of convicted terrorist comrades and have complained about harsh prison conditions.

Meanwhile, the crisis has piled injustice upon injustice on hundreds of prison inmates who have nothing to do with Tupac Amaru. They are known as “the innocents” because the consensus is that they were unjustly convicted of terrorism. But the takeover of the Japanese diplomatic compound here has slammed the door on plans for President Alberto Fujimori to continue granting pardons to these inmates.

The forgotten hostages of the standoff are people like Reynaldo and Elsa de la Cruz, a husband and wife sentenced to 20 years in prison by a faceless tribunal. The couple lived with their four young daughters in a windowless room with a concrete floor behind the family’s auto-paint shop until anti-terrorist police arrested them--allegedly in error.

Instead of being reunited with Reynaldo and Elsa for Christmas, the De la Cruz family watched the televised releases of Tupac captives. And they wondered if the hostage crisis has wiped out the chances of liberty for the innocents.

“We had hopes for Christmas,” said Claudio Surco, the imprisoned woman’s brother, surrounded by two dozen relatives in the gloomy room behind the shop. “But what happened at the Japanese ambassador’s house paralyzed everything. The Tupac Amaru’s action has been bad for everyone.”

Last year, Fujimori responded to growing concern about Peruvians jailed erroneously under emergency anti-terrorism laws imposed in 1992. He formed a review commission headed by eminent figures: Peru’s public ombudsman, Jorge Santiestevan, and Hubert Lanssiers, a Belgian priest and prison reformer.

Fujimori pardoned 110 inmates based on recommendations of the commission, which has identified about 400 more strong candidates for release. The hostage crisis erupted Dec. 17 as 80 or so cases were being prepared for the president’s approval; the commission decided to postpone the requests until the standoff ends.

Although inmates on the commission’s list have no relation to the convicts that the Tupac Amaru wants freed, the perception is that Fujimori cannot release anyone accused of terrorism because it might look as if he has conceded to the rebels. A similar political calculus apparently caused the president to reject the guerrillas’ proposal of Santiestevan and Lanssiers as mediators in the hostage crisis, analysts say.

Continuing with the presidential pardons “would not be a sign of weakness, but that is the interpretation,” said Susana Villaran, director of a national human rights coalition. “This is what we have tried to show the president and the commission: We cannot accept the extortion of the Tupac Amaru. Not presenting these cases to the president is surrendering to their extortion.”

The hostage standoff has stalled a larger campaign to dismantle the almost-medieval machinery created to combat terrorism in Peru via the special courts with their hooded military judges, summary verdicts and harsh sentences. Especially if the crisis ends violently, the Tupac action has strengthened political hawks who want to sacrifice civil rights to public order, human rights advocates say.

Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, leader of the rebels holding the ambassador’s residence, has taken hostage the future of the innocents and the justice reforms as well, the advocates say. “Cerpa has been a catastrophe for our work,” said one prominent advocate. “We were on our way toward a consensus that the legislation had been understandable in extraordinary circumstances . . . but now that the danger had passed, we could return to a normal situation.”

The De la Cruz family members are the kind of people Cerpa claims to champion. Reynaldo, 35, and his brothers migrated from the highlands of Ayacucho province in the 1970s and worked as laborers and itinerant vendors. Reynaldo married Elsa, now 31, a native of Lima. In 1992, they used their savings to buy the auto-paint business with the yellow facade in a row of shabby shops where their relatives also run stores. The couple worked seven days a week. The family ate and slept in the room in back. Elsa opened a tiny hardware store next door in 1995.

“They didn’t even go out on Sundays,” said Surco, Elsa’s brother. “She was working hard because she had to pay off the loan she used to buy the hardware store. And she had just had an operation.”

The humble entrepreneurs do not fit the profile of terrorists. But the war on subversion has entangled Peruvians of all descriptions. Remote or imagined contact with terrorists often amounts to guilt.

Elsa made a fateful mistake in March 1995, when a man came into her store and offered her $4 to hold a package of paper for a few hours. Merchants in the commercial strip in the semi-industrial San Luis area routinely charge a fee to store tools or bundles for self-employed mechanics and street vendors, said Marcial de la Cruz, Reynaldo’s brother.

The man did not return, so Elsa left the package in the front hall and went to bed. The next morning, anti-terrorist police burst in, ransacked the home and found propaganda leaflets of the terrorist movement Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, concealed among blank paper in the package. They hauled off the couple as suspected collaborators.

When relatives went to the headquarters of the Dincote, the anti-terrorist division, an officer made a chilling prediction, saying: “If they are in here, they won’t get out without a 15- or 20-year sentence, minimum. You can count on that.”

During interrogations, in which police allegedly slapped Elsa and threatened her children, the anguished couple argued that their failure to conceal the package proved their ignorance of its contents. But they were accused of harboring two terrorists overnight.

The latter charge is a fabrication, the family and its lawyers assert. They say the police report offers few details about the supposed surveillance and that police found no traces of the terrorists. It defies the imagination, the family says, that the parents would let fugitives sleep in the same room with their daughters.

Still, judges hidden behind one-way glass sentenced the couple each to 20 years in prison. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, 15, tried to commit suicide.

After giving money to several unsuccessful defense lawyers, the family went to Fedepaz, a legal aid charity that investigates potential clients and has overturned notoriously unjust verdicts. The lawyers there were impressed with the family: The uncles and aunts took in the four daughters and put together a file full of character references. Marcial even pored through hospital records to prove that scars on his brother’s arm resulted from a work accident, not a terrorist bomb, as police insinuated.

The legal aid lawyers presented the case to the president’s review commission. In November, a commission lawyer told Marcial that prospects for a Christmas pardon looked good.

The hostage crisis interfered. Reynaldo tells visitors to Castro Castro prison that authorities have restricted light and water and otherwise toughened conditions in an apparent reprisal for the attack by the Tupac Amaru, who are holding 72 hostages.

“My brother told me he can do nothing except endure,” Marcial said. “And he told me, ‘I leave everything in your hands.’ It is a lot of responsibility--the debts, the children, the pressure.”

Although terrorism no longer poses the menace it did five years ago in Peru, the emergency legislation remains on the books. Fujimori recently vowed to stamp out the Tupac Amaru after the crisis ends.

Peruvians know they have reasons to fear both terrorists and the heavy-handed justice system.

“It makes you scared of everything,” said Claudio Surco, who no longer lets customers leave vehicles for repair unless they provide all the registration documents. “Let’s say it’s a stolen car that was used by terrorists, then you’re involved. It makes you watch out for everyone and everything.”

The worst fear of the De la Cruz family and Peruvian human rights advocates is that the crisis has already changed the political climate in which the presidential pardons represented an imperfect salvation.

“It was like opening a path in the jungle with a machete,” Villaran said. “The pardons turned legality upside down. The president did not recognize judicial error. . . . But the pardons were a possible solution.”