Former Peruvian truth commission members receive death threats

Published: 2005-10-26

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- Two years after Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report on two decades of political violence in the country, former commission members, including the president of the Catholic University of Peru, are the target of death threats and harassment. The threats have come during the trial of several military officials charged with human rights violations and mentioned in the truth commission report. "Their aim is to frighten us, to silence us," Salomon Lerner, former head of the commission and Catholic University president, said of the death threats and harassing phone calls and e-mail messages that he and other former commission members have received. "It's a systematically organized attack. The message is that we've sullied the military and have not recognized the merits of the people who saved Peru." Several national-circulation opposition newspapers also have begun questioning the commission's findings, especially its estimate that 69,000 people died between 1980 and 2000 as government forces battled two subversive groups, the Maoist Shining Path and the Marxist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

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