$94 Million for a Drug War Run by Thugs : Peru: The police shoot down a plane and match the army for brutality--and Bush sees a clean human-rights record.

In the past two weeks, extraordinarily vicious abuses by the police and military in Peru have exploded onto the front pages of the country’s newspapers, and Peruvian political leaders are clamoring for a complete overhaul of the security forces.

The Bush Administration has picked this inopportune moment to certify that Peru complies with the strict human-rights conditions that Congress attached to anti-narcotics assistance for the Andean countries, and thus is eligible for a whopping $94 million in anti-narcotics aid, $34 million of it for the military. The gesture is a slap in the face of Congress and a body blow to Peruvian human-rights advocates struggling desperately to rescue their country from political violence.

In an effort to combat a violent guerrilla insurgency, Sendero Luminoso, and a flourishing narcotics industry, the army and police have become a law unto themselves. In the 40% of the country currently under military rule, killings of innocent noncombatants by Sendero and the army are the norm; thousands have died since the insurgency began in 1980, and thousands more have been arrested arbitrarily in mass roundups or “disappeared.” Peruvian human-rights monitors report that June of this year was the worst month to date for political violence from all sides.

Army executions of suspected “subversives”--that is, anyone viewed by the military as potentially sympathetic to Sendero--have spread into new areas. Junin and the Upper Huallaga Valley are now plagued with such abuses, which have long characterized counterinsurgency operations in Ayacucho and Apurimac.

During the visit of an Americas Watch representative to Peru last week, a TV reporter revealed a secret army document that ordered military units to kill “subversives” and dispose of their bodies clandestinely. Defense Minister Gen. Jorge Torres Aciego confirmed the authenticity of the order, but blamed it on a subordinate, who, he said, would be punished. First, the program for which the reporter worked was ordered off the air.

Many of the worst human-rights abuses occur in areas where the Peruvian police and security forces are deployed to counter the drug trade. On July 9, for example, drunken members of a police unit in the Upper Huallaga Valley town of Bellavista, in the heart of the anti-narcotics campaign, shot a commercial plane out of the sky after the pilot refused to let them board and shake down the passengers for money. All 15 people aboard died in the crash; undeterred, the police scavenged through the wreckage and robbed the dead.

In June, police in the Lima suburb of Callao were videotaped as they abducted a medical student and two teen-agers and stuffed them into the trunk of a police cruiser. Their bullet-ridden bodies turned up hours later in the city morgue.

The airline incident and the murder of the three young people have created a sensation in Peruvian political circles. The widely respected vice president of the Peruvian Senate, Enrique Bernales, (who is also the current president of the U. N. Human Rights Commission) has called for the creation of a national commission to reform the police, the evaluation of every member of the force and the firing of many, and an upgrading of qualifications for new recruits.

The United States has taken a markedly different tack. The Administration sent its assistant secretary of state for human rights, Richard Schifter, to visit Peru last week, but rather than issuing a public statement of concern about abuses, which might have boosted reform efforts, Schifter remained silent. Worse, as he returned to Washington, the State Department signaled its intent to issue a formal determination (with its Human Rights Bureau’s imprimatur) to Congress, stating that the Peruvian army and police are under effective civilian control and are not engaged in a consistent pattern of gross abuses of human rights.

Few in the Bush Administration actually believe that Peru qualifies for aid under current law, given the spectacular thuggery of the police and army. But State Department officials have admitted privately that they would rather issue a bogus human-rights finding--betting that Congress will be distracted in the last hectic week before the August recess--than withhold anti-narcotics assistance from the Peruvians.

This is outrageous. Human-rights conditions were attached to U.S. assistance precisely because Congress knows that army and police violence against innocent civilians is no way to combat the narcotics trade. At a minimum, Congress should prohibit disbursement of the aid until Sen. Bernales’ recommendations have been adopted and the Peruvian police and army have been brought to heel.