In Peru, One Too Many Disappearances? : Human rights: Thousands have been detained. But this was the student son of a persistent businessman.

Witnesses say police detained Ernesto Castillo last Oct. 21, locked him in the trunk of a patrol car and drove away. Since then, Castillo has been missing.

Thousands of other Peruvians have disappeared after being detained by security forces. Most have been poor people in provincial areas where authorities are fighting a bloody guerrilla war with the fanatical Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path rebel army.

But Castillo was different. He was a Lima university student, the son of a middle-class businessman who refuses to let the disappearance be forgotten. His case has caught the attention of the press, triggered congressional hearings, reached the Peruvian Supreme Court and focused unprecedented public concern on the issue of detainees who disappear here.

It is an extremely sensitive issue for the civilian government of President Alberto Fujimori and for the Bush Administration, which provides aid to Peru’s police and armed forces.

In the past, U.S. administrations imposed stern sanctions against the former military regime in neighboring Chile for human rights violations, including detainee disappearances. Although the number of disappearances has been far greater in Peru than it was in Chile, the State Department recently determined that there is no “consistent pattern” of human rights violations by Peruvian authorities.

That determination is required by U.S. law for allocation of $95 million in military and economic aid to Peru to combat cocaine trafficking. It not only contradicts what human rights groups in Peru say but portrays a more positive human rights picture than is contained in another State Department report issued only a few months earlier.

Democrats in Congress, aware of discrepancies, have delayed approval of the Peruvian aid until Congress reconvenes in September. The delay has ruffled relations between the governments and cast doubts on whether Fujimori will make a scheduled September visit to Washington.

Cromwell Castillo, Ernesto Castillo’s father, said that Fujimori has been unresponsive to his pleas to help clear up his son’s disappearance. “I believe it is the president himself who is covering this up,” he said.

Fujimori, echoing official police statements, has told Peruvian reporters that Ernesto Castillo was never detained. But witnesses report seeing police stop him in Villa El Salvador, a working-class suburb of Lima. Ernesto, a sociology student at Lima’s Catholic University, had gone to see a friend in the area, where Sendero Luminoso militants were protesting, his father said. Police soon came looking for guerrillas.

Four police officers stopped Ernesto on the street, pointing a gun at him and questioning him, according to witnesses who watched from nearby houses. “They searched him, didn’t find anything, handcuffed him and put him in the trunk,” his father said.

After he learned that his son had been detained, Cromwell Castillo went door to door looking for witnesses. He checked the morgue and police arrest records. He obtained a writ from a judge ordering police to produce his son, if he were a prisoner. Government attorneys later persuaded the Supreme Court to invalidate the writ on a technicality, Castillo said.

He added that he has “sent two open letters to the president . . . asking for an explanation. The president hasn’t answered my letters.”

Castillo has pressed criminal charges, demanding an investigation of all police in Villa El Salvador on the morning of Oct. 21.

Until mid-March, Castillo’s lawyer in the case was Augusto Zuniga, legal secretary for the Human Rights Commission, an independent group known by the Spanish acronym COMISEDH. Because of his efforts on Castillo’s behalf, Zuniga began receiving anonymous threats. On March 14, he received a letter bomb that blew up, costing him an arm.

Castillo voiced no hope that his missing son still lives, saying, “We believe that Ernesto has been killed by the police.”

Zuniga received word from a police friend that Ernesto was taken to Lima’s 22nd Precinct, which Castillo says is the headquarters of a special anti-terrorist training unit. “There, they interrogated him, which means they tortured him,” Castillo said. He said Zuniga’s police friend also said that Ernesto’s body was taken to a remote area of coastal desert somewhere south of Lima, destroyed by dynamite and buried. No remains have been found.

Public outrage over the Castillo case has raised Peruvians’ awareness of at least 5,000 other reported disappearances in the 11-year war with Sendero Luminoso guerrillas. Most of the cases have been blamed on army personnel fighting senderistas , as the guerrillas are called.

Senderistas are notorious for slaughtering peasants who do not cooperate with them, so it is unsurprising to Peruvians that excesses are committed by security forces. Fernando Rospigliosi, an analyst with the Institute of Peruvian Studies, said that people commonly condone disappearances of suspected guerrillas: “When it is a senderista , it’s OK to kill him.”

Rospigliosi said that official excesses are beyond the Fujimori government’s control but that the government is not without blame. “It is the policy of the military,” he said, “but it is the responsibility of the government to the degree that it has not been able to stop it.”

In 1980, when the armed forces returned power to elected civilians after 12 years of military rule, there was a tacit agreement that civilians would not meddle in military matters, he said. That understanding was reinforced in the ‘80s as the Sendero Luminoso war escalated. “The military began to ‘disappear’ people in 1983,” he said. “Since then, they haven’t stopped.”

A human rights report issued Feb. 1 by the U.S. State Department said that abuses by security forces increased in 1990: “There were widespread credible reports of summary executions, arbitrary detentions, torture and rape by the military, as well as less frequent reports of such abuses by the police.”

It added that, while human rights groups recorded 302 new cases of disappearances during 1990, that was markedly less than a record number in 1989.

Most disappearances have been reported in provincial Apurimac and Ayacucho. “Based on the testimony of survivors, it appears that most victims are taken to military bases for interrogation,” the report said.

But to meet conditions imposed by Congress for providing Peru anti-drug aid, the State Department on July 30 determined that security forces “are not engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, and the government of Peru has made significant progress in protecting internationally recognized human rights.”

Democrats in Congress, however, have frozen a $94.9-million package of anti-drug aid to Peru for fiscal 1991, including $34.9 million in military aid.

A ranking Peruvian army officer, who asked not to be identified by name, said that military commanders are taking measures to safeguard human rights. He leafed through a sheaf of directives to officers that prohibit abuses and denied that violations are as widespread as human rights groups contend.

He said a study of reports about those who had disappeared in 1990 showed that “only 10% had been detained by our forces.”

In 1989, government attorneys received 441 formal disappearance complaints. Pablo Rojas, president of the Commission on Human Rights, said the number dropped to 251 in 1990 but reached 165 in the first half of 1991. In the first 12 months of Fujimori’s administration, which began July 28, 1990, government attorneys received 238 disappearance complaints; 70 of the missing were later released from army and police posts, two were transferred to the criminal justice system, 24 were found dead, and 142 are still missing.

Other human rights groups, using different sources, report greater numbers of disappeared detainees. Ricardo Villanueva, secretary general in Peru for London-based Amnesty International, said that 750 Peruvians disappeared in the Fujimori government’s first year.

In the previous 12 months, under former President Alan Garcia, about 1,400 disappeared.