MILITARY : Army Tarnishes Efforts Toward Peru Democracy : Show of force to protest legislative inquiry set back attempts to restore global confidence, observers say.

President Alberto Fujimori’s effort to persuade the world that democracy will, indeed, be restored here has been badly damaged, analysts say, by an army commander’s recent decision to send tanks rumbling through the capital’s streets to express displeasure with a congressional investigation of possible military wrongdoing.

Gen. Nicolas Hermoza, commander of the army, ordered the show of force last week to deter opposition legislators’ investigation of alleged army involvement in the disappearances last July of nine students and a teacher from La Cantuta university, a stronghold of radical leftism near Lima.

Regional army commanders, observers said, made the situation worse, rallying behind Hermoza. In a communique, they called the legislative investigation and the allegations against the army “part of a systematically designed campaign, which aims to discredit the forces of order. The armed forces will not tolerate it.”

But analysts, legislators and diplomats said military officials overreacted and, in doing so, set back Fujimori’s efforts to restore global confidence in the fate of democracy here.

Fujimori, of course, had himself raised hemispherical concerns when he shut down the Congress in a military-backed “self-coup” last year.

Under international pressure to restore constitutional rule, he had called new congressional elections last November, balloting that put in office the legislators who were involved in the current military investigation.

“In one day,” with his decision to send out the tanks, “Hermoza undid all that Fujimori has carried out in a year to show that the country was returning to democracy,” said Enrique Obando, a military affairs analyst with the Peruvian Center for International Studies.

Opposition legislator Henry Pease, who had promoted the investigation of the disappearances, observed that “democracy here is like a china shop, and Hermoza behaved like an elephant in a china shop.”

The incident prompted a protest from Bernard Aronson, departing U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who telephoned Fujimori.

“We view the independent Congress as an indispensable part of Peru’s constitutional system, and we support its right to work without intimidation of any kind,” Aronson said. “It has every right to investigate human rights practices in Peru.”

In response to the outrage caused by the incident, Fujimori sent a conciliatory message to the Congress; Defense Minister Gen. Victor Malca assured legislators that the investigation would continue.

That seemed to calm the opposition and American officials somewhat. But observers here continue to express deep concern over the autonomy of the Congress and Peru’s checkered human rights record, as previous such investigations have been whitewashed.

The incident also puts Peru’s armed forces, locked in a deadly 13-year-old war against the brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency, in a quandary over how to handle the congressional investigation into the La Cantuta disappearances.

That is because some of those who vanished from La Cantuta, as, indeed, the university itself, have been linked by the army to Sendero Luminoso, which declared war on the government in 1980. Since then, more than 27,000 Peruvians have died in terrorist and counterinsurgency violence that has inflicted more than $22 billion in damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The violence has abated since police captured Abimael Guzman, Sendero Luminoso’s founder and leader, in September. He is now serving a life sentence at a navy base near Lima.

The disappearances the legislators are investigating occurred during a critical and wildly unstable time last year.

Shortly after the April coup, Guzman masterminded scores of Sendero Luminoso attacks on Lima, culminating in July with the explosion of a car bomb that killed more than 20 people. The La Cantuta students and teacher disappeared two days after the bombing.

Fujimori has often said that one of the reasons behind his self-coup was to pacify Peru; he justifies the move by highlighting the successes he has scored in the war against Sendero Luminoso.

This, analysts say, helps to explain the army’s hard line on the La Cantuta disappearances and its leaders’ reaction to the congressional investigation. “They thought they were saving the country, and now they’re being judged as delinquents,” Obando said.