LATIN AMERICA : Peru’s Cantuta Case Defines Nation’s Judicial Front Line : Members of the army have been accused in the deaths of 10. The high court must choose either civilian or military hearings.

A civilian prosecutor’s charges against eight soldiers accused in the disappearance and deaths of nine students and a university lecturer are testing this nation’s Supreme Court, which must rule whether the military men will face civil or military hearings.

The controversial case--known as La Cantuta after the name of the teachers training university just east of Lima--has come to symbolize the willingness of President Alberto Fujimori’s administration to prosecute army officers accused of human rights violations. Such crimes by the military have gone largely unpunished in the past.

Clumsy attempts over the last year to cover up military involvement have only pushed the Cantuta case further into the limelight and undermined the president’s promises to clean up Peru’s tarnished human rights record.

Until recently, Peru was mired in a deadly war against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency. More than 27,000 Peruvians have died on both sides since 1980, and the counterinsurgency resulted in one of the world’s worst records of human rights abuses.

But since Fujimori came to office in 1990, disappearances have dropped from a high of 440 in 1989 to 80 or so last year. He has called the Cantuta case an “isolated occurrence.”

Victor Cubas, a civilian prosecutor, filed charges in mid-December against four officers and four enlisted men linked to the disappearances, including Gen. Juan Rivera, who heads the army’s intelligence service.

A military court, which is conducting a separate investigation, then asked the Supreme Court to rule whether army or civilian hearings should be conducted.

“For me, it is a given that it will end up in the military court,” said Jose Ugaz, a human rights lawyer.

He noted that in 1985, a navy officer implicated in the massacre of civilians in an Andean village staged his own kidnaping after the Supreme Court ruled that he appear before civilian judges. The naval officer, who is believed to have fled to the United States, has not been seen since.

The Cantuta case places Fujimori in a vulnerable position vis-a-vis the armed forces, which backed his “self-coup” in April, 1992, when he shut down the Congress and judiciary and suspended the constitution. Bowing to international pressure, Fujimori called elections for a new Congress, which drafted Peru’s new charter, approved by referendum last October.

Critics of Fujimori’s administration say the judges, many appointed after the 1992 coup, have yet to show their independence, and the Cantuta case offers a real test of their neutrality. Unlike in the United States, justices in Peru are not confirmed by the Congress.

Meanwhile, analysts say military support for the coup gave the armed forces, who saw themselves as the country’s saviors, carte blanche to combat the Sendero Luminoso.

Fujimori has often said that one reason behind his coup was to pacify Peru. He justifies the move by highlighting the successes he has scored in the war against the insurgents.

*

But, Ugaz said, Fujimori’s promises to prosecute officers accused of wrongdoing have lost him military support. As Ugaz put it, Fujimori “leaned on the bayonets so heavily that now they’re pricking him.”

The students and lecturer disappeared in July, 1992, two days after a Sendero Luminoso car bomb exploded in Lima’s Miraflores district; it was part of a Lima spree that killed more than 20 people and injured scores of others.

Some of those who vanished from La Cantuta, a former Sendero Luminoso stronghold, have been linked to the insurgency. The university was under army control at the time. Violence has abated since the September, 1992, capture of Sendero Luminoso founder Abimael Guzman, who is serving a life sentence at a navy prison near Lima.