The Ordeal of ‘the Innocents’

The cobbler worked on the street, a vulnerable place in the best of times.

And it was the worst of times: 1993, the height of Peru’s bloody civil war. Police were hunting terrorists in the gray slums of the capital. Terrorists were shooting at the police, civilians and each other.

Every day, however, Julio Loa Albornoz set up his outdoor stand and repaired shoes. He stayed out of politics. He was the father of two young children, a devout Buddhist. As long as he worked and kept his head down, he thought, he would be safe.

He was wrong.

One day the anti-terrorist police rolled up in a van. They were torturing a suspect in back, Loa says; the suspect pointed at him. The police pulled the cobbler into the van and into the dungeon of Peru’s anti-terrorist justice system, where the judges wear masks and the guilty verdict is read as soon as the defense rests.

Although prosecutors admitted that there was no evidence, Loa was charged with terrorism. He spent 3 1/2 years in prison as his case plodded through a Kafkaesque maze of military and civilian courts, convictions, appeals.

Loa became one of more than 1,000 Peruvians believed to have been wrongly imprisoned under emergency anti-subversion laws--inmates known as “the innocents.”

“It makes you sick,” said Loa, now 34. “It . . . was like they were playing with me. I think they were trying to drive me crazy.”

Loa talked about his ordeal a few days after his recent release from a maximum-security prison here. Peru’s top military court freed him at a time of growing consensus that the war left a legacy of injustices to be redressed.

The plight of the innocents, according to Peruvian leaders, is an unavoidable result of harsh policies needed to fight a dangerous foe: the country’s Maoist rebels. Although the fighting has abated, Congress voted Friday to extend current anti-terrorism laws for another year.

Meanwhile, a special commission headed by Peru’s new defender of the people, a public ombudsman, is reviewing the cases of the innocents at the urging of President Alberto Fujimori. About 200 of the wrongly accused have been freed this year--Loa among them. And earlier this month, the government announced the first of a series of pardons promised by the president.

“This has been a titanic and gratifying task for those of us who want justice,” Fujimori said recently at the opening of the offices of the ombudsman.

Some human rights activists criticize the president’s remedy, saying it is absurd to pardon convicts who did nothing wrong in the first place. But they prefer the pardons to relying on the workings of a cumbersome legal apparatus.

The Fujimori administration is trying to undo excesses that date to 1992. As vicious attacks by the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement pushed the nation toward chaos, Fujimori and the military declared a state of emergency. They armed themselves with extraordinary legislation: a new treason law, plea bargains for informants, harsh sentences for collaborators and masterminds alike.

This counterattack produced victories against terrorism and a fearsome justice system that has been condemned in Peru and abroad.

“It is terrible legislation. It violates basic rights,” said Susana Villaran, director of a coalition of Peruvian human rights groups.

Legal tools were turned into clubs, critics say. Between 6,000 and 8,000 alleged terrorists have been tried in closed military and civilian courts, often dark chambers presided over by judges who hide behind hooded masks, one-way mirrors or curtains. Authorities say those intimidating precautions protect judges from the Sendero Luminoso’s proven capacity for vengeance.

The courts are “absolutely medieval,” Villaran said. In an anecdote recorded by human rights watchdogs, a visitor to a prison court found himself in a room watching through the one-way glass as a lawyer delivered an impassioned plea for mercy. The visitor realized that the judges’ chairs were empty: No one was listening to the defense.

Loa spent more time in such courtrooms than he wants to remember.

“The judges talk to you through a speaker that deforms their voice,” the cobbler recalled. “You can’t talk to anyone--you just listen to the accusations. You can’t say anything. It has all been written already.”

Loa’s arrest in February 1993 began an odyssey that is documented by court records, Peruvian lawyers and international human rights advocates and is typical of the innocents’ ordeals.

Loa was accused of collaborating with the Sendero Luminoso by a confessed guerrilla of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a rival group. The accuser claimed that terrorists congregated at Loa’s shoe repair stand in the tough La Victoria neighborhood, where the two rebel groups were feuding.

But during an initial hearing, Loa’s accuser reversed himself. He admitted he pointed to the cobbler through the window of the police van at random, out of desperation. He said police promised to let him go if he talked.

Loa was a classic victim of an effective but dangerous law granting leniency to turncoats. False accusations, often extracted through torture, acquire enormous weight because informants and investigators are largely shielded from cross-examination, Villaran said.

Although civilian judges exonerated Loa, he remained in prison while the government appealed. Ominously, his case was attached to the files of other accused terrorists and transferred to the military courts. A year later, he sat next to his lawyer, aghast, listening to the monotonous, disembodied voice of an unseen judge sentencing him to 15 years in prison.

Loa’s attorney protested, but the judges already were reading another sentence. Loa was returned to a top-security cellblock. Many of his fellow inmates were hard-core Sendero Luminoso members, who imposed a stern leftist discipline on cellblock life.

Other inmates were as bewildered as Loa. The litany of judicial abuse borders on the grotesque: Journalists who wrote about the guerrillas were arrested. Doctors were charged as collaborators after guerrillas forced them to treat wounded comrades at gunpoint. A university student was caught with “revolutionary” documents--her classroom notes on “The Revolt of the Masses” by Jose Ortega y Gasset, a conservative Spanish philosopher.

Surrounded by anguish and frustration, Loa kept busy with books--he had completed high school before his arrest--as well as with crafts and prayer.

“If you don’t have a way of confronting these problems, it will mess up your head,” he said. “I met people who were destroyed.”

In prison, Loa found refuge in his Buddhism, a minority religion in this traditionally Roman Catholic country. He had converted in 1985, following his brother’s lead. “I saw the change in him. It is a very interesting philosophy. The humanism, the respect for everything that is life.”

Loa’s profound faith made him resilient. Days after his release, he looked youthful and athletic: an open-faced, well-spoken man who told his tale without bitterness. He even managed to chuckle at the ironies he experienced.

“The common inmates--the drug traffickers, extortionists, rapists, all that--they have all the amenities,” Loa recalled. “They get visits twice a week.”

In contrast, inmates charged or convicted of terrorism received only one visit a month. Families waited for hours in the sun to talk to inmates through thick bars.

Loa made an extraordinary sacrifice: He decided not to subject his children to that humiliation. His wife, Sarah, agreed to tell the children, who are now 7 and 5, that their father was sick in the hospital. He would come home when he got well.

“How do you explain this situation to a child?” Loa said.

The case took increasingly bizarre twists. In January, a military appellate court overturned Loa’s conviction and ordered a retrial. His cause had been adopted by legal aid lawyers and Amnesty International. He had been transferred to a cellblock reserved for inmates who seemed clearly innocent.

But in May, the lower court handed down a sentence of 20 years.

“I said, ‘That’s it, I’m never getting out of here,’ ” Loa said.

Loa’s lawyers kept pushing. Loa kept the faith. “I held on to my hope,” he said. “I prayed a great deal for it to come true. And look, it did.”

In August, the case reached Peru’s military equivalent of the Supreme Court, which absolved Loa once and for all.

On a Thursday afternoon soon afterward, a prison guard told him his release was imminent. For $8, the guard offered to finish the paperwork right away. Loa scraped together loans to pay the bribe. Overcome by euphoria, he gave away his mattress, his books and other meager possessions to his fellow inmates, who cheered as he left the cellblock.

Another cruel joke awaited him at the prison gates.

“I got to the gates and they told me, ‘We don’t have the release order,’ ” Loa recalled. “They made me go back to cellblock. I had to take back my mattress, everything I had given away. From then until Tuesday were probably the longest days of the whole time.”

Loa finally emerged last month into a Peru that had changed--at least on the surface.

The Sendero Luminoso has been battered and demoralized, but recent violence for which the group claimed responsibility--raids on villages, an assassination attempt on a military commander--suggests it still poses a threat. The crusade on behalf of the innocents gathers momentum, but the anti-terrorist laws are still on the books.

Unless the system is reformed, Villaran said, “We are going to have a little machine that produces innocents unjustly accused of terrorism, and a commission that is going to work forever” at liberating them.

Loa is back on the streets of Lima, looking for work. He fights off sudden anxieties, fears that people are following him. His national identification card was taken away after his arrest, so he carries his release order wherever he goes. It is a green, carefully folded paper that records the day they took his life away and the day they gave it back.

The cobbler does not curse or weep. His mild tone makes his words the most powerful indictment of all.

“It is not a happy ending,” he said. “They destroyed all my plans. Before this happened, I had many plans. I was building my house. I had a project with my brothers to start a business. I wanted to study. And it all collapsed.

“And they keep sentencing people to prison who had nothing to do with subversion.”