Peru Frees 83 Unjustly Jailed for Terrorism

The government, under increasing international pressure to clear its prisons of innocent people, on Friday freed 83 inmates jailed unjustly for terrorism during the state’s war on leftist guerrillas.

The releases, authorized in a decree published in the official daily El Peruano, brought to more than 311 the number of falsely convicted prisoners who have been freed by President Alberto Fujimori’s government since 1996.

The 83 prisoners, including 16 women, were being held in the capital, Lima, and various provincial cities.

The government has admitted that scores of other innocent people may still be behind bars on unjust terrorism charges, but human rights groups put that number at close to 1,000.

Government-appointed ombudsman Jorge Santistevan said Friday that an additional 32 prisoners will likely be released before the New Year. A three-member commission, on which he sits and which recommends the releases, has 200 more cases to examine.

Friday’s releases came as foreign pressure intensified on Peru over the prisons issue. Earlier in the week, the United Nations gave details of a mission planning to visit Peru in January to investigate “arbitrary detentions.”

In the first direct challenge from abroad to Peru’s judiciary, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights successfully ordered the government two months ago to release a university teacher wrongly held as a Shining Path guerrilla after being raped and tortured into giving a confession.

And in August, rights group Amnesty International issued a report lashing Peru for holding hundreds of innocents in “awful, inhuman” conditions.

All the 300-plus “terrorist” prisoners released in the last two years were convicted by Fujimori’s controversial “faceless” courts that have imprisoned thousands of leftist guerrillas but also put hundreds of innocents behind bars in their zeal to stamp out rebellion.

Fujimori set up the secret courts, in which judges wear hoods or hide behind screens to try guerrilla suspects, in 1992 to combat escalating guerrilla violence. The “faceless” system was abolished last month, but the government retains the right to hold closed-door trials.