Ombudsman Rewriting Peru’s History

After a decade of working for the U.N. refugee agency, Jorge Santistevan came home in 1991 with a simple goal.

“I had put a semicolon in the history of Central American peace,” he said, paraphrasing novelist Henry Miller to describe what he considered a minor role. “I hoped to put a line in the history of my own country, Peru.”

The soft-spoken, bespectacled lawyer has written several lines for posterity in the four years since Congress chose him to found the ombudsman’s office, literally translated from Spanish as “defender of the people.” His quarters in a high-ceilinged, pillared building in Lima’s colonial downtown has become the one government agency where Peruvians can take complaints ranging from false imprisonment to electoral fraud.

Because of Santistevan’s vigorous defense of the people, the door to President Alberto Fujimori’s office has long been closed to him, he said. He has been called a Communist by government-controlled broadcast media, a term associated here with the terror of the Shining Path guerrillas.

Despite the efforts to “trap me in a red spider web,” he noted, recent polls show that the ombudsman’s office has a higher approval rating than any institution except the Roman Catholic Church.

Now 55, Santistevan has been a key figure in ongoing talks between Fujimori and the opposition in preparation for April elections, which were called by the three-time president after a corruption scandal that brought down his spy chief. Fujimori will not run, cutting his term short by four years. And Santistevan, though he steadfastly declines to discuss his political future, is regarded as a strong potential contender for the presidency.

During a recent interview, Santistevan spoke about why he and his office have become central to democratic efforts in Peru.

“Normally, an ombudsman deals with individual cases,” he said. “But that only functions if the institutional framework functions, if the district attorney’s office functions, if the courts function. All of that has been undermined; the framework for protecting individual human rights does not exist.”

So, in Peru, the ombudsman’s office has led the investigations into allegations of vote fraud because no one else would, Santistevan said.

Sofia Macher, director of the National Human Rights Coordinating Office, an alliance of independent organizations, said: “He has made it so that Peruvians have not lost hope that it is possible to reconstruct democracy. It’s an oasis that allows us to hope that we can have a government like that tiny oasis.”

Santistevan is known to mortify his team into top form with an acerbic wit. “I don’t know whether he inspires more from respect or fear,” joked Walter Alban, his deputy.

Life Geared Toward Ombudsman Job

Although Santistevan is a tireless executive who knows the details of every case in the office, Alban said, the ombudsman isn’t absorbed by work. The boss is always up-to-date on the latest plays and novels and can quote what he has read. He collects modern art.

“You wouldn’t think it to look at him,” Alban said, referring to Santistevan’s rotund figure, “but he is a great dancer, especially merengue,” the fast-paced Dominican step.

Santistevan took on the ombudsman’s job because, after five years as a corporate lawyer, he realized that he was doing nothing for the history books. Besides, the job description sounded exactly like what he had been preparing for all his life.

After graduating from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, he did graduate work at New York University in 1969 and 1970. There, he learned to look at the law as more than cut-and-dried regulations to be enforced as written, the traditional view held in Latin American countries, whose legal systems are based on the Napoleonic Code.

“I don’t have too much respect for the letter of the law,” he said. “My respect is for the spirit of the law.”

New York also was his first contact with the international world, with its varied religions and languages--a realm that he would live in for 17 years. Working first for the International Labor Organization and then for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, he moved around Latin America and Europe.

From 1986 to 1991, he was charged with protecting the estimated 50,000 Guatemalan refugees in Mexico. When the Guatemalan army crossed the border, claiming that guerrillas were using the refugee camps as rear-guard bases, refugees had to be moved farther north.

“He dealt with not only the administrative and huge logistical problem of so many refugees, he also showed the ability and intelligence to manage very slippery diplomatic relations between Mexico and Guatemala,” said Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, a Colombian who, at the time, was in charge of the U.N. development commission for the region.

As his tour in Mexico came to a close, Santistevan worried that his family was becoming too international. The family had left Peru when the eldest of his three children was an infant. All three children spoke perfect English, and their Spanish was a mixture of Mexican and Costa Rican expressions.

His two college-age daughters were heading to Europe and the United States. To keep the family together, Santistevan took them home.

Initially, they had a difficult adjustment in a country held hostage to the terror of the Shining Path, a Maoist group. A bomb exploded in Lima, the capital, five months after they arrived.

“The war was just around the corner,” Santistevan recalled. The emergency measures that Fujimori took to stop the horror also stepped on Peruvians’ civil rights.

When Santistevan became ombudsman, one of his first tasks was to review more than 1,000 cases of people who had been jailed as terrorists.

Many had been imprisoned simply because they were named by rebels seeking an asylum that required them to expose other insurgents. The accusations were never investigated until the ombudsman’s office reviewed them in 1997.

After meticulous investigation, the ombudsman’s office recommended the release of more than 500 prisoners, who were then freed. Still, the caseload was so heavy that all of the accused could not be reviewed in the time allotted.

Santistevan asked for an extension. Fujimori denied it.

Santistevan Takes On Electoral Machine

That was the first of many conflicts that culminated in Santistevan’s decision to take on the electoral machine assembled to assure Fujimori a third five-year term.

The prosecutor’s office had ignored citizen complaints about suspicious voter registration, Santistevan said. The ombudsman began investigating in 1998.

“This election had defects straight from the factory,” he said. The ombudsman’s office documented and publicized specific cases of public funds being used for electoral ends, he said.

In return, the government-controlled television stations reviled Santistevan as a Communist.

“He never responded to the attacks,” Alban said. “That left many people in the ombudsman’s office feeling as if they went unanswered.” Morale dipped for a while.

Ultimately, the strategy worked. The unproven accusations undermined the credibility of the television news broadcasts more than that of Santistevan, and the insults stopped.

Fujimori had been faced down. The growing pressure over elections so tainted that his rival refused to participate culminated in a bribery scandal that forced the president to call new elections in which he promised not to participate.

Santistevan admits that success has made him more ambitious. “Now,” he said, “I would like to write a whole page in Peru’s history.”