An exhaustive report commissioned by the Peruvian Government into the country’s “dirty war” between 1980 and 2000 has applauded the Church for its role but implicitly deplored that of the Opus Dei Archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani. The findings, which are based on testimonies by 17,000 people and stacks of documents, are contained in the final report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published on 28 August.
The commission’s report places the death toll at 69,280, twice the previous estimate, during a period when the State confronted the armed insurrection of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and their smaller Marxist counterpart, the MRTA. More than half of those who died in the violence did so at the hands of Shining Path, the TRC report found, while the armed forces were responsible for rape, massacre, torture and forced disappearances.
The TRC also criticised the social and racial divisions which meant that “the tragedy suffered by the population of rural Peru, of the Andes and the jungle, the Quechuas and the Ashánika, peasants, poor and ill-educated, was not felt or recognised as its own by the rest of the country”.
The report found that more than 70 per cent of the victims were rural Indians and mestizos, and that 40 per cent of them lived in the remote Andean province of Ayacucho, the Archbishop of Lima’s former diocese. It was at the university there that an obscure professor, Abimael Guzmán, founded Shining Path, with the aim of wiping out existing political institutions and creating a new society. While it paid tribute to the role of the Churches, “irrespective of theological or pastoral positions” in “saving many lives and preventing many other abuses”, the report made an explicit exception of the diocese of Ayacucho under its then archbishop, Juan Luis Cipriani, who “placed obstacles in the way of church organisations working on human rights, and denied the existence of human rights violations”.
Speaking at the Mass for the feast of St Rose of Lima on 30 August, Cardinal Cipriani said the TRC had not bothered to talk to him, and denounced its report as “prejudiced, biased and petty”. An auxiliary bishop of Lima, José Antonio Eguren, said he deplored the absence in the report of any criticism of liberation theology and its principal exponent, the Peruvian priest Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, which, he said, had “encouraged the class struggle and revolutionary engagement”.
But Peru’s bishops’ conference (CEP) welcomed the report. It said reconciliation would only be possible when the truth was known. “The depth of the violence should be known in order to purify the collective memory of our past history”, the CEP statement said.
The TRC calls for the prosecution of those against whom evidence exists, and reparation for victims. But its overriding concern is that Peruvians should seek to eradicate the deeper causes of this tragedy – racism, class prejudice, and authoritarianism – and work for reconciliation in a “new founding pact between the Peruvian State and Peruvian society”.