PERU: CIVILIAN COURT SENTENCES SENDERO LUMINOSO LEADERS TO LIFE IN PRISON.
A Peruvian court sentenced several top figures from the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso (SL) on Oct. 13, finding leader Abimael Guzman and his partner Elena Iparraguirre guilty of terrorism and sentencing them to life in prison. The court also sentenced 10 other co-defendants to sentences ranging from 24 to 35 years, with the terms beginning when they were first incarcerated in the 1980s or 1990s. Guzman was tried after his capture in 1992 by a secret military court, but the verdict and life sentence were thrown out in 2003.
Life for Abimael Guzman and partner
Former philosophy professor Guzman led a 12-year rebellion beginning in 1980 in which 70,000 people died. In 2003, a truth and reconciliation commission blamed more than 31,000 killings on the guerrillas (see NotiSur, 2003-09-12), and some other estimates reach 40,000.
The Peruvian government began a public retrial of a dozen SL leaders in 2004 with civilian judges in charge of the "megatrial" by the Sala Antiterrorista court convened at the naval base and prison of Callao where Guzman has been held since 1993 (see NotiSur, 2004-12-03). The public nature of the proceedings and civilian judges were the main purpose of the retrial.
Guzman's first retrial in 2004 ended in chaos after he and Iparraguirre shouted communist slogans in his defense in front of live television cameras. The retrial ended 10 days after it began, when two of three judges stepped down after becoming mired in complaints about their previous involvement in rebel trials.
To avoid a repeat performance, tape recorders and cameras were banned from the courtroom for this trial. However, television stations were allowed to use footage from the court's closed-circuit television cameras to broadcast Guzman's sentence live on Oct. 13. The verdicts took several hours to read, and Guzman stood motionless with his arms folded as the court gave its judgment.
SL, known in English as Shining Path, a Maoist fundamentalist guerrilla group, waged a violent campaign to overthrow the Peruvian state.
Survivors from a SL massacre in the Andean village of Lucanamarca, where 69 peasants were shot and hacked to death, gathered outside the court to demand maximum sentences for the defendants. "They killed them with machetes, stones, axes--and for those who did not die in agony in this way, they put them into a vat of boiling water," Ignacio Tacas, a 35-year-old farmer from the village, told the Associated Press.
The SL founder said the...
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