PERU: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OLLANTA HUMALA FACES ACCUSATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES.
Peruvian nationalist presidential candidate Ollanta Humala has faced accusations in the press and in the nation's prosecutor's office that he held command during a reign of human rights abuses in the early 1990s while using the nom de guerre Captain Carlos Gonzalez. In February, five people filed criminal complaints accusing Humala and his soldiers of disappearances, torture, and attempted murder during his 1992 command of the jungle base Madre Mia in the Huallaga River Valley.
Five criminal complaints for 1992 abuses in Huallaga Valley
Human rights groups say about 300 people disappeared that year in the Huallaga Valley, where locals were caught in the crossfire among Maoist Sendero Luminoso rebels, cocaine traffickers, and soldiers stationed in counterinsurgency bases.
Teresa Avila, one of the five complaint filers, says she found her brother-in-law floating in the Huallaga River, a bullet in his forehead and knife wounds in his chest, a week after soldiers dragged him and his wife from their jungle home. Her sister's body never turned up. She had already gone to the Madre Mia counterinsurgency base looking for them, Avila says, but the commander, known as Captain Carlos, denied they were there. "He told me, 'Your family is a scourge and if they were in my hands, I would kill them all,'"
Nearly 14 years later, Avila has identified Captain Carlos as Humala, now a retired army lieutenant colonel with a good chance of becoming Peru's next president.
Humala, 43, acknowledges using the pseudonym Captain Carlos to avoid rebel reprisals at the time but denies any wrongdoing. He says he is being smeared to derail his presidential campaign. Initially, he had denied being Captain Carlos, but after he admitted to it, he said he was only one of four officers who used the pseudonym and that he knew of a Captain Carlos who violated human rights but would not reveal his identity.
"They want to destroy a soldier, but I will not permit it," Humala told a rally in a poor Lima neighborhood. Throughout February, Peruvian media aired testimonies from jungle residents accusing Humala of overseeing systematic abuses in the area.
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