Peru’s Shining Path leader captured alive

3 Comments Posted by on February 12, 2012

Over the weekend Peru’s shining path leader Artemio was captured by the Peruvian anti-drug police. The Shining Path group is a guerrilla rebel movement that tried to lead a people’s war to overthrow the government and establish a communist state during the 1980’s and 90’s leaving nearly 70,000 people deceased or missing. The group committed crimes against humanity including the recruitment of child soldiers, while the Peruvian and US governments worked exhaustively to capture them. Now that its last leader has finally been arrested, I hope the victims obtain the justice they deserve. As a native Peruvian I do not trust the corruptive judicial system and would like to see international intervention in the prosecution of this terrorist leader, as well as an investigation to the head officials of the Peruvian army who also exceed their use of power against civilians during the guerrilla warfare.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/02/201221216388960618.html

About these ads
News ,

3 Responses to Peru’s Shining Path leader captured alive

  1. rmalesky February 13, 2012 at 2:54 pm

    I was actually about to post this exact story. I’ve been following this story for some time as I have a very close friend who lives in Lima, Peru and have been interested in the history of Peru as well as the recent election of Humala. As the story points out and having some knowledge on the issue, Humala, Peru’s recently elected President, has had personal experience fighting the guerilla faction during the early 90′s. I’d be interested to see how his government handles the capture of the guerilla leader and whether or not the United States will take part especially since it had previously offered a multi-million dollar reward for information for the capture of this particular individual.

  2. Alana Tiemessen February 14, 2012 at 9:20 am

    Do either of you know what role civil society (NGOs) are playing Peru with regards to calling for justice for the Shining Path? Are there NGOs monitoring the judicial system and disseminating information about past human rights abuses? Typically NGOs have been quite active in many of the transitional justice situations in Latin America.

  3. claudialora February 17, 2012 at 10:19 pm

    Yes, as rtmalesky just mentioned Humala formed part of the Peruvian military group that fought off the guerrilla during the early 90’s, and therefore it has been very interesting to observe the way in which his administration is managing Artemio’s capture. Humala’s government is handling the situation objectively and in a recent press conference the head of state has assured the nation that Artemio will not avoid “the exceptional punishment” he deserves. Nevertheless, I still hope to see international interference in the investigation in order to guarantee a punitive penalty for this guerrilla leader.
    Professor Tiemessen, I dont think NGO’s are allowed to monitor the judicial system in Peru, and if this was the case I’m sure they would be threatened by the corruptive political authorities.

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 44 other followers

%d bloggers like this: