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Peru's Fujimori convicted of human rights crimes
Tue Apr 7, 2009 11:47am EDT

By Teresa Cespedes and Terry Wade

LIMA (Reuters) - Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of human rights crimes on Tuesday, the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of rights abuses.

A three-judge panel convicted him for ordering a military death squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule, when he was battling guerrillas. Nearly 70,000 people died in two decades of conflict in the Andean country.

"This court declares that the four charges against him have been proven beyond all reasonable doubt," Judge Cesar San Martin said.

Fujimori, 70, could spend the rest of his life in prison if he receives a lengthy sentence. The verdict could also have far-reaching political implications for Peru.

Current President Alan Garcia has also been accused of human rights violations stemming from his first term in the 1980s before he was replaced by Fujimori. These accusations may become stronger following the verdict.

Fujimori's daughter Keiko, a popular lawmaker, could try to use her father's conviction to create sympathy and spur her own presidential ambitions.

Fujimori was once lauded as a hero for defeating the brutal Shining Path guerrillas, taming economic chaos, and freeing dozens of hostages taken by the Tupac Amaru insurgency during a siege of the Japanese ambassador's house in Lima.

But a corruption scandal involving his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, sank his government in 2000. Fujimori fled for a while to exile in Japan, the country where his parents were born, before being extradited to Peru from Chile.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

He may have committed some human rights crimes. I don't know, I haven't been following the case closely lately. But if the Sendero Luminoso guerillas had taken power, the death toll would have been orders of magnitude larger. They were Maoist, similar to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.


There would almost certainly have been mass executions if they had toppled the government.

His goals may have been noble but IMO the ends do not justify the means. Chile's Pinochet was far worse than Fujimori, however. His regime tortured (sometimes openly in the streets) and "disappeared" countless unfortunate souls.