PERU

Country Summary

The Peruvian press enjoys considerable freedom, but remains vulnerable to the country’s precarious form of democracy and faces intimidation and harassment by national and regional government officials, the military, and criminal gangs.

Four journalists unfairly convicted of subversion under Peru’s draconian anti-terrorist laws are currently in prison, serving sentences of up to 20 years. President Alberto Fujimori granted special presidential pardons to four others in 1996. And while Fujimori acknowledged that the journalistsÑas well as others who had been convicted of subversion--were unjustly imprisoned, their criminal record stands and they cannot claim damages for the state's error. One of the freed journalists, Jesús Alfonso Castiglione Mendoza, a respected radio journalist, had received his 20-year sentence after a ten-minute trial--the work of Peru’s infamous "faceless court," a panel of judges hidden behind a one-way mirror.

The increasingly independent stance of the Peruvian press has made it a much more politically formidable institution. According to public opinion polls, only the Catholic Church has greater credibility. Moreover, in a significant shift in society's view of the media, Peruvians have turned to the press for support in their quest to make government institutions accountable. There is widespread distrust of elected officials and skepticism about the judiciary’s and legislature’s independence from the president. "The institutional crisis has obliged the press to take on the role of accountability," says Francisco Miró Quesada, executive editor of El Comercio, the country's oldest and most influential major newspaper.

At the same time, Peruvian journalists are becoming more self-critical, conscious that ethical lapses could taint the media's public image.

New tensions between the press and Fujimori have arisen in the wake of the dramatic takeover of the Japanese embassy by members of the armed Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a leftist guerrilla group, that began on Dec. 17. At the rebels’ invitation, journalists slipped past police security on Dec. 31 and entered the besieged compound to conduct interviews with rebel leaders. Such actions have raised concerns that the hostage crisis could result in a setback to prospects for the elimination or reform of special tribunals and other anti-terrorist laws that the Fujimori government have used against the press.

In 1992, Fujimori showed just how fragile democracy is in Peru when he suspended the constitution, dismissed the Congress, and assumed near-dictatorial powers, including direct executive control of the judiciary. Fujimori won a second five-year term in the 1995 election, and his party secured control of the congress. The president had promised the October dismantlement of the faceless court system, which he had established during the “self-coup.” But in a troubling setback on Oct. 11, the Congress approved a bill extending the system for another year.

In a positive development, the Congress, at Fujimori’s request, granted amnesty in December to a retired general who had been detained in a military prison after a television interview in which he denounced human rights abuses by the military. In the interview, the retired general, Rodolfo Robles, alleged that a military death squad had blown up the transmission tower of Global Television , a local station in Puno that has been critical of the government. The military court--which claims jurisdiction over all active and retired military personnel--charged Robles with insubordination.

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