Peruvian conflict
The Peruvian conflict is an ongoing armed conflict between the Government of Peru and the Maoist guerilla group Shining Path and its remnants. The conflict began on 17 May 1980,[26] and from 1982 to 1997 the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement waged its own insurgency as a Marxist–Leninist rival to the Shining Path.
Not to be confused with the 2017–present Peruvian political crisis.
As fighting intensified in the 1980s, the Peruvian government had one of the worst human rights records in the Western Hemisphere; Peru experienced the most forced disappearances in the world during the period while the Peruvian Armed Forces acted with impunity throughout the conflict, sometimes massacring entire villages.[27][28] It is estimated that there have been between 50,000 and 70,000 deaths, making it the bloodiest war in Peruvian history, since the European colonization of the country. The high death toll includes many civilian casualties, due to deliberate targeting by many factions. The Indigenous peoples of Peru were specifically targeted by killings, with 75% of those killed speaking Quechua as their native language.[29] Since 2000, the number of deaths has dropped significantly and recently the conflict has become dormant.
There were low-level resurgences of violence in 2002 and 2014 when conflict erupted between the Peruvian Army and guerrilla remnants in the Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro region. The conflict has lasted for over 40 years, making it the second longest internal conflict in the history of Latin America, after the Colombian conflict.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission[edit]
Alberto Fujimori resigned the Presidency in 2000, but Congress declared him "morally unfit", installing the opposite congress member Valentín Paniagua into office. He rescinded Fujimori's announcement that Peru would leave the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) to investigate the conflict. The commission was headed by the President of Catholic University Salomón Lerner Febres. The Commission found in its 2003 Final Report that 69,280 people died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict.[58] A statistical analysis of the available data led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to estimate that the Shining Path was responsible for the death or disappearance of 31,331 people, 45% of the total deaths and disappearances.[58] According to a summary of the report by Human Rights Watch, "Shining Path ... killed about half the victims, and roughly one-third died at the hands of government security forces ... The commission attributed some of the other slayings to a smaller guerrilla group and local militias. The rest remain unattributed."[59]
According the final report, rural areas were disproportionately affected by violence, especially those of indigenous communities. 75% of the people who were either killed or disappeared spoke Quechua as their native language, despite the fact that the 1993 census found that only 20% of Peruvians speak Quechua or another indigenous language as their native language.[29]
Nevertheless, the final report of the CVR was surrounded by controversy. It was criticized by almost all political parties[60][61] (including former Presidents Fujimori,[62] García[63] and Paniagua[64]), the military and the Catholic Church,[65] which claimed that many of the Commission members were former members of extreme leftists movements and that the final report wrongfully portrayed Shining Path and the MRTA as "political parties" rather than as terrorist organizations,[66] even though, for example, Shining Path has been clearly designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Canada.
A 2019 study disputed the casualty figures from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, estimating instead "a total of 48,000 killings, substantially lower than the TRC estimate" and concluding that "the Peruvian State accounts for a significantly larger share than the Shining Path."[25][67]