Peru casts light on a dark chapter from the past

Florencio Varillas hobbles up to the microphone here and barely manages a whisper as he relives eight years of torment.

"They beat us all the time," he tells the standing-room-only crowd gathered in this colonial coastal town. "They passed electricity through my hands, my elbows. They wrapped us in a wet blanket and beat us."

Swept like thousands of other Peruvians into the vortex of political violence here in the 1980s and 1990s, the high school teacher was arrested on suspicion of terrorism, thrown into jail after he refused to confess, and absolved after eight years in prison that left him partially paralyzed.

In public hearings such as the one in Trujillo last week, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is gathering testimony about ordinary citizens who died, disappeared, or were imprisoned as terrorist groups clashed with armed forces and police. Almost two decades of violence claimed at least 30,000 lives. More than 4,000 people were arbitrarily detained; nearly 600,000 were forced to leave their homes.

The commission's goals are to fully reveal what happened, document human rights violations, find out what happened to the victims, propose reparations, and recommend reforms to keep this dark chapter from repeating itself.

Given Latin America's history of political violence, truth commissions have been a common occurrence in the region. Peruvian officials have studied past initiatives in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala. "We tried to take advantage of all the positive experiences of other commissions and avoid their problems," explains Salomón Lerner, dean of Peru's Catholic University and president of the commission.

Peru's truth process differs from the rest of Latin America's in two important ways that emphasize openness and the quest for justice.

The public statements by victims are a first for the region, notes Lisa Magarrell, a senior associate with the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, a nonprofit group that provides technical assistance to countries dealing with past rights abuses. "Other Latin American countries took the information from testimonies behind closed doors, and then put it all together and issued a final report," she says. "There was nothing so directly and so publicly involving the victims. It is an experiment for Latin America."

The Trujillo hearing, the final one, was the eighth since April 2002. More than 150 of the thousands of harrowing accounts of murder, rape, torture and arbitrary detention – told by the victims themselves or surviving relatives – have aired on national television. "[The testimonies] reveal for many the degrees of cruelty that were reached in that period," says Mr. Lerner. "At the time, we – at least those of us living in cities – had only indirect news of what was happening.... We did not have a full sense of the atrocities being committed."

The public tellings represent "a first level of symbolic and moral reparations" for the victims of violence, says Carlos Iván Degregori, an anthropologist and member of the commission.

Peru's hearings were inspired by South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission of the late 1990s.

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