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Lisa Sharlach
APSA 2004
After the democratically-elected President Fujimori’s establishment of himself as
a dictator in the early 1990s, the military used increasingly drastic measures to repress
terrorism. The government jailed over 4,000 on charges of terrorism, many without
evidence (IWRAW 1999). By the late 1990s, Fujimori had succeeded in weakening,
although not entirely quelling, the leftist uprising. He had done so with little respect for
human rights (U.S. DoS 1999).
In Peru as well as South Africa, the government declared successive states of
emergency, but never declared war. In the early 1990s, half of all Peruvians lived under
a state of emergency, in which the security forces were not held accountable to the
national government (Hudson 1993, 4). Anti-terrorism laws in the Emergency Zones
defined as a terrorist anyone who "creates a state of anxiety" or was guilty of "affecting
international relations" (even non-violently) (HRW 1992, 35, 23). These exceptionally
vague laws in effect permitted state agents to detain anyone they chose, for any length of
time they chose, with no obligation to reveal the charges (HRW 1992, 24). As late as
1999, one-fifth of all Peruvians still lived under a state of emergency, in which some of
their constitutional liberties were suspended (CNDDHH 1999; U.S. DoS 1999). Much
of the Peruvian countryside was deemed an Emergency Zone continuously from 1982
until 1999, but the government denied that the country was undergoing civil war (U.S.
DoS 1999).
The conflict was not strictly an ethnic one; the Maoist guerrillas employed the
language of class warfare. Bizarrely, however, this insurgency is both Communist and
ethnic nationalist (Anderson and Sloan 1995, 327-331). Just as Siad Barré fused
Communism with Marx’s anathema, religion, in his officially “Marxist-Leninist Islamic”
Convention