• by Milagros Salazar (lima)
• Wednesday, February 09, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Peru will begin to pay individual monetary reparations to victims and survivors of the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war, with top priority put on elderly people in remote villages in the country's impoverished highlands, where most of the human rights violations took place.

Although collective reparations have been made in the form of infrastructure projects at a community level, the individual damages have been delayed because the official registry of victims has not yet been completed.

The beneficiaries of the reparations will be direct family members of people killed or forcibly disappeared in the armed conflict, rape victims, and people left with disabilities.

'This is a pending issue that must be addressed,' said Jesús Aliaga, executive secretary of the High Level Multisectoral Commission (CMAN) set up to monitor the state's policies and actions on reparations. 'It has been a long wait,' he told IPS.

He said the CMAN Technical Commission, which he himself chairs, delivered a report that determined the amount of reparations to be paid, to Prime Minister José Antonio Chang on Jan. 31.

In its 2001 to 2003 investigation of human rights abuses committed during the 20-year civil war, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the conflict between government counterinsurgency forces and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas claimed the lives of 69,000 civilians.

However, the Reparations Council projects the total number of dead and disappeared civilians at around 50,000, based on its field visits to each region, where people applying for reparations fill out registration forms.

'The Technical Commission produced four cost projections taking into account the final projected estimates from the General Victims' Registry. The amounts have to be realistic. We are not putting a price on a life, nor are we asking the survivors to 'sell' their dead,' Aliaga said.

'We want to make the payment of a forgotten debt viable and sustainable,' he stressed.

The technical report will be published when Chang, who presides over the Council of Ministers, and the members of the CMAN reach a final decision.

But Aliaga told IPS that reparations to the families of local authorities like mayors or justices of the peace killed or disappeared in the conflict would be 1,350 dollars, while damages to the families of members of the 'rondas campesinas' -- rural vigilante groups trained by the army to fight Sendero, and thus seen as heroes -- were set at just under 14,000 dollars.

The official also said the proposed amounts presented to the prime minister are far from the 'maximalist option' outlined by the National Human Rights Coordinator (CNDDHH), an umbrella group of 60 NGOs, which called for reparations calculated on the basis of the official minimum wage.

'Monetary reparations have a symbolic component; the amount that was proposed is a reference point,' Gino Huerta with the Legal Defence Institute (IDL), who forms part of the CMAN as a representative of the CNDDHH, told IPS.

Aliaga explained that the reparations were calculated on the basis of actual monthly incomes in the conflict zones, mainly poor highlands areas where incomes are generally far below the official minimum wage.

The damages are based on incomes lost in the years since a breadwinner was killed or disappeared, or since the victim was left disabled.

For 2011, the government foresees payments totalling 7.2 million dollars in individual reparations, and a similar amount in collective reparations, which it continues to pay out.

In four years, the government has made collective indemnification to around 1,200 of the 5,660 communities registered as victims.

The collective reparations programme launched in 2007 consists of small infrastructure projects in areas hit hard by the conflict.

'Reparations should be as homogeneous as possible, because in contrast with Argentina and Chile (where damages were paid after military dictatorships), in Peru there was a larger proportion of poor victims,' Huerta said.

The IDL and the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) provided the Technical Commission with the report 'How Is Pain Quantified?' which describes reparations programmes in other countries of Latin America and discusses different ways that reparations can be made.

Huerta said the local human rights organisations insist that no conditions should be placed on how the families of victims use the damages, and that the elderly should be the first to receive payments.

Aliaga, for his part, said the Technical Commission also recommended that a set amount be paid, instead of different amounts depending on the specific human rights violation involved, to 'avoid resentments.'

He also confirmed that the first to receive payments will be elderly persons in rural areas, and that the technical report determined that three out of four victims were poor peasant farmers from the country's Quechua-speaking Andean highlands regions.

In his interview with IPS, Aliaga expressed concern over 'the fragility of the information' on the General Victims' Registry, which he said was only half complete. Moreover, of the 22,000 victims registered by December 2010 -- of the projected total of 50,000 -- there are '6,000 dead victims without any beneficiary identified,' he added.

'This worries us because in the end we would only have to pay reparations to 16,000 of the nearly 50,000 victims projected by the Council,' he said.

Determining who will or will not receive monetary damages is more complicated than it might seem. It must still be determined who is considered disabled by the conflict, and an amendment is still pending to include rape victims in the reparations programme.

In addition, the way the damages are distributed among the victims' direct family members must be determined, as well as what happens if new relatives turn up.

Aliaga stressed that the General Victims' Registry was supposed to be completed two years ago, and said the failure to meet the deadline led to delays.

But Rivas said that was 'only a pretext,' and that the registry didn't have to be completed before individual reparations began to be made.

The technical secretary of the Reparations Council pointed out that delays occurred because the laws and regulations governing the registry were not approved in time, and insufficient funds were assigned.

He noted, for example, that the team in charge of reviewing the registration forms filled out for the inclusion of victims on the General Victims' Registry had to be temporarily disbanded in December 2008 due to a lack of budget funds.

And although funds were once again available in January 2009, then prime minister Javier Velásquez did not give the team permission to begin operating again until July 2009.

Rivas said the Registry will be completed this year, and that of 73,000 applications, 50,000 have been verified, mainly from the hardest hit regions: Ayacucho, Junín, Huancavelica and Apurímac.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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