•  lima
• Thursday, February 10, 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.

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