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Rights Tribunal Orders Million-Dollar Payout From Peru For Executions- International Justice - Global Policy Forum Rights Tribunal Orders Million-Dollar Payout
Agence France Presse
From Peru For Executions
December 19, 2001The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered Peru to pay more than one million dollars to the families of people killed during the regime of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori.
In a sentence handed down November 30 but released Tuesday, the court ordered the Peruvian state to begin 175,000-dollar payments in January 2002 to the relatives of victims of massacres in the first six years of the Fujimori regime, such as the 1991 attack on Barrios Altos that killed a child and 14 others.
Survivors of the nine students and a professor from the La Cantuta state university shot on July 18, 1992, also will each receive 175,000-dollar payments.
Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides, who was brutally tortured both before and during a 20-year prison sentence for terrorism charges never fully explained during his two trials, will receive 100,000 dollars from the state.
At least 25,000 people, mainly civilians, died in the fighting, which ended when Fujimori's regime crushed leftist guerrillas in the mid-1990s. Most of the victims were poor rural workers who lived in the Andes and Amazon regions.
An August study by sociologist Jaime Antezana indicates that some 180 mass graves exist in Peru, containing the remains of at least 2,000 people murdered in extrajudicial executions by troops during the 1980s -- the worst years of Peru's war against subversion.
Most of the executions took place between 1983 and 1989 in the southern Andean region, notably in Ayacucho department where the Maoist rebel group Shining Path rose up, as well as in Huancavelica and Apurimac.
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