Mendoza’s 19-year-old son Arquimedes Ascarza, rumoured to be collaborating with the Maoist guerrilla organisation Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), had been disappeared by the Peruvian army in 1983. In addition to being his mother, Mendoza’s terrorist credentials also included helping to found the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP) as well as travelling briefly to Europe, in conjunction with other terrorist outfits such as Amnesty International, to publicise human rights abuses in the South American nation.
The year 1992 – the year of Fujimori’s accusation – also happened to be the year in which a professor and nine students from Lima’s National University of Education were abducted from campus and murdered by the Grupo Colina death squad, which included members of the Peruvian armed forces. In 1991, the same group assassinated an eight-year-old child and 14 other people at a social gathering in the neighbourhood of Barrios Altos.
Despite Fujimori’s efforts to preserve the human rights of Grupo Colina affiliates by passing an amnesty law, both of these massacres contributed to his own eventual conviction and imprisonment in 2009.
Che vs Jesus
Mendoza’s daughter Maribel Ascarza, who presides over the ANFASEP office in Ayacucho, recently described to me the violent night-time kidnapping of her brother from the family’s home. According to Ascarza, the army found validation for their operation in Arquimedes’ interior decorating scheme, which involved transcriptions on his bedroom walls of poems by Pablo Neruda, as well as a portrait of Che Guevara. The even larger portrait of Jesus Christ apparently did not constitute sufficient compensation for the presence of the other two idols, and Arquimedes was removed from the premises while his mother sustained a beating.
Ascarza ruefully admitted that she sometimes wished the soldiers had simply shot Arquimedes in his bedroom rather than subjecting the family to what is now verging on three decades of uncertainty as to his fate. A former student of law and political science, she affirmed that whether or not young Peruvians belonged to Sendero was entirely irrelevant to the responsibilities of a state that advertised itself as democratic – such as to refrain from engaging in state terrorism and from assigning judicial powers to the military.
The fact that entities like ANFASEP and Peru’s post-armed conflict Truth and Reconciliation Commission also condemn the terrorism committed by Sendero and emphasise the organisation’s instigating role in the conflict has not spared them denunciation as Senderista agents.
Fujimori is of course hardly the only Latin American functionary to have detected insidious motives behind human rights-oriented institutions. Last year, the head of the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General’s Office in Honduras was accused of facilitating gang violence when she objected to the extrajudicial execution by police of seven Honduran citizens. The accusation was levied by the Ministry of Security, the same ministry that excused the excessively high assassination rate of journalists in the country by arguing that most of the assassinated journalists did not possess proper journalistic qualifications anyway.