Arguing and Justifying: Assessing the Convention Refugees' Choice of Moment, Motive and Host Country by Robert F. Barsky

Author:Robert F. Barsky [Barsky, Robert F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351957281
Google: XkUrDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 21879464
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

4 Claimants from Peru: Persecution in “America” and Flight to Canada

Alberto Fujimori has not advanced the judicial process because he has not widened in the slightest degree the opportunities of the have-nots to compete with the haves on terms resembling equality… The distance between the measures taken by the Fujimori government and my program is abysmal… the difference, in economics between liberal and conservative, and in politics, between dictatorship and democracy. (Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water, p. 174)

Fujimori’s system of injustice since his self-coup in 1992, the killing of whole peasant villages (close to 25,000 people killed by the government since 1980), the over 4,000 disappearances, the secret military tribunals, have all been part of a US led counter-insurgency aimed at the 17 year-long People’s War led by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP). The US is currently planning to send more Green Berets and Navy Seals to Peru to train and lead Peruvian military and police in these methods of terror. (From “The Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru”, internet site)

A study of Peruvian claimants is particularly interesting in light of the 2000 election, in which Fujimori was forced into a run-off on account of charges of massive electoral fraud, charges which led to more open discussion and then protests about the brutality of his rule. It’s also revealing in light of the events that occurred in the Japanese embassy in Lima over a four month period beginning December 17th, 1996, when Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) rebels took hundreds of high-level diplomats, government officials and business executives hostage. They had been attending a party at the Japanese embassy in Lima, and ending April 22, 1997, when 150 heavily-armed Peruvian military troops carried out a commando raid to end the takeover. Those rebels who were not immediately killed by the government commandos in the course of the assault were, according to witnesses, disarmed and executed. For the most part the news was greeted with relief, but individuals knowledgeable of the situation in Peru expressed surprise and disgust at the government tactics and the bloody outcome. It would have been apparent to anyone who had read the testimony recorded in the course of my interviews with Peruvian claimants that the Fujimori government would never have backed down or offered concessions; the incident was quite literally destined to end with a bloodbath. These interviews also reveal the degree to which the highly-politicized and often anti-American attitudes of the claimants can be linked to the type of American activities in Central and South America which provoke opposition groups in Peru. The general attitudes of the claimants, and their methods of argumentation, reflect a long-standing and well-founded fear of US backed dictatorial governments like Fujimori’s.

Gil Loescher offers significant amounts of material useful for the contextualization of these attitudes, particularly in his discussions of how the Americans used political refugees from the whole region for political purposes. For example, on the question of Chilean refugees he recalls that “in sharp

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