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Peru Penal System
In the second half of the 1980s, Peru's insurgency
exacerbated the country's already intolerable prison
conditions.
One of the SL's early successes was its March 1982 raid on
the
Ayacucho Prison, freeing most of the prisoners, including
several
SL militants. Even though intelligence reports had alerted
the GR
that an attack was planned and Lima had sent
reinforcements to
Ayacucho, the local commanding officer chose to disregard
the
warning.
Another problem related to the prison policy of
segregating
the SL members from the other prisoners. The SL turned
this
policy to its own advantage by creating model minicamps of
collective ideological reinforcement and community
building
within their separate cell blocks. Visitors reported an
organization and an esprit de corps not found in any other
part
of the prisons. This separation probably facilitated
coordinated
SL prisoner riots at Lurigancho, El Frontón, and Santa
Bárbara
prisons in Lima in mid-June 1986, as well as the
overreaction by
GR jailors and the army reinforcements that were sent in,
resulting in the killing of nearly 300 prisoners after
they had
surrendered. One justification offered at the time alluded
to the
GR's release of pent-up rage after having been
continuously
subjected to threats from the jailed militants that their
comrades outside prison knew where the guards' families
lived and
would attack them if the inmates were not granted special
treatment. Later, Minister of Interior Félix Mantilla
accused PS
prison officials at Canto Grande of aiding and abetting
the July
1990 tunnel escape of forty-seven MRTA prisoners. After
the April
1992 autogolpe, President Fujimori took steps to
break up
the blocks of SL militants in prisons, which provoked a
riot in
Canto Grande in May, resulting in the deaths of about
twenty-five
SL inmates and two police officials.
Peru's prisons, totaling 111 to 114 nationwide in 1990,
were
administered by 3,075 employees, with a guard staff made
up of
about 4,000 PS members (formerly Republican Guards).
Article 234
of the constitution of 1979 emphasized the reeducation and
rehabilitative functions of the penal system rather than
simply
punishment, with the goal of eventual reintegration of the
prisoner back into society. However, that remained a
distant goal
in 1992 rather than a realized program.
Of a 1990 prison population estimated at 40,000, about
half
were in the twenty-five jails in Lima. Although the
military
government began an ambitious program of building new
prisons and
rehabilitating old ones, financial limitations left the
project
incomplete. In a survey of the prisons carried out in 1987
to
assess their general physical state, only 13 percent
(fourteen)
were determined to be in good condition, 53 percent
(fifty-nine)
were average, and 32 percent (thirty-six) were poor (two
Lima
prisons were not surveyed). Among the most important
prisons, all
in Lima, were Lurigancho Prison, completed in 1968; Canto
Grande
Prison, built in the early 1980s; Miguel Castro Prison;
and two
womens' prisons--Santa Mónica Prison in Chorrillos
District,
dating from 1951, and Santa Bárbara Prison. The most
dangerous
criminals were sent to El Frontón, on a small island near
the
port of Callao, where the isolated blockhouse, known as La
Lobera
(Wolf's Lair), was one of the most dreaded in the country.
Another important prison was the agricultural penal colony
of El
Sepa in the jungle of Loreto.
The twin challenges of a growing prison population and
the
government's continuing economic difficulties contributed
to
increasing deterioration of conditions in the prisons, a
deterioration that reached crisis proportions by the end
of the
1980s. The total prison population increased from about
15,000 in
1975 to about 40,000 by 1990. Peru's largest prison,
Lurigancho,
built for a maximum inmate population of 2,000, held
nearly 7,000
in August 1990; others, such as Miguel Castro Prison,
housed at
that juncture over four times its installed capacity of
500. Some
168 children were jailed with their mothers in Chorrillos
Prison.
At the time the Fujimori government began its term in
July
1990, Inpe was spending less than US$0.10 daily per inmate
on
food--one meal a day or less. A thirteen-day hunger strike
was
conducted by some 9,000 prisoners in Lima in August 1990
to
protest the situation. In response, the Fujimori
government
directed food donations to the prisons and increased food
expenditures to US$0.55 per inmate in September 1990.
Of the many other problems, one of the most serious was
the
"custom in the judicial system to delay five years before
handing
down a verdict," as Inpe director Carlos Caparó said in
September
1990. Another problem was the delay in releasing inmates
who had
completed their sentences, which was an estimated 10
percent of
the prison population. In some cases, this was because
prisoners
could not pay the "fees" demanded for authorities to sign
the
five evaluations required to be released--medical, legal,
social,
educational, and psychological. With the deterioration in
conditions, health problems in the prisons increased;
forty
inmates died of tuberculosis in Lurigancho alone between
January
and September 1990, and President Fujimori stated that
about
5,000 of the country's prisoners had life-threatening
diseases.
In September 1990, President Fujimori's office
promulgated a
decree setting up a special advisory group, the Special
Technical
Qualifying Commission, to review cases of prisoners held
but not
tried for less serious offenses (drug trafficking,
terrorism, and
murder were excluded) for possible presidential pardons.
The
first 97 received President Fujimori's official pardon in
December 1990, with up to 2,000 more expected to be
pardoned
later. The new draft penal code was another major step
toward
resolving some penal system problems, but alleviation of
many
other issues would require infusion of new resources that
were
not yet available in 1992. Fujimori's April 1992
autogolpe
further postponed any definitive resolution of this
problem,
other than immediately implementing a reorganization of
Inpe.
* * *
The Peruvian military and its relationship to politics
and
society has been the subject of numerous book-length
studies and
articles in English. In part, this is because the military
takeover in Peru in October 1968 turned out to be the
first and
the most sustained of several long-term reformist military
governments in the region during this period. Some two
dozen
books appeared in English describing and evaluating the
twelveyear regime (1968-80), of which the most comprehensive to
date in
1991 was The Peruvian Experiment Revisited, edited
by
Cynthia McClintock and Abraham F. Lowenthal. Daniel M.
Masterson's Militarism and Politics in Latin
America also
covers the reform period in depth, as well as providing
the most
systematic and complete study available in English on the
Peruvian military in the twentieth century. Among the many
articles that summarize this period, David Scott Palmer's
"Changing Political Economy of Peru Under Civilian and
Military
Rule" was quite helpful. Particularly useful studies in
English
include the annual country reports on human rights
practices in
Peru submitted to the United States Congress by the
Department of
State; Philip Mauceri's The Military, Insurgency, and
Democratic Power; Adrian J. English's "Peru," in
Jane's
Armed Forces of Latin America; Carlos Iván
Degregori's
Ayacucho, 1969-1979; and The Shining Path of
Peru,
edited by Palmer. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of September 1992
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