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Peru's truth commission and the churches.

Article Excerpt
In August 2003 Peru's Commission of Truth and Reconciliation presented to the country its nine-volume report on the violence and human rights violations that occurred between 1980 and 2000. The report estimated that 69,280 Peruvians lost their lives as a result of that violence--a number far greater than the original figure of 25,000 that most people had presumed to have been the death toll. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, received considerable praise in the report for their defense of human rights and for the pastoral care that they extended to the victims of the violence.

But not all church people were happy with the report. In the report the Opus Dei archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani, is singled out for not defending human rights and for not fulfilling his pastoral mission while he was auxiliary bishop and later archbishop (1990-99) of Ayacucho, the home of the Shining Path in the central Andes. In angry retorts the archbishop rejected the findings of the report, as did an Opus Dei congressman and several members of the military. But most of the rest of the country received the report as a truthful account of what happened. Since August, briefer versions have been published and are currently the topic of discussions in schools, universities, and churches.

The Work of the Commission

The Commission of Truth and Reconciliation was founded in July 2001 by President Valentin Paniagua, the interim president after the debacle of the Fujimori government in 2000. The commission's original mandate was to investigate all serious human rights violations from the moment the Shining Path took up arms in 1980 up through the Fujimori regime, which collapsed in 2000. Originally conceived as a truth commission, it soon added the word "reconciliation." The head of the commission, Dr. Salomon Lerner, the...