The trial of Alberto Fujimori

Jo-Marie Burt witnessed the first week of former President Alberto Fujimori’s trial in Lima as an accredited observer for WOLA. Here is her report. The trial of Alberto Fujimori started on December 10, 2007, which was also the 59th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Whether he was aware of this irony or not (and he presumably wasn’t; human rights law is not exactly his forte), Fujimori stands accused of precisely the sorts of crimes that the magna carta of human rights protection was meant to prevent: ordering abductions and extra-judicial killings and abuse of authority during his rule from 1990 to 2000. The “mega-trial,” as Peruvians call of it, of their former president is currently limited to charges for which Fujimori was extradited to Peru from Chile in September. These include human rights violations in three cases: the Barrios Altos massacre of 1991, in which 15 people were killed; the disappearance and later killing of nine students and a professor from the Cantuta University in 1992; and the kidnapping of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer in the aftermath of the April 5, 1992, coup d’état in which Fujimori closed Congress, suspended the Constitution, and took control over the judiciary with the backing of the armed forces.