Barrios Altos Massacre - Case Reopened

Case Reopened

After the fall of the Fujimori government in 2000, Congress repealed the Amnesty Law. The Barrios Altos case was reopened, and a number of suspects were taken into legal custody. On March 21, 2001, the Peruvian Attorney General Nelly Calderón presented charges against Fujimori in Congress, accusing him of being a "co-author" of the massacre. She presented evidence that Fujimori, acting in concert with Vladimiro Montesinos, head of the SIN, exercised control over Grupo Colina. The charges allege that the group could not have committed crimes of this magnitude without Fujimori's express orders or consent, and that the formation and functioning of the Colina group was part of an overall counter-insurgency policy that involved systematic violations of human rights. According to the report, Fujimori went to SIN headquarters to celebrate with intelligence officers after the massacre took place.

As a result of the August 2001 ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the OAS, which had heard the case, the government of Peru agreed to pay USD $3.3 million in compensation to the four survivors and the relatives of the fifteen people murdered. It waited until the new government had been elected to sign the ruling later that year.

On September 13, 2001, Supreme Court Justice José Luis Lecaros issued an international warrant to Interpol for the arrest of Fujimori, then living in Japan. In August 2003, the Peruvian government submitted a request for the extradition of Fujimori from Japan; among the crimes it cited was the Barrios Altos massacre. Initially Japan had resisted extradition because Fujimori's parents had emigrated to Peru from Japan and it considered him a national of Japan. Its laws prohibited extradition of nationals; in addition, Japan and Peru did not then have an extradition agreement. Peru finally gained his extradition when Fujimori traveled to Chile. He was tried and convicted for his role in the massacre.

In 2004, Peruvian judges ordered the release of several of the Barrios Altos suspects, who had been held for more than three years without a trial or sentence. They had been taken into custody allegedly to comply with a recommendation by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, as part of its ruling on the Barrios Altos case. Supreme Court of Justice president Walter Vásquez Vejarano said an investigation is under way into the judges who allowed trials to be delayed for so long.