Unmarked graves haunt Peru despite Fujimori trial
By Dana Ford
LIMA, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Far from the high-profile human rights trial of former President Alberto Fujimori, scientists are trying to match DNA samples with bones dug from unmarked graves to identify thousands of victims of Peru's civil war.
Fujimori is charged with ordering the deaths of 25 people but nearly 70,000 people were killed or disappeared during the war, and the worst violence was in the decade before he took power in 1990.
Some Peruvians say Fujimori's trial is now drawing attention from the work of identifying war victims and allowing their families to give them proper burials.
"Corruption and human rights abuses started long before Fujimori," said Jose Pablo Baraybar, an anthropologist who heads a forensics team that swabbed dozens of cheeks this week to get DNA samples from families of Peru's disappeared.
"His trial is a distraction - a diversion from the first ten years" said Baraybar.
The brutal conflict, which erupted in 1980, pitted the military, police, and peasant militias against two armed leftist groups -- the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
Shining Path's Maoist radicals imposed a reign of terror in rural areas and security forces targeted student activists and union leaders it suspected of working with the guerrillas.
Most of the victims were killed in the 1980s, during the governments of Fernando Belaunde and Alan Garcia, who returned to power two years ago.
Fujimori ruled from 1990 to 2000 and is widely credited with ending the war by capturing Shining Path's top leaders, but public opinion turned against him over corruption scandals and his authoritarian style.
He has been on trial for nearly three months, charged with ordering a death squad to kill suspected leftists.
Families of the disappeared say his trial is a major turning point in a country long hobbled by a weak justice system, but worry a conviction could distract Peru from the broader task of dealing with past atrocities.
"All the governments committed the same (crimes) and all should be brought to justice," said Cirila Pulido, 36, who gave a saliva sample this week in Lima, the capital. Her mother and baby brother were killed 23 years ago, and their bodies have not been found.
Baraybar said that some 14,000 people disappeared during the dirty war and only several hundred of their bodies have been recovered and identified. "What about the rest?" he said.
RACE AGAINST TIME
Since 2003, the Peruvian government has kept a list of people who disappeared in the war. Each year it grows.
"There are a lot of problems inherent in identifying people," said Gisella Vignolo, director of the government agency charged with investigating what happened to those who disappeared.
The majority of victims are from poor, remote areas where people speak Quechua. Some never had birth certificates. Their towns are hard to get to and once there, researchers have to find survivors of the war who remember what happened.
"It's a race against time, and time is running out," said Baraybar.
Angelica Mendoza, 79, talks often about the night in 1983 when soldiers snatched her teenage son from her house in Ayacucho, birthplace of the Shining Path.
Mendoza hopes Fujimori, 69, will be sentenced to the maximum 30 years in prison. Still, she says more work is needed.
"We'll never forget the thousands and thousands of people who disappeared," said Mendoza. "And we'll never stop looking." (Editing by Terry Wade and Kieran Murray)
