By RICK VECCHIO
The Associated Press
Friday, May 26, 2006; 5:32 AM
LIMA, Peru -- A tangle of past atrocities has risen to the forefront of Peru's presidential election, leaving voters with a dispiriting question: Which alleged human rights violator do you least want for president?
Front-runner Alan Garcia, who is accused of covering up a massacre? Or Ollanta Humala, who is accused of overseeing the torture and murder of suspected guerrilla sympathizers?
The government-appointed Truth Commission that investigated Peru's 1980-2000 dirty war against the Shining Path held Garcia politically _ not criminally _ responsible for military abuses during his presidency, including the torture and massacre of more than two dozen peasants in the highland village of Cayara in May 1988.
Several human rights groups believe Garcia should be held criminally liable for appointing a legislative commission, dominated by his center-left Aprista party, whose majority report claimed the Cayara massacre never happened.
A Peruvian court reopened the Cayara case in July 2005 against 118 current and retired soldiers. For lack of evidence, Garcia was not charged with participating in an attempted cover-up. But former state prosecutor Carlos Escobar, while conceding he lacks hard proof, claims Garcia personally ordered soldiers to dig up and remove the bodies and blood stains.
Escobar _ an decorated champion of human rights for his work investigating Peru's past conflict with the Maoist Shining Path insurgency _ now works as a private lawyer defending Garcia's rival, Humala, against allegations from his own questionable past.
Humala, who retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel, commanded the "Madre Mia" jungle counterinsurgency base where soldiers allegedly terrorized the locals in 1992 during their fight against the Shining Path.
Known then by the pseudonym "Captain Carlos," Humala led soldiers accused of disappearances, torture and attempted murder. Hundreds of local residents disappeared that year, caught in the conflict between the army, the insurgents and drug traffickers in the Huallaga Valley.
Five of the survivors filed criminal complaints this year against Humala, who denied the charges and said he's being smeared to derail his campaign.
Escobar, who earned international praise for pursuing charges against Peru's army for the May 1988 massacre, has an ax to grind with Humala's opponent. He's convinced that Garcia sabotaged the Cayara investigation.
"Alan Garcia is someone whose hands are stained by blood," said Escobar, who fled Peru in November 1989, after numerous death threats and two attempts on his life, and lived for 10 years under political asylum in the United States.
Escobar is a walking reminder to Peruvian voters of the human rights violations during Garcia's presidency.
But he's also helping Humala in another case that could influence the June 4 runoff election, blocking calls for the candidate to testify in the trial of his brother, Antauro Humala. Saying he was acting on his brother's orders, Antauro Humala led 160 ultra-nationalist rebels in January 2005 to seize a remote police station in Peru's southern Andes, where they demanded the resignation of President Alejandro Toledo.
Ollanta, then facing forced retirement as a military attache at the Peruvian Embassy in South Korea, made a public call to army reservists back home to start a "popular insurrection" against Toledo's government.
But Ollanta quickly backed down and distanced himself from Antauro's action after four police were killed in the standoff.
It was the second time the brothers had urged the military to help unseat a president: In October 2000, they staged a small, ineffective rebellion as President Alberto Fujimori's government collapsed in corruption scandals.
The mystery surrounding that revolt deepened in the heat of the election campaign. Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's now-imprisoned intelligence chief, claimed last week the mutiny was a preplanned diversion for his simultaneous escape from Peru. Montesinos was captured eight months later in Venezuela.
Before hooking up with Fujimori, Montesinos was a lawyer for the drug underworld, and a behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer in the halls of Peru's Justice Palace. He is widely believed to have delivered the copy of Escobar's case file that Peru's military used to locate and systematically murder nine witnesses in Cayara massacre.
As the man in the middle of all this, Escobar misses no opportunity to bring up the Cayara massacre whenever the subject of Madre Mia comes up. Humala and his soldiers were accused in February of murdering three suspected guerrilla sympathizers in Madre Mia and torturing a fourth.
"Cayara" even popped up in Escobar's recent motion to move the Madre Mia investigation from a local prosecutor in the jungle town of Tocache to a prosecutor in the capital.
"It is public knowledge that cases of forced disappearance, homicides and crimes against humanity, like those that occurred in Cayara in Ayacucho, are being handled in Lima," Escobar wrote in a May 9 letter to the Tocache district attorney's office.
Garcia, who stresses that he was cleared of all human rights charges, told reporters he accepted being investigated "without complaints, without making myself out to be a victim or without being a cry baby" _ a clear reference to Humala.
Rights advocates are unsettled by Humala's use of Cayara for political advantage, but are reluctant to criticize Escobar, who was awarded the nation's annual Human Rights award when he returned to Peru in 2000.
"The one who has to answer whether he thinks what he is doing is correct, whether it is ethical or not, is Carlos Escobar," said Alejandro Silva, of the National Coordinator for Human Rights in Peru.
