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News > Latin America

Peru: Remains of 14 Disappeared Persons Returned to Families

  • In 1982 mothers of the disappeared founded Peru's National Association of the Relatives of Detained and Disappeared People.

    In 1982 mothers of the disappeared founded Peru's National Association of the Relatives of Detained and Disappeared People. | Photo: Twitter / @LUMoficial

Published 17 August 2018
Opinion

The humanitarian effort was done in the framework of a 2016 law that allows the exhumation, identification, and return of the remains the disappeared.

Relatives of 14 persons, who were disappeared in Peru, received their remains within the framework of a pioneering law that expedites the humanitarian delivery of the remains of people murdered during the bloody internal conflict between Peru’s security forces and the communist guerrilla known as Shining Path.

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The Law to Search for Disappeared People was approved in 2016 to prioritize the identification and return of human remains and later proceed with the investigation if it is viable. Before 2016, Peruvian law forced relatives and loved ones to file a complaint and present witnesses in a lengthy process. In most cases, the general attorney’s office did not order the exhumation of the bodies arguing they were unable to identify the crime’s author.   

According to national authorities, there are over 15,000 people who remain disappeared due to 20 years of political violence, during which the Peruvian army kidnapped, tortured and murdered guerillas and people suspected of being guerrillas.

In 2003, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that over 70 percent of the victims of Peru’s internal conflict was poor, Indigenous people with virtually no access to the justice system.

The remains of Alberto Ramos, a Campesino murdered by the army in 1983, was among those delivered to family members. His remains were exhumed over three decades after his murder and through a forensic analysis kinship to his 98-year-old father was confirmed.

Ramos was buried for the second time surrounded by family and friends.  

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