A Peruvian judge has ordered the arrest of 118 current and retired military officials for their alleged involvement in the 1988 massacre of peasants in an Andean village.
The arrests were ordered in connection with the torture and killing of more than two dozen villagers in Cayara on May 14, 1988, and subsequent human rights violations in two neighboring hamlets in the area, about 250 miles southeast of Lima.
The initial attack was in response to an ambush of an army patrol by Maoist Shining Path guerrillas.
Judge Miluska Cano Lopez's order comes a month after another judge issued arrest warrants for 29 current and former military officials for a similar 1985 massacre of 72 peasants in Accomarca, another village in the Ayacucho region, where the Shining Path was founded.
The arrest orders pit Peru's civilian courts against its military justice system, which historically has jurisdiction over its personnel implicated in human rights abuse cases. The military courts rarely mete out harsh punishment.
In 1992, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that the Peruvian army massacred at least 26 peasants in Cayara on May 14, 1988, then a week later executed three more peasants, before systematically killing eight witnesses.
A ninth witness, a 22-year-old nurse, was slain in September 1989, human rights groups said. The woman's parents and neighbors said they watched, helpless, as eight men in army uniforms, faces hidden by black ski masks, broke down her front door, dragged her into the street and fired three bullets into her head and chest.
The case was revived by Peru's government-appointed truth commission, which in its final 2003 report blamed state security forces for nearly half of an estimated 70,000 people killed during Peru's bloody insurgency between 1980-2000.
AP