LIMA—Plans to build a "Museum of Memory" for the tens of thousands of people killed in Peru's civil war have exposed a deep political divide and revived scare tactics unseen since the conflict ended.
The museum would house photographs and oral histories from a war that claimed nearly 70,000 lives from 1980 to 2000 when the government battled left-wing guerrillas.
The planned exhibits reinforce the findings of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which said in its final report in 2003 that the military committed scores of atrocities while fighting the brutal Shining Path rebel group and the smaller Tupac Amaru insurgency.
With construction to start as soon as next year, the controversy is part of a broader dispute about putting former military officers on trial for human rights crimes, a bitter wrangle that could spill over into the 2011 presidential race.
Salomon Lerner, a former university chancellor who led the truth commission and is now helping organize the museum, has received death threats in recent weeks and two of his pet dogs were poisoned to death.
More than 200 prominent Peruvians have run a full page ad in newspapers to demand the government provide Lerner with special police protection. Renowned Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa heads the board of the museum and has called its foes "recalcitrant."
But some senior officials oppose the museum and frown on the findings of the truth commission, which was set up by former President Alejandro Toledo.
Defense Minister Rafael Rey and Vice President Luis Giampietri, a former Navy admiral, want to block the display of incriminating evidence that might intensify calls to prosecute former soldiers or officers.
They insist that the armed forces protected Peruvians from the guerrillas' bombings and beheadings.
Shining Path, a Maoist group, was one of the most violent Latin American rebel forces, but the truth commission said the army executed hundreds of innocent people suspected of being leftist sympathizers.
Rey says the truth commission inflated the civil war death toll, and accuses human rights groups of defending terrorists.
Francisco Soberon, president of leading Peruvian rights group Aprodeh, said the government is reluctant to admit there were more than just a few isolated cases of abuse.
"There are lawsuits pending and the military is trying to stop them, so what we are seeing is an effort to deny that there were grave, systematic and generalized rights violations," Soberon said. He added that the killing of Lerner's dogs was "part of a spider's web of contrarian acts against efforts to seek justice, memory and reparations".
Dead dogs have shown up before in Peruvian political history. In 1980, when the Shining Path declared war against the state, one of its first symbolic acts was hanging dead dogs from street lights in Lima.
More Trials or a Pardon?
Critics say that while Peru has made economic progress in recent years, it must do more to prosecute rights abuses.
One step in that direction was taken this year when former President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for two massacres that a death squad carried out in the 1990s.
The Supreme Court verdict, which placed Fujimori at the helm of a dirty counterinsurgency effort, could be used as a precedent to prosecute other former officials.
Lawyers are already moving to put the current president, Alan Garcia, on trial when he leaves office in 2011.
During his first term in the 1980s, Garcia, frustrated that Shining Path rebels had taken over El Fronton prison, told the navy to attack it.
The prison was bombed by airplanes before soldiers went in on the ground to retake control. Many unarmed prisoners were shot. More than 200 were killed at El Fronton and two other prisons where rebellions were repressed in 1986.
Vice President Giampietri was in charge of the navy at the time of the El Fronton attack.
The push to try former military officers on rights abuses could depend in part on who wins the next election.
Fujimori's daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a conservative lawmaker and an early front-runner in the 2011 presidential race, has said that if elected she would grant her father a pardon — a move that would undermine efforts to put other former officials on trial.
Ollanta Humala, a candidate of the left-wing Nationalist Party, has said abuses by the military should be punished. A former lieutenant colonel, he himself once faced charges of rights abuses stemming from the war though they were dropped.
Fujimori was widely credited with defeating the Shining Path and taming economic chaos before his government collapsed in a cloud of corruption in 2000.
But some remnant bands of the Shining Path have survived, one of which controls cocaine trafficking routes out of the Apurimac and Ene Valleys, the world's largest coca growing region. That group has killed two dozen soldiers in the past year as it resists the government's war on drugs.
"I don't support this idea of the museum of memory," Defense Minister Rey has said. "They want to build a museum for the dead when the Shining Path, together with the drug traffickers, are still killing Peruvians."
