The fallen soldiers and single slain hostage were eulogized as heroes. The terrorist leaders were shoved quietly into their crypts in nighttime ceremonies heavily guarded by Peruvian security agents.
In markedly different funerals Thursday and Friday, from the steps of Peru’s Supreme Court to the city’s bleak desert shantytowns, the nation tried to lay to rest its long hostage crisis.
But some questions remained. President Alberto Fujimori on Friday denied reports that at least two of the guerrillas had been executed after trying to surrender, calling the charges “completely false.”
He evaded a question as to whether the troops had orders to kill all of the guerrillas, saying only that “the order and the objective was to free the 72 hostages, not one less.”
One of the hostages, Fujimori’s Agriculture Minister Rodolfo Munante, however, said he saw a young rebel who tried to surrender gunned down by commandos.
Unnamed military and intelligence sources also were quoted in Lima’s newspapers as saying that two captured guerrillas were lined up against an upstairs wall and shot, and one young woman among the rebels was killed after screaming, “We surrender!”
Sinecio Jarama, a retired army general, on Friday defended the killings of all of the rebels.
“In the chaos and confusion of an operation of this nature, the basic theme is to eliminate anyone in front of you,” he said.
In a solemn ceremony, Juan Valer, the navy commando who blocked with his own body seven rebel bullets intended for Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela, was buried with Raul Jiminez, an army lieutenant who also died in the rescue.
Fujimori and his 16-year-old son Kenji, who attended the ceremony with hundreds of soldiers, called the soldiers “heroes of the country, the pride of their families and an example for Peru’s youth.”
The president’s son wept and kissed the coffin of Valer, who had once served as his personal bodyguard.
Valer’s death “touches me personally,” Fujimori noted. “We feel, my son and me, a great loss.”
El Sol, a Lima newspaper, Friday published a letter the commando had left in his locker before the raid, to be read in the event of his death. In it, he expressed his willingness to “fight until death to see Peru free” from what he called “the destruction, the pain and barbarity caused by this group of evil Peruvians.”
Supreme Court Justice Carlos Giusti, the only hostage to die in Tuesday’s raid that ended the more than four-month siege at the Japanese ambassador’s residence, also was buried Friday after his coffin lay in state Thursday at Peru’s Palace of Justice, where he once worked.
The 14 Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement guerrillas killed in Tuesday’s lighting military raid, meanwhile, were buried with as little fanfare as possible.
In apparent violation of what family members said was a promise to turn over the bodies, Peru’s government staged its own rushed burials of the terrorists Thursday night in graveyards in the desert shantytowns that surround Lima.
Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, the Tupac Amaru leader, was buried at Lurin in southern Lima, in a quick ceremony attended only by an aunt and a handful of other relatives, who had wanted his body interred elsewhere.
Soldiers dropped his casket in a freshly dug trench, covered it with dirt and left. Only a small black cross with his name was left to mark the grave.
His second-in-command, Roli Rojas, was buried in northeast Lima, also after dark. His mother and two brothers wept over the gray casket and then watched by candlelight as soldiers shoved it into a burial niche and closed the grave with concrete.
Soldiers and intelligence officers outnumbered mourners at the brief ceremony. The family, which had made plans for a traditional wake and services, was not allowed to hold a mass. Family members instead simply scratched Rojas’ name in the fresh cement after a brief prayer.
Rojas’ brother called the slain rebel “a social fighter ahead of his time and promised that “history will judge him.” Other mourners shouted for vengeance and chanted, “Long live the MRTA!”
The 12 other lower-ranking rebels were quickly buried at various cemeteries around Lima.
Fujimori’s popularity, meanwhile, leapt nearly 30 points following the raid, a new poll shows. The polling firm Apoyo SA put his support at 67 percent, up from 38 percent before the strike.
