By Steve Warren Privat-Pérez, National Coordinator, Agroecology Projects, Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas, Peru
Earlier this month, the Congress of the Republic of Peru approved Bill 7549/2023-CR (see communiqué in Spanish), which grants amnesty to soldiers, police officers, militia members and state functionaries who violated human rights during the civil conflict from 1980-2000. Alarmed that it could hinder ongoing prosecutions for serious crimes if enacted, UN experts have warned that the bill “violates human rights treaty norms” and “impedes access to justice, truth and reparation for victims.” The bill has also been denounced by victims’ groups.
Critics of the bill include Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada‘s Peruvian partner, the Instituto Bartolomé de Las Casas (IBC), which is named after a Dominican friar who campaigned against the atrocities of Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. IBC’s opposition to the bill is in keeping with its mission of furthering liberation and human development from the perspective of the preferential option for the poor.
The article below, first published in Spanish on IBC’s website, has been reproduced here in translation with their permission.
The second death: when Congress buries memory
Lima, July 2025
History will remember this moment with shame. In an artificially lit room filled with prefabricated speeches and complicit silences, a group of Congress members pressed buttons that not only activated an electronic voting system, but also buried decades of struggle, silenced thousands of cries, trampled on the accumulated pain of generations, and enshrined impunity as state policy. It was not a simple vote; it was the public execution of justice.
The Congress of the Republic has passed a law granting amnesty to members of the Armed Forces and the National Police of Peru involved in crimes during the internal armed conflict. Under the guise of reconciliation, an act of betrayal of the national memory has been consummated. They have called this an act of “historical justice,” as if history could be changed by decree. As if the bodies still lying in mass graves could be convinced that they died by mistake. As if the mothers who continue to wait for their children could be persuaded that forgetting is a form of healing.
It is not. Imposed oblivion is a form of torture. And that is what Congress has done: it has tortured the victims once again, revictimized the survivors, and condemned the country to a truncated memory.
To understand the gravity of this law, one need only consider its effects. This is not a technical measure or an innocent legal reform. This amnesty means that those who executed, tortured, raped, disappeared or murdered in the name of the state can walk free, without accountability, without trial, without even the minimal act of acknowledging the harm they caused.
This is not about granting clemency to confused foot soldiers caught up in the horror. This law also benefits officers who planned extermination operations, generals who signed annihilation orders, and officials who shielded the machinery of death with paperwork. Men who were not mere executors, but designers of terror. Granting amnesty to these individuals is not a legal decision: it is a political statement. It is the state saying, without mincing words, that the lives of Quechua-speaking peasants, raped women, and tortured children are worthless.
Because most of the victims did not live in Lima or speak Spanish. Most were poor Indigenous people, inhabitants of the Ayacucho highlands, the Huancavelica ravines, the margins of the country. When the state killed, it did not do so with surgical precision, it did not do so in self-defence, it did not do so exceptionally. It did so systematically, with cruelty, with prior impunity, with racial contempt. And now, that impunity has been legitimized by law.
This law does not only erase court records. It erases testimonies. It erases faces. It erases the truth. In that sense, it is a second death. The death of the possibility of justice. The death of the hope for reparation.
The discourse used to defend this law is as cynical as it is insulting. It has been said that it is a ‘vindication’ of those who “saved the country from terrorism.” But what country saves some by killing others? What kind of salvation is this that leaves more than 69,000 dead, most of them civilians, many of them killed by the state itself?
They talk about “pacification” as if silence were peace. As if burying crimes were a way to heal. But the silence imposed by those in power is only a pause in the violence. True peace cannot be decreed; it is built with truth, justice, and memory. Without these pillars, everything else is institutional hypocrisy.
It has been repeated ad nauseam that the military were “following orders,” as if obedience were an excuse for barbarism. As if the chain of command dissolved moral responsibility. But history does not absolve the executioner because he “was only obeying orders.” History points, judges, remembers.
Congress has sought to manipulate language, attempting to paint what is essentially a shameful concession to oblivion in patriotic tones. They call impunity “amnesty.” They call cover-ups “reparations.” They call denial of the truth “historical debt.”
During the vote on the law, no member of Congress mentioned the victims by name. No one remembered the girls raped in Manta, the students of La Cantuta buried in secret graves, the peasants of Accomarca mercilessly shot down. None named the mothers who walked for decades with photos pinned to their chests, begging for justice. None made the effort to humanize those who were dehumanized by the state’s bullets.
And that silence speaks volumes. Because the victims are inconvenient. Because their stories contradict the official narrative. Because their mutilated bodies spoil the heroic narrative that they want to impose. Because their persistence is, in itself, an act of resistance.
But those victims exist. They are there. In the nameless cemeteries. In the footprints in the Andean mud. In the archives of truth. In family memories. And also in the pent-up rage that builds up like dynamite in the heart of communities.
It is not only Congress that has failed. This law could not have been passed without the complicity of the State as a whole. Without prosecutors who have delayed proceedings. Without judges who have dismissed complaints. Without presidents who have looked the other way. Without media outlets that have preferred to talk of military “heroism” rather than the innocent blood that has been shed.
A network of impunity has been woven over decades. A structural, deep-rooted, shameful impunity. And now, with this law, that network has become the norm. The exception has become the rule. Crime has been legalized.
And let’s not fool ourselves: this law does not seek to “heal wounds.” It seeks to shield sectors of power that fear being judged. It seeks to protect those who still wield influence in the barracks, in political parties, in security companies. It seeks to ensure that official history continues to be written by the victors.
Talking about reconciliation in this context is an insult. You cannot reconcile a nation based on impunity. You cannot demand that victims embrace their executioners without truth, without recognition, without punishment.
Reconciliation requires courageous gestures. It requires telling the whole truth. It requires restorative justice. It requires taking responsibility. This law does the opposite: it revictimizes, denies, protects the guilty, and abandons those who have waited for justice for more than 40 years.
It has been said that “a lot of time has passed” and that we need to “turn the page.” But who can turn the page if the book remains open on the wound? Who can look to the future if the past continues to dictate impunity?
Peace without justice is a sham. Reconciliation without memory is hypocrisy. And forgiveness imposed by those in power is a sophisticated form of violence.
Today, Peru is not only facing a political crisis. It is facing a dispute over its very soul. What kind of country do we want to be? One that protects murderers or one that stands with victims? One that legislates for impunity or one that builds justice from the ground up? One that covers its eyes or one that dares to look at its history with courage?
This Congress has chosen the path of cowardice. It has preferred the applause of the military sectors to the cries of the victims. It has legislated from the comfort of privilege, without listening to those who have been crying silently for decades.
But memory cannot be erased by law. Oblivion cannot be decreed. Because memory lives on in bodies. In stories. In rituals. In songs. In the stones of the ravines where people were murdered. In the black-and-white photos carried by grandmothers. In the interrupted dreams of disappeared children.
Memory is rebellious. That is why it makes people uncomfortable. That is why they want to silence it. That is why they attack it. But memory is also a trench. A form of resistance. And that is what is happening today in Peru: a new resistance against forgetting, against the amnesia planned by Congress, against the normalisation of crime.
Because communities do not forget. Because the missing bones still demand to be found. Because justice delayed is not justice, but it has not been defeated either. Because there is another country. One that marches with the photos of the disappeared. One that sings songs of mourning and resistance in Quechua. One that sows justice in every word, in every protest, in every open archive. That country has not been defeated. That country is still alive. And it is that country that refuses to accept impunity as its destiny.
Therefore, they can pass all the laws they want. They can vote by a show of hands, behind closed doors or with bombastic speeches. They can congratulate each other, hug each other, pretend they have done something noble. But history will judge them. And it will judge them harshly.
Because history does not forget those who protected crime. History does not forgive those who buried justice. History does not remain silent in the face of impunity. History, in the end, always restores the voice of those who were silenced.
This Congress will go down in history, yes. But not as saviours of the nation. Not as exemplary legislators. They will go down as what they are: accomplices to impunity, architects of oblivion, executioners of memory.