Urgent Action for Peru!

ILPS Commission 3 Statement

Thirty-five members of the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (MOVADEF) were condemned on October 28, 2024 with draconian sentences of either life imprisonment, or 35, 25 or 15 years of imprisonment. One of the condemned is a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the ILPS.

Their crime: membership in an organization that defends the social and fundamental rights of the Peruvian people and fights for a new Constitution to guarantee these rights, as well as working to participate in the Peruvian electoral system.

The sentences were read at the National Criminal Court of Peru against the 43 defendants in the Perseus case, with 35 being condemned.

The condemned were first arrested in 2014 and the trial began, after numerous delays, in 2022, without respecting due process, Peru’s laws and Constitution, international conventions and decisions of international institutions such as the United Nations and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Numerous lawyers have been prohibited from defending the accused in the trial, with public defenders with limited knowledge of the case imposed instead, and even former US President Barrack Obama made a direct public intervention.

For some time, it has been clear that the Sixth Command of the U.S. Armed Forces has set out to neutralize or eliminate leftist organizations in Latin America, including MOVADEF.

Some of the defendants, such as Osman Morote and Margot Liendo, have served other sentences in accordance with the law and, even though they even have chronic illnesses such as cancer, they have been denied their freedom through the application of the Enemy Criminal Law, a reactionary law that preemptively criminalizes people for their ideas. The long prison sentences will essentially condemn the older comrades involved to die in prison.

This offensive against an ILPS member organization by US imperialism in cahoots with the Peruvian right is an attack against all who fight in Latin America against injustice and for the rights of their people.

All those prosecuted in the Perseus case must be freed! It is necessary to mobilize to demand that these unjust and harsh sentences not be ratified and that MOVADEF members be released since they are older adults with no proof of having committed a crime, so freedom is their right.

NO TO THE COVERT DEATH SENTENCES 

AGAINST MOVADEF COMRADES IN PERU!

FREEDOM FOR ALL THOSE PROSECUTED IN THE PERSEO CASE!

FREEDOM TO ALL PERUVIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS!

Signed, ILPS Commission 3 on Peoples’ Rights and Anti-Fascism

(ILPS Commission 3: Human rights in the civil, political, economic, social and cultural fields against state violence, national oppression, class exploitation and oppression, gender oppression, fascism, casteism, racism and religious bigotry; and justice and indemnification for the victims of illegal arrest and detention (especially political prisoners), violations of due process, torture, extra-judicial executions, disappearances, mass displacement, and other blatant forms of human rights violations.)