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| The Ambassador of Japan and his wife welcoming the Ambassadors of Indian and Israel |
A Bloody Summer
By December 1996, many of us believed that terrorist activity in Lima was on the wane. Attacks on police stations, bombings and car bombs were less frequent, and crime with violence appeared to be a more potent threat to our families’ security. Thus, terrorism was not at the front of my mind when I received a call in the evening of December 17 to inform me that Ambassador and Mrs Vincent were in some way victims of a terrorist occupation of the Japanese residence. Thus began the longest cocktail party in human history, or what one Peruvian newspaper later described as “The Bloody Summer.”
Not really knowing what was happening, as the number 2 at the Embassy, I called colleagues from the staff, and we sped to the Embassy to open up the office and a channel with Ottawa as well as to try to gather information on what had occurred at the Japanese residence. It soon became clear that Tony and Lucie Vincent were being held captive by an MRTA terrorist cell along with well over 600 other Peruvian and foreign dignitaries. At about midnight all of the women and some of the older guests were released, leaving perhaps 350 inside. At about 2:00 in the morning, I received a telephone call from a calm and collected Tony Vincent, to debrief me on what was happening in the residence. He had borrowed someone’s cell phone and we talked with the sound of snoring in the background. Tony informed me that, beyond himself, there were three other Canadians among the hostages. With four Canadian lives at risk, this became essentially a consular crisis for the Embassy – everything else was subordinated to the task of ensuring that these Canadians emerged unscathed. None of us slept that night.
The next afternoon Tony was released as part of a commission to present the terrorists’ demands to President Fujimori. I was near the front of the Japanese residence at that time, and it was a huge relief to see him emerge, tired and dishevelled but unharmed. For the next 24 hours, Tony made repeated attempts to meet with Fujimori, but his efforts had been rebuffed. At this point, Fujimori clearly wanted to devise and put a strategy in place before receiving any communiqué from the terrorists.
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| Canadian Ambassador Anthony Vincent released |
That evening Tony told me that he would be going back into the Japanese residence to inform the terrorists that he had not been successful in his task, but that he would continue his efforts. While the two of us got along well, this time we argued. I told him not to go back in – who knows whether he would be allowed to leave again. He persisted, and I told him to send in a written status report with the Red Cross. He refused, and I asked him why he was so insistent about going back in. “Because I gave my word” he replied[1]. Again, I argued that we were dealing with unpredictable terrorists, and one didn’t have to keep his word to such people. He again insisted, and while I didn’t agree with what he was doing, I appreciated his courage and desire to help ensure the safety of many of his colleagues and friends. I watched him go into the residence with a mixture of emotions: fear and apprehension that he wouldn’t be coming out alive; and pride that the Canadian foreign service had produced someone like him. I don’t think I took a full breath until he emerged some 30 minutes later.
Over the next few days, Tony was able to deliver the MRTA’s terms to the government’s “interlocutor” for negotiations with the terrorists, and all the other Canadian hostages had been released. With terms delivered and all Canadians now safe, I heaved a sigh of relief and thought that our direct involvement in the crisis was over. Little did I know…
What is a Guarantor?
The Embassy continued to monitor the hostage crisis, which took up an enormous amount of Peruvian political attention and energy, but there was no evidence that negotiations had even begun. Then, in early January, Ambassador Vincent was asked to serve in a personal capacity as one of a Group of Guarantors. With Ottawa’s consent and support, he accepted the role. As the acting foreign minister explained to us, the group was to include Japan (representing Asia), the Vatican (representing Europe), Canada (representing the Americas), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (providing food, water and amenities to the hostages on a daily basis). The Japanese representative opted to be an observer given the large number of Japanese hostages, and the ICRC representative decided to continue to devote his efforts entirely to the care and feeding of the hostages. The Guarantors effectively were limited to Tony Vincent and the Archbishop of Ayacucho, Monsignor Juan Luis Cipriani (representing the Vatican), although the Japanese representative, Terusuke Terada (Japanese ambassador in Mexico) provided much wise counsel.
The mandate of the Group of Guarantors, as initially stipulated by the Peruvian government, was to be present when the terrorists laid down their arms, released the hostages and left the residence for a safe haven. They were not to be present during negotiations. The Guarantors argued successfully, that they could guarantee the implementation of an agreement if they had not been party to the negotiations. The Peruvian government reluctantly agreed with this point of view, and the guarantors discovered at their first meeting between the government and terrorists that negotiations had not yet started, and that the terrorists were becoming nervous about the unwillingness of the government to discuss their demands.
In order to kick-start negotiations, the Guarantors began to introduce ideas and to stimulate discussion in order to clarify positions and build at least a small measure of confidence. The Guarantor’s role moved from passive observer to facilitator, and eventually to mediator. As part of that process, I got to lead a sub-group to visit the MRTA leadership incarcerated in high-altitude, maximum-security prisons – scary, but that is another story.
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| Left to Right: Tony Vincent, Monsignor Cipriani, Domingo Palermo, Michel Minnig and Terusuke Terada |
To digress slightly, at some point in their career, diplomats receive training in “negotiating skills”. I had completed such a course several years before, and dug out the course material and my notes to see whether there was any inspiration there. It was a depressing exercise since, in this instance, none of the criteria for a successful negotiation were present: There was, inter alia, no willingness on either side to negotiate, no flexibility in positions, no mutual confidence, and on the terrorist side no clear understanding of what they really wanted. At times, they demanded the release of all their comrades from jail, at others better health, food and visits privileges, at others just the release of their key leaders. The Guarantors attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince the terrorists that the release of their leadership was a non-starter, and they should lower their expectations.
I had talked with hostage rescue experts from a number of countries, including our own, and the consensus was that an armed assault on the Japanese residence would be extremely costly in human lives, since the building was large, with many rooms and hostages and captors were spread throughout the building. A major factor was that the MRTA regularly practiced their routine for responding to such an attack – which essentially meant killing as many of the hostages as possible before being overwhelmed. The view was that if the takeover could be accomplished in under 3 minutes, 50% of the hostages would become casualties, 50% of the remaining hostages would die within the next 3 minutes, and so on. If the operation lasted more than 12 minutes, it was likely that all the hostages would be dead or wounded.
The Guarantors believed that the only conceivable favourable outcome was a negotiated exit strategy. All efforts were made to ensure such a conclusion, but as the months passed, very little progress was made. Meetings between the government and the terrorists were few and pro forma, accomplished little. In consequence, the Guarantors spent more of their time in the Japanese residence attempting to make the terrorists listen to reason and urging the hostages to keep calm and not provoke their captors. In this, the Guarantors were more successful. Moral remained relatively high among the hostages, there were few instances of confrontation between the hostages and terrorists, and a form a reverse Stockholm syndrome emerged - several of the young (15 to 16 years of age) and impressionable terrorists were awed by being the presence of ministers, generals and ambassadors and saw them as role models.
In the meantime, the Peruvian army was digging tunnels under the residence…
Terrorism for Dummies
During the off-and-on discussions between the terrorists and the Peruvian government, several times the MRTA expressed concern about the plight of their imprisoned comrades – shortly after the taking of the Japanese residence, all visiting rights to terrorists in jail were suspended by the government and any other of the limited privileges that the prisoners enjoyed in these stark institutions was curtailed. The Guarantors decided to form a sub-committee (I was chosen as the victim to lead the group) to visit the various prisons where MRTA members were being held. We were a small group consisting of myself, a Japanese diplomat, a Spanish nun, a Japanese doctor, a Peruvian doctor and another Canadian diplomat. We were to visit six prisons, and report back to the Guarantors on conditions within the prisons, including respect for human rights, as well as the health and well being of prisoners.
We started out well – sort of - in a minibus rented by the Japanese Embassy from “Mickey Mouse Tours”, which even had a picture of the smiling mouse on the side. The visit to one of the most notorious prisons in Lima, called Lurigancho, was extremely interesting. This was the prison in the late 1980s where there was an internal revolt and the army went in and killed hundreds of prisoners, mostly terrorists. There were four major wings, two of which contained hardened criminals and where the guards never went, and the others where convicted terrorists were held. We had ready access to prisoners, sampled their food, and were rather surprised that prisoner morale remained high given a very Spartan regime. We emerged from the prison to be surrounded by the media (mainly Japanese) who hounded us worse than the prisoners inside. The intrepid Mickey Mouse bus was unable to outrun the swarm of press vehicles and motorcycles and we arrived back in the Embassy to write our report with the press milling and shouting outside.
We visited several medium security facilities, but the highlight (literally) was a high-altitude prison at 4,200 metres near Puno in southern Peru: Yanamayo. We arrived from Lima - almost deaf - on a Peruvian National Police Antonov 22 (Soviet 1960s equivalent of a C-130 Hercules). The prison we were visiting held most of the MRTA leadership. We wanted both to look at their welfare, and also try to convince them to instruct their colleagues in the Japanese residence to be more flexible in negotiations. One of the problems we had experienced was that the leaders in Yanamayo had given the terrorists in the Japanese residence their instructions, through intermediaries, prior to the assault. Although prisoners were, theoretically, held incommunicado in the high-altitude prisons, they were in contact with the outside world – we presumed through bribing guards to convey messages.
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| MRTA guerrillas in the Japanese Embassy |
The first impressions of Yanamayo were forbidding. On a windswept hillside, the prison was a huge 4-floor cement block with no windows, with a few outbuildings. The complex was surrounded by two chain-link fences topped by razor wire, with armed soldiers every fifty metres between the two fences facing outward - presumably to deter any assault from outside. Signs indicated that outside the wire there were land mines. From inside we could hear shouting, slogans and chanting of patriotic mantras. The guards didn’t want us to go in, fearing a riot, but we insisted. With some trepidation we entered a cellblock. There were cells on all four sides, with bars across the front of the cells. Once they saw us, the MRTA immediately started shouting, banging on the bars – strangely the Shining Path prisoners were calm, and talked to us in a relaxed way. The MRTA appeared half crazed, including one whose photo I recognized as being a Chilean. I was extremely glad that there were stout bars between them and us. What I remember most though was the cold. It was intense and pierced to the bone. I shook hands with some of the prisoners whose hands were blue and appeared to have little feeling in them. They were four to a cell (about 3 by 3 metres), sleeping on concrete shelves with thin foam mattresses. They were allowed out to exercise for 30 minutes a day – but this “privilege” had been cancelled, along with visits and parcels from home. I found it hard to believe that they could maintain their militancy year-after-year under such conditions, but they had.
Later we met in a small conference room with the leadership, who were calm, relaxed, but argumentative and not forthcoming. We got nowhere convincing them to introduce some flexibility in their negotiating position – after all, for them the whole purpose of taking high-level hostages was to gain their own release from jail. Nothing else mattered. We later visited the hospital, where I sat down on a bed with a Shining Path guerrilla paralysed from the waist down. He admitted that he had injured himself while preparing a bomb. He told me he had received little rehabilitation at the prison, but felt he was treated better than a poor Peruvian with no access to medical assistance. I found the Shining Path much more reasonable than the MRTA. We also visited the kitchen where we tried Alpaca stew (mostly leg bones, but nonetheless hearty and tasty). We went back to Lima late in the day with splitting headaches from the change in altitude (Lima is just a few metres above sea level).
The Assault – Surprise, surprise…
On one of his moral-raising visits to the Japanese residence, Tony was called into the dining room by the leader of the terrorists, Nestor Cerpa, and asked to put his ear to the floor. After a few minutes, scraping was heard underneath, and Cerpa said, “They are digging tunnels, aren’t they”. Tony would not reply. Later, in the Embassy we discussed this and saw it as a bad omen.
With hindsight, it is now clear that Fujimori was pursuing a two-track approach: If the terrorists gave up, all well and good. If they didn’t, he was prepared to send in the army – even though his younger brother was a hostage. For him, the role of the Guarantors was to keep the situation in the residence calm for long enough to build his tunnels. In the meantime, the presence of the Guarantors had given the MRTA a false sense of security. They felt protected, and relaxed their vigilance. Dangerous for them, they slipped into a routine and the Peruvian authorities ultimately took advantage.
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| Assault on the Japanese Residence in Lima, Peru |
On April 22, 1997, Tony came back from a visit to the Japanese residence at about 13:30. He said that the police around the perimeter of the residence were edgy, tense and aggressive with him. We filed this thought away, but at 15:20 the assault began. Tony, and eventually Cipriani, Terada and one of his officers, clustered around the television in my office at the Embassy and we watched the attack unfold with horror. The final shots were fired some 20 minutes later, but the armed forces assault force did not declare victory until almost 16:00. We felt failure bitterly, believing that four months of work had all been for nothing. We were sure that the bulk of the hostages must have been killed, since the assault took so long. As reports filtered in, however, it emerged that most of the hostages had survived, to us a miracle. In the end, of the 72 hostages, only one died, although four others were wounded. In the operation, two commandos were killed and 10 badly wounded. All 14 terrorists died.
How had they accomplished this when experts from around the world said it couldn’t be done without massive losses among the hostages? In secret, the Peruvian army had build a full-size replica of the Japanese residence on a local army base, where 150 officers from the special forces had been practicing and refining assaults for weeks. In addition, the authorities were able to communicate clandestinely with some of the hostages, and on “D Day” told them to prepare for an assault at 15:20 by getting themselves up stairs without raising the suspicions of the terrorists, and behind some protection. The MRTA had gotten into the habit of gathering in the main dining room shortly after 15:00 to play table football. The commandos simply blew up the dining room at 13:20 from a tunnel below, killing or disabling probably half of the terrorists. Commandos simultaneously attacked the front door, emerged from tunnels to blast holes in the outer walls, or landed on the roof by helicopter. Also, when it came to the crunch, several of the young terrorists could not bring themselves to kill men that they had come to know and often admire. Fujimori played the assault as a major victory over terror, and his popularity soared in the immediate aftermath.
The Aftermath
The last official act of the Group of Guarantors was a press conference the day after the release of the hostages. The Guarantors lamented the fact that a peaceful solution had not been reached. They expressed satisfaction that the vast majority of the hostages had survived, but regretted the loss of life, both the hostage killed, the military officers slain, and the 14 MRTA members. As Cipriani expressed it: “Throughout the hostage crisis, I felt like the father of a great family of 86: the 72 hostages and 14 members of the MRTA…My tears are those of a father of a family of 86 persons, of which 17 have been killed in one blow.” Privately, Cipriani later told me how sorry he was that he couldn’t have saved the lives of the teenaged terrorists. It took us all quite some time for the shock of the assault to wear off and to realize that the Group of Guarantors was no more. It was hard to believe that now it really was over.
The question of whether the death of all the 14 terrorists was justified continued to be controversial mainly outside Peru. Some suggested that a number of terrorists had raised their hands in surrender, but been shot down, that others had been in hiding after the hostages were freed but were shot when discovered, and several had pleaded for mercy, but to no avail. Several Western European counter-terrorism officers had told me earlier that in such operations, the first priority is to secure the safety of the hostages. Should someone attempt to surrender, you shoot and move on. If you stop to secure a prisoner, you have been diverted from your main task. Also that person may well be faking, and fire at you when you let your guard down. That appears to be the line taken by the Peruvian special forces assault group. Their own losses of two killed and ten badly wounded suggest that the battle was not completely one-sided.
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| Heavily guarded Canadian Embassy in Lima, Peru |
After the rescue operation, the media suggested that Ambassador Vincent, since he was the last member of the Group of Guarantors to enter the Japanese residence – and only two hours before the assault – must have passed the word that the attack would take place that day. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were given no indication by the government that such an attack was to take place. Later Fujimori told the press that the attack would have proceeded as planned even if one of the Guarantors had been inside at the time – truthful but not very diplomatic. Tony was extremely lucky he hadn’t stayed longer, or arrived a bit later.
Nonetheless, the MRTA leadership blamed the Group of Guarantors for the failure of this operation. Apparently, a key part of their strategy had been to execute a hostage every few weeks should talks not proceed, in order to impress upon the Peruvian government the seriousness of their intent and demands. The presence of the Guarantors, particularly Cipriani, made the terrorists in the Japanese residence reluctant to carry this out, and their leaders blamed the Guarantors for interfering. As a result, the Canadian Embassy and its staff remained under a terrorist threat (kidnapping of a senior staff member or a car bomb at the Embassy) for several years after the hostage crisis, until the remnants of the MRTA were either hunted down and killed or imprisoned. My family and I travelled with Peruvian police bodyguards for the next two years, our home had 24 hour armed guards who enjoyed playing basketball with my two sons at shift change time, and the Embassy resembled a bunker with a private guard service within the perimeter of the property, barricades, cement barriers, and high grills/walls with barbed wires surrounding the grounds, and armed SWAT team from the national police (including a bomb squad truck) in the street in front of the building. Not a very welcoming impression for visitors.
Most Peruvians were elated by the result of the rescue operation, and gave the group of Guarantors at least some of the credit – Fujimori never did. For the rest of his time in Peru, Tony was often approached in public places by Peruvians who were anxious to shake his hand and to thank him for his efforts. A year or so later, Francisco Tudela, who had been Peruvian Foreign Minister at the time of the hostage crisis and considered by the MRTA as their prime hostage, told me that, undoubtedly, the Group of Guarantors had saved many lives, including his own. From that point of view, I think we done good, and that it was a good time to be a Canadian in Peru, eh!
[1] For more on this, see David Goldfield’s book “The Ambassador’s Word”
Photo credits:
"Base Tokio: El Verano Sangriento" by El Comercio (Peru)
Other pictures from Picasa Web Album, Gateway To The Americas by William Bickford
Photo credits:
"Base Tokio: El Verano Sangriento" by El Comercio (Peru)
Other pictures from Picasa Web Album, Gateway To The Americas by William Bickford
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