Peru leader defeated as death penalty voted down
Source: Reuters
By Andrei Khalip LIMA, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Peru's 5-month-old government has suffered its first defeat in Congress, which rejected President Alan Garcia's bill seeking to introduce the death penalty for terrorists, and the setback could hurt his popularity, analysts said on Thursday. Painful memories of deadly bombings and raids by Maoist rebels during an insurgence between 1980 and 1998 are still fresh in Peru, and Garcia's death penalty proposal was part of the campaign platform that helped him win July's election. But in a result that surprised political analysts, legislators voted his proposal down late on Wednesday by 49 votes to 26. Even some members of Garcia's APRA party, which does not control Congress, voted against it. Political analyst Manuel Torrado of the Datum International consultancy and polling firm said more than 70 percent of Peruvians favor capital punishment, which led Garcia to think that Congress would also support the bill. "It is a strong defeat for the president, also because many people here think that the president is like God and when he says that there will be death penalty there has to be death penalty," Torrado said. Capital punishment for terrorism is allowed under Peru's 1993 constitution, but it is not in the penal code. The proposal would have added capital punishment to the code, which does not currently allow for it under any circumstance. Congress deputies said doing so would have breached the American Convention on Human Rights, which Peru has signed and which says the signatories cannot restore the death penalty or apply it more widely. Prof. Ernesto Velit, a political scientist at the Ricardo Palma university, said the bill was "a populist gesture, which ultimately debilitates the government and the state" by hurting Peru's image in a world that is shifting away from capital punishment. 'SHAMEFUL DEFEAT' He said popular support for the death penalty is guided by emotion, while the issue is too serious to rely on emotions. "There was no need for the government to embark on this project and it resulted in a shameful defeat," he said. Asked whether this will affect Garcia's popularity, Velit said: "Of course." A Datum poll in November showed Garcia's popularity diving to 53 percent from 64 percent in August with most respondents citing "not fulfilling what he promised" as Garcia's weakness. Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo said, however: "I do not see a political defeat... The president fulfilled what he has promised, but the parliamentary majority had a different opinion, which we democratically respect." Separately in another terrorism-related case, Del Castillo said Peru would not withdraw from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights which has ordered Peru's government to honor 41 leftist rebels killed in a 1992 prison raid and pay compensation to their families. Some officials had suggested Peru would withdraw from the court but Del Castillo said it would seek to overturn the court's decision in the Organization of American States.
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