The Dogs of Deng Xiao Ping

I met Father Hubert Lanssiers in Picsi Prison, in Chiclayo, on the northwest coast of Perú, one day in May 1999. Although designed for 300 prisoners, Picsi housed 974 convicted offenders, 252 of these serving sentences for "Treason to the Fatherland," a legal concept that included acts of terrorism. For me, at that moment, the Shining Path was past history. We had gone through seven years without bombs, there were no blackouts anymore, and the leader Abimael Guzmán was in prison. Period. Aside from that, I knew very little about the history of the movement and never, until that time, had I personally seen a terrorist.

It was also the first time I had entered a maximum-security prison. During the search at the gate, a policeman removed my camera. And two steps beyond that point, the air was twice as heavy as it was outside. Two walls stood between Picsi's inmates and freedom. Eight meters in height and topped by barbed wire, the walls were separated by a so-called "Nobody's Land," a gray and arid zone ten meters wide that was only to be crossed when going into or leaving the prison blocks.

For anyone entering the prison, Nobody's Land was the first foreshadowing of hell. The policemen playing cards and drying the sweat off their necks with the chevrons on their sleeves knew that Picsi was not the best place for promotions, and with time they began to give vent to their frustration with clots of spit against the cell bars. Many of the prisoners gripping those bars in the prison blocks had not seen anything beyond these eight-meter walls in ten years. For sixteen inmates in block E condemned to life sentences, this barren strip represented the last horizon their eyes would take in.

Father Hubert Lanssiers and ombudsman Jorge Santistevan were in charge of a commission for the acquittal of innocents condemned for terrorism. The commission's work consisted of interviewing those convicted prisoners who requested it, reviewing their cases, and recommending release if the commissioners believed that the prisoners had been confined without proof or had been convicted in summary trials. It was not a popular job among the authorities, or even for that matter among the public. First, because the whole country felt that condemning ten innocent men was worth more than leaving a single terrorist on the loose. Second, because no one wanted to turn a knife in the still-festering wound of terrorism.

We entered block E accompanied by two other attorneys. Lanssiers, six feet tall, was leading the way, strolling with resolve among the inmates who, as we advanced, quietly made room for us to pass. I noticed with concern that we did not have an escort. But when we reached the central patio of the block, amid tables for the ceramic workshops and the weight-lifting equipment used for exercising, I realized we did not need one.

The Shining Path members did not have here the defiant and arrogant look they exhibited before the cameras whenever they were arrested. Nor did they flaunt the incendiary rhetoric of their political discourses. Some appeared haughty, but Lanssiers had an even firmer gaze and spoke with a self-assurance that demanded respect. I had not known until then that a terrorist could respect a priest.

"I have been here for eight years," said one of the convicts, "and I am condemned to twenty more. They put me in here because a terrorist neighbor accused me falsely, to get back at me because I turned him in. My family is free, but it is three women and a boy and they can't work my plot, so we are going to lose it. My daughter has now become a prostitute to survive. What sense does it make to keep me here? If my case is not reviewed soon, what are my children going to do? How can anyone expect them not to fall into a life of crime?"

I whispered to the attorney who was accompanying me, "They screwed this one. He...