Peru's imprisoned ex-spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos went on trial as one of 57 defendants charged with ordering two paramilitary death squad massacres and kidnappings carried out in the early 1990s during former President Alberto Fujimori's autocratic regime.
About 100 demonstrators blocked traffic early Wednesday outside the maximum security naval base in Lima's port of Callao, where the case was being tried in a packed courtroom.
"Colina assassins murdered our children," they chanted, referring to the "Colina group" death squad that Montesinos is accused of directing.
"We are going to be here to accompany in solidarity the families who have waited for years for justice," said Francisco Soberon, executive secretary of Peru's National Human Rights Coordinator, an umbrella organization representing 63 human rights groups.
35 victims
Prosecutor Pablo Sanchez is seeking a 35-year sentence for Montesinos, as well as fines of 100,000 soles, or about US$30,740, for each of the death squad's 35 victims.
Montesinos, 60, is already serving a 15-year prison sentence for various corruption convictions.
His attorney, Estela Valdivia, tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to convince the presiding tribunal to postpone the trial, arguing the prosecution's indictment sent to her was in a format that she could not open on her computer, local media reported.
As the day wore on, other defense attorneys tried to get a postponement through other means, but those, too, were rejected.
"The defense for the accused shared a common strategy geared at delaying the trial," Peru's ad hoc anti-corruption attorney, Antonio Maldonado, told Canal N television as the proceedings wrapped up for the day. "Fortunately, the trial is now underway."
Montesinos allegedly ordered the death squad to carry out the 1991 murders of 15 people. The victims were gunned down with machine guns, their bodies left strewn about a tenement building in an impoverished downtown Lima neighborhood.
The Colina group allegedly kidnapped nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University months later. Their incinerated bodies were found a year later buried on a barren hillside outside the capital.
sympathizers targeted
Both massacres were intended strikes at suspected sympathizers of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, which ravaged Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s with car bomb attacks, sabotage and assassinations.
Montesinos is also accused of helping to mastermind the 1992 disappearances of nine townspeople from Santa, in the Department of Ancash, and a radio journalist in Huacho, north of the capital, at the hands of the Colina group.
Prosecutors say Fujimori sanctioned the death squad killings, though he is not a named defendant in the trial.
Fujimori, who denies any wrongdoing, fled in November 2000 to Japan, where he remains fighting two extradition requests -- one based on his alleged links to the Colina group, and the other accusing him of making a US$15 million payoff to Montesinos in September 2000 with misappropriated state funds.
power-broker
Montesinos, known as a behind-the-scenes power-broker during Fujimori's decade-long rule, left office in disgrace after the broadcast of a now-famous video in September 2000 showing him paying a newly elected opposition congressman US$15,000 to back the government -- a bribe that precipitated Fujimori's downfall.
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