Fujimori widens emergency rule
Fujimori widens emergency rule
LIMA (Reuter): President Alberto Fujimori widened emergency rule in Peru on Friday and won solid backing from home and abroad for refusing to make concessions to Marxist guerrillas holding 103 VIP hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima.
A special session of the Peruvian congress called by Fujimori voted overwhelmingly -- 82 for, eight abstentions -- to give "full support to the government and (whatever) decisions it takes to solve this grave crisis."
Fujimori called the session after giving more powers to the army and police under a decree that widened a state of emergency first imposed in the early 1980s to counter a wave of left-wing violence.
Outside the Japanese ambassador's residence in the fashionable district of San Isidro, police arrested three guerrilla suspects they said had posed as street vendors to gather information.
Police sources said the three -- two women and a man -- had been found with maps and false identity papers. One police source said: "We think they were looking for information to report back to the national committee" of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), whose guerrillas stormed the residence on Dec. 17.
A decree published in the official government gazette and signed by Fujimori said all of Lima and the neighboring port of Callao had been placed under emergency rule for 60 days.
Until Friday, the state of emergency had covered only the center and industrial outskirts of Lima and part of Peru's mountain and jungle regions.
Under emergency rule, a number of constitutional rights are suspended and police can make arrests without search warrants.
A local television channel showed two of the suspects being bundled into cars which then sped off to the headquarters of Peru's anti-terrorism police. The arrests brought to six the number of people detained outside the residence for suspicion of being guerrillas.
Fujimori has flatly ruled out giving in to the hostage takers' demand for the release of 400 comrades serving long sentences in Peruvian jails.
His refusal to negotiate the release of jailed guerrillas won backing on Friday from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations and Russia.
In the toughest of a long stream of statements on the hostage crisis from around the world, a G7 communique condemned the rebels as "terrorists" and promised to help the Peruvian government with "all the appropriate means that it could request."
Stressing the principle of no concessions to armed rebels, the communique issued in Paris coincided with reports that a U.S. spyplane had made high-altitude night flights over the residence and crack anti-terrorist units of the Peruvian police were training around a model of the building.
Peruvian intelligence sources told Reuters the American plane, a Schweitzer SA-2-37A equipped with infrared cameras, had made several runs over the residence in the past few days.
The aircraft has been used periodically, the sources said, on reconnaissance missions over drug-growing areas in the jungles of Peru, the world's largest producer of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Earlier in the day, Japan, whose nationals account for the largest number of hostages, after Peru, had called for unity in resolving the crisis.
"It is clear that the international community should not condone terrorism," Foreign Minister Yukihiko Ikeda told a news conference. "It is also necessary ... to act as one to help resolve this crisis by setting free all the hostages peacefully, and at an early date."
The hardening position of the international community followed Christmas appeals from around the world, including Pope John Paul and U.S. President Bill Clinton. But the roughly 20 guerrillas holed up inside the booby-trapped residence showed no signs of changing their conditions for releasing hostages.