The head of Peru’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINI), General Juan Carlos Liendo O’Connor, has resigned after Peru’s President Dina Boluarte said on Tuesday that he was being considered for dismissal and disagreed with treating the protests as a «terrorist insurgency».
O’Connor’s appointment had generated controversy from the beginning, not only because Boluarte admitted she did not know who he was and what his curriculum vitae was, but above all because of his way of dealing with the protests, celebrating the «efficiency» of the Army, which has left some thirty dead.
«If you want to approach the events we are seeing as social conflict, we are in total error. There is no social conflict here. There is not even vandalism. They are exercises of violence with a very clear political agenda: Constituent Assembly, the resignation of Boluarte and the closing of Congress», he said just a day before being elected to the post.
In his resignation letter, O’Connor has cited as reasons «serious complications to comply with the functions assigned according to law». Hours earlier, he had told the press that he was resigning because of clear disagreements with Boluarte, who in an interview disagreed with calling the protests a «terrorist insurgency».
O’Connor insisted on continuing along this line in a conversation with Radio Programas, in which she once again assured that there are «terrorist organizations» behind the protests, although without mentioning which ones.
In this sense, he emphasized that according to the definition of terrorism present in Peruvian legislation, «the actions that are being carried out in the demonstrations are evidence of acts of terrorism».
However, he clarified that in the protests «not all the people are terrorists» and that although he recognizes that there may be «legitimate demands», from his point of view as Director of Intelligence, there is «planning and objectives from clandestine organizations».
Before being elected to this position, O’Connor worked, although without decision-making power, in one of the previous versions of the DINI, the National Intelligence Service (SIN) between 1991 and 1998, when it was under the control of former president Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos, both in prison for crimes against humanity, the former for crimes against humanity and the latter for various drug trafficking and murder crimes.
During those years, O’Connor worked alongside Julio Salazar Monroe, former head of the SIN and former Minister of Defense under Fujimori, who is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for the La Cantuta massacre, in which nine students and a professor were murdered and then passed off as terrorists.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
