'When I saw the death squad coming into my house, I understood that I had made a crucial mistake'

From Journalist saved from death squad by quick-thinking family by Naomi Mapstone (Financial Times) :

The death squad came for Gustavo Gorritti in the aftermath of Alberto Fujimori's 1992 "self-coup" to strip the congressional opposition of power.

As tanks rolled through the streets of Lima, the Peruvian capital, Mr Gorritti, an investigative journalist, was just finishing a dispatch for the Spanish daily El País after warning his editors that he might be at risk. He had been pursuing both Mr Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos, the president's spymaster, and had been receiving threats.

Mr Gorritti, whose case is among those for which Mr Fujimori has faced trial over the past 15 months, had written a detailed plan for friends should he be arrested. He had expected to see police, not assassins, at his door.

"When I saw the death squad coming into my house, I understood that I had made a crucial mistake," Mr Gorritti says.

He was taken to the pentagonito , the high-security army headquarters where it was already suspected that some of Peru's "disappeared" had been detained and tortured. He began a hunger strike.

His family rushed to call the ambassadors of Spain and the US and politicians at home and abroad. The first 72 hours of a "disappearance" were crucial, they knew, if Mr Gorritti was to have any chance of surviving.

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