28 years for murder - some justice at last in iconic Amazon defenders case?
Peruvian court reaches verdict almost a decade after four indigenous men in remote rainforest were killed
Some years back I found myself with the unfortunate task of having to locate two recently-widowed indigenous Ashéninka women living in one of the Peruvian Amazon’s biggest towns, Pucallpa, home to some 300,000+ people. They had been forced to flee from their remote community out in the forest near the border with Brazil, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, after their partners and two other men had been murdered and apparently dismembered. The case garnered major international media attention at the time and has arguably become one of the most iconic examples around the world of indigenous peoples trying to defend their territories from exploitation, colonisation, invasion and destruction.
Eventually, I found both women, Lita Rojas and Adelina Vargas Santallán, in different Pucallpa suburbs. “We want justice. That’s what I’m asking for,” Rojas told me.
She had four children, she said, three sons and a daughter. Two of them were playing in front of us on the floor of her temporary home, where she was living under 24-hour police protection together with one of the other widows, Ergilia Rengifo Lopez. Rojas’s partner had been Leoncio Quintisima Meléndez, one of Saweto’s community leaders.
“Look, my children have been abandoned,” she said. “No one’s going to help us. Who’ll help me grow our food? Who’ll support us? My young boy can’t work.”
Rojas, there in Pucallpa’s outskirts, told me she was scared.
“We want justice,” she repeated. “We’ve seen nothing so far.”
The two other widows, Rengifo Lopez and Julia Pérez, I had already met, upriver in Saweto, a visit I reported on for The Guardian. The murders were widely attributed to the community’s years-long opposition to illegal loggers and logging concessions in what they considered to be their territory, and their fight to obtain legal title over it. Some people also believed or suspected that the murders were connected to the cocaine trade, with indigenous federation ORAU saying at the time that “narco-traffickers” may have been responsible.
The demand for justice from the widows, their families and other community members had been clear. “We’re asking for justice,” Rengifo Lopez told me when I interviewed her in Saweto. “I’m asking for justice, for the murder of my father, for the law to be abided by,” her daughter, Diana Ríos Rengifo, said too.
“We want justice. . .” Last week, eight and a half years after Quintisima Meléndez, together with Edwin Chota Valera, Jorge Ríos Pérez and Francisco Pinedo Ramírez were killed, and after all kinds of ostensibly hopeless bumbling by the public prosecutors in charge of the case, including a truly pathetic attempt to visit the scene-of-the-crime which I happened to participate in, Rojas, her fellow widows and their families may have finally got some. Although the full sentence has not yet been released, and those found guilty have 10 days from this Monday to appeal, a judge from the Ucayali region’s Superior Court of Justice read out part of the sentence on 15 February stating that five men will each face 28 years and three months in prison.
Those men are logging industry types Hugo Soria Flores and José Carlos Estrada Huayta, found to be the “intellectual authors" of the murders, and Eurico Mapes Gómes, Josimar Atachi Félix and Segundo Euclides Atachi Félix, found guilty of committing them.
“We are happy [about the jail sentences] after so many years of struggle and many threats,” Lita Rojas, now living back in Saweto and the president of the community, told The Guardian in its report on the verdict.