Justice still being sought in iconic Amazon defenders murder case
Regional court in Peru due to hear accusations against five men allegedly involved in killings in 2014
A potentially sensational murder trial in the Peruvian Amazon effectively had to be postponed this week after three of the accused failed to appear for the beginning of the oral hearing. Four community leaders from an indigenous Ashéninka village in one of the remotest parts of the country were killed and apparently dismembered seven and a half years ago, but no justice has ever been served. The case attracted unprecedented global media attention at the time and has become one of the most well-known, arguably iconic examples around the world of indigenous peoples and other local communities attempting to defend their territory from resource extraction and land appropriation.
The four murdered men were Edwin Chota Valera, Leoncio Quintisima Meléndez, Jorge Ríos Pérez and Francisco Pinedo Ramírez. They had been fighting to obtain legal title for their community, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, and had repeatedly denounced illegal loggers and logging concessions in what they considered to be their territory to the Ucayali region’s government, public prosecutors, police and even the Prime Minister, among others. They were killed immediately after the first ever visit to the area by the national government’s forestry inspections agency, OSINFOR. It is also believed or suspected by some people that the murders were connected to the cocaine trade, with regional indigenous federation ORAU acknowledging at the time that “narco-traffickers” may have been responsible.
But justice moves slowly in Peru, when it moves at all. In early 2015, six months after the murders, I visited Alto Tamaya-Saweto for The Guardian and by then only two of the bodies had been identified, while a third was in a morgue undergoing DNA tests. Those two bodies - Chota Valera’s and Quintisima Meléndez’s - are still the only two to be identified.
The UK Channel 4’s Latin America correspondent, Guillermo Galdos, had been with Peruvian police when the remains of Chota Valera were discovered and subsequently accompanied his widow, Julia, to the morgue. “They only recognised him through his bracelet,” Galdos told me the following year.
The public prosecutor now in charge of the case, Dennis Vega Sotelo, is a specialist in organised crime. According to the NGO Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS), the case constitutes an “unprecedented legal effort” “to extend criminal accountability: not just to the triggermen, but also to those who ordered the murders. Loggers and other extractive industrialists throughout the Amazon basin regularly perpetrate organised violent crime against indigenous peoples who resist their efforts,” the NGO stated in a press release. “In 2020, more than one hundred indigenous environmental activists were murdered for standing up against deforestation on their lands.”
RFUS’s Margoth Quispe, a Peruvian lawyer who has been involved with the case for years, says that it is particularly important because it is one of the first involving “environmental defenders” that has reached trial stage. “Many other cases have been closed in the first stages of preliminary investigation by public prosecutors and weren’t treated as organised crime,” she says.
The trial was due to open on Monday, 4 April, in the Superior Court of Justice in Pucallpa with five men standing accused - all working in the logging industry, all facing up to 35 years in prison. Two of the accused - Hugo Soria Flores and José Carlos Estrada Huayta - appeared virtually, but the other three - Eurico Mapes Gomez and the brothers Josimar Atachi Félix and Segundo Euclides Atachi Félix - didn’t appear at all.
Soria Flores and Estrada Huayta, both from a logging company called Eco Forestal Ucayali (ECOFUSAC), are accused by the prosecutor of being the “intellectual authors” of the murders. ECOFUSAC had a concession overlapping part of the area where Alto Tamaya-Saweto claimed title and therefore the community had been trying to have it annulled or relocated for more than a decade. That concession was previously reported by the Pucallpa-based logging company Grupo Vargas Negocios Amazónicos (GVNA) to be one of its suppliers, and the front page of GVNA’s website currently describes the concession as part of “our business group”, although it has since been relocated to elsewhere in Ucayali. Both the ECOFUSAC concession and GVNA have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and both share the same address. According to GVNA, they export timber to the European Union, the US and China.
The reasons given for the failure of Mapes Gomez and the Atachi Félixes to appear at the trial included the fact that notifications had been sent to the wrong address, plus the fact that they live numerous days travel away, in the upper River Tamaya, close to the Alto Tamaya-Saweto community itself and the border with Brazil.
“Only two turned up because in 2018 when I didn’t have the case they used another address in the indictment so, despite the fact they had lawyers, they didn’t go,” prosecutor Vega Sotelo tells me. “The Saweto case has been strengthened by an increase in the amount of evidence we have. That will be made clear during the oral hearing. The families of the victims deserve justice and the public prosecutors office is on course to get it for them.”
For Ergilia Rengifo Lopez, widow of Jorge Ríos Pérez, Monday’s no-show by three of the accused was acutely disappointing, but hope remains.
“They’ll go out looking for them if they don’t turn up next time,” Rengifo Lopez, currently living in Pucallpa, tells me. “The police will bring them in. If it wasn’t for what happened, I’d be in Saweto now.”
The trial has been rescheduled for 20 June.