11 years ago to this day, on 1 September 2014, four men from an indigenous community, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon were ambushed, killed and apparently dismembered on their way to a meeting with another indigenous community across the border in Brazil. The murders made international headlines and were widely attributed to the community’s years-long struggle to obtain legal title to their land and their opposition to the timber industry, with the cocaine trade possibly playing a role too. This “Caso Saweto” has become one of the most well-known, arguably iconic examples around the world of indigenous peoples attempting to defend their territory from resource extraction and land appropriation.
The four men murdered: Edwin Chota Valera, Leoncio Quintisima Meléndez, Jorge Ríos Pérez and Francisco Pinedo Ramírez.
All these years later and a measure of justice may now have finally been served. Last Monday an Appeals Court in the Ucayali region in central Peru confirmed a 2024 ruling sentencing four men to more than 28 years in prison: two “intellectual authors” of the crimes, Hugo Soria Flores and José Carlos Estrada Huayta, and two “material co-authors”, Josimar Atachi Félix and Segundo Euclides Atachi Félix.
But, somewhat extraordinarily, none of those four men were at the Appeals Court to hear the ruling and all of them remain at large - because the sentence last year permitted them to walk free while their appeal was underway. Will Peruvian police now find and detain the four convicted men - two of whom live in one of the most lawless, dangerous regions of the entire Peruvian Amazon?
Previous form doesn’t inspire much confidence. A fifth man, Eurico Mapes Gomez - whom the Sawetinos have been formally denouncing for more than 15 years - was supposed to have stood trial too, but he has been a fugitive from justice since 2023.
“We urge the police to capture the sentenced men,” Ergilia Rengifo, widow of Ríos Pérez, was quoted saying by Mongabay after hearing the Appeals Court’s decision. “If they don’t go to prison, there isn’t any justice.”
In an interview last week the vice-president of Peru’s national indigenous federation AIDESEP, Miguel Guimaraes, called Saweto's struggle “emblematic” for the Peruvian Amazon, but said dozens of other indigenous people have been murdered in recent years too.
“The sentenced men still haven’t been detained,” he said. “They’ve been continuing to threaten the widows [of the murdered men]. We urge the police to do their job, identify the killers’s whereabouts and capture them, so the widows can feel safe and those who were killed can rest in peace.”
To date, the legal process has been somewhat tortuous, to say the least. It took public prosecutors five years to file charges, following all kinds of bureaucratic shenanigans and some impossible-to-imagine bungling. Subsequently, prior to the ruling and appeal last year, there had been a 2023 sentence which had also condemned the same four men - plus Mapes Gomez - to 28 years in prison, but that was appealed and annulled.
Saweto - which I’ve visited twice, once for The Guardian six months after the murders - is located on the River Tamaya very close to the border with Brazil. The community, mostly inhabited by Ashéninka people, has been formally denouncing loggers operating in their territory since at least 2004.
Peru’s Ombudsman, the Defensoria del Pueblo, has issued a statement describing the Saweto ruling as “historic”, but also calling on the police to capture the four sentenced men. The Ombudsman is also urging the country’s justice system to replicate the ruling with regard to another 23 indigenous leaders who have been murdered since the four Sawetinos in 2014 - and for whom justice has not been done either.
“[This ruling] constitutes the first final conviction in a murder case of human rights defenders in our country,” the Ombudsman’s statement runs. “But while it marks a milestone in our judicial history in favour of human rights defenders, it should also force justice officials to reflect on the need to speed up proceedings so that the delay of almost a decade isn’t repeated in other similar cases.”