12 years in prison for ex-legislator for murder of journalist

A Peruvian judge sentenced a former legislator to 12 years in prison on Thursday for co-authoring the murder of a journalist 35 years ago when the politician was an army officer during the bloody conflict between the Armed Forces and Shining Path.

Judge Juan Santillán indicated in the reading of the sentence of more than seven hours that Daniel Urresti, 66, participated together with other soldiers in the crime of Hugo Bustíos, who was ambushed, machine-gunned and dynamited on November 24, 1988 in a rural road in the province of Huanta when he was going -along with another colleague who survived- to cover the murder of two peasants. The dynamite smashed his face and tore off an arm, the judge added.

Urresti -who was also Minister of the Interior, former presidential candidate, twice a candidate for the capital’s municipality and is frequently invited by the local media to comment on local politics- listened to the sentence along with his wife and daughter, whom he hugged before being arrested by the police. The Prosecutor’s Office had requested 25 years and the payment of $132,000, but was satisfied with the decision. Urresti appealed.

The conviction against the politician was achieved in a second trial, after a first trial acquitted Urresti. The acquittal was annulled in 2019 by the Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial because the previous process had been riddled with errors.

Urresti, who rose to be an army general at the end of his career in the early 2000s, was in his youth the intelligence chief at a remote military base in the Andes called Castropampa, in Huanta province. In 1988 he was just a captain. The judges determined that he, along with five other lower-ranking soldiers, ambushed Bustíos that year to prevent him from spreading news of military abuses against civilians, especially peasants. Precisely on the day of his death, Bustíos was going to report the murder of two peasants in a rural area.

For the crime in Bustíos, officers Víctor La Vera, head of the Castropampa base near the place where the journalist was killed, and officer Amador Vidal, who since the prison accused Urresti before the authorities of being part of the group of assassins.

Sharmelí Bustíos, daughter of the murdered journalist, told the press that after 35 years “I can tell my parents that they can finally rest in peace.” Margarita Patiño, mother of Sharmelí and wife of the journalist and who promoted the search for justice for her husband, died in 2016 in a road accident.

The National Association of Journalists said on its social networks that the sentence “constitutes reparation to the Bustíos-Patiño family and to journalism. It is an important step towards justice and the defense of press freedom in Peru.”

Huanta, located 612 kilometers southeast of Lima with its intense blue sky and green countryside, was one of the most violent cities during the internal war between 1980 and 2000.

Herminia Oré, who represents the disappeared and tortured people of that city, told a journalist from The Associated Press in 2015 that “Huanta was paranoid. A candle lit in your house at night was a reason for the military to arrest you, the police walked in pairs looking at each other at extremes, but the violence was worse in the countryside”.

According to a Truth Commission, the internal armed conflict in Peru left some 70,000 dead, the majority living in rural areas and whose languages ​​were Quechua and Ashaninka.

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