On Monday night, the Peruvian justice system sentenced a retired military officer to 18 years in prison for being the direct perpetrator of the forced disappearance of a journalist and the murder of 60 peasants, in events that occurred in 1984 in the Andes during the internal armed conflict that bled to the country.
Judge Miluska Cano indicated that Alberto Rivero Valdeavellano – who in 1984 was a frigate captain and head of the Navy’s actions in the province of Huanta, Ayacucho region – will serve his sentence “from the day he is apprehended” for his responsibility in the malicious murders of the victims.
The events for which Rivero was convicted occurred between July and August 1984.
In one of them, the military killed six farmers from the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Huanta, a rural town. The soldiers took them out of the temple where they were praying and in the back of the premises they shot them and dynamited their bodies.
Another victim was journalist Jaime Ayala, 22, who reported on the armed conflict for the capital’s newspaper La República and for the local Radio Huanta 2000. On August 2, 1984, Ayala entered the Huanta soccer stadium, a torture center for the Navy, to complain about the military’s entry, the night before, into his mother’s house and where they broke his brother’s nasal septum, according to witnesses.
“The journalist never came out,” said the judge, who added that the reporter’s complaints of human rights violations “were an obstacle” to the military’s actions.
His wife, Rosa Pallqui, who was widowed at the age of 20 along with her four-month-old son, was photographed by the local press at the courthouse door next to the black and white portrait of her husband sitting next to a typewriter.
The sentence of the Fourth Transitory Criminal Liquidation Chamber of Lima indicated that Rivero refuses to provide information about the place where the remains of the journalist and dozens of peasants who were killed in other events that occurred between July and August 1984 could be found after accusing them, without evidence, of being members or collaborators of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso, which sought to take power in Peru through violence. The sentenced soldier did not attend the reading of the judicial decision and his arrest was ordered.
The National Association of Journalists of Peru wrote on its social networks “the remains of our colleague are still pending, so that justice in this case is complete.”
Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced an internal armed conflict that pitted the security forces and peasant self-defense committees on one side and the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement on the other.
A truth commission estimates that the death toll could have reached 70,000. The majority of victims were Quechua-speaking peasants from the Andes or natives of the Ashaninka ethnic group from the Amazon.
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