( Spanish) –– The Peruvian court sentenced former presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos (as mediate perpetrator) and Martín Rivas (as perpetrator) to 23 years in prison for qualified homicide with the aggravating circumstance of treachery for the murder of Army intelligence agent Mariella Barreto, which occurred in 1997.
The Fourth Transitory Liquidating Criminal Chamber of the National Superior Court of Peru, presided over by Judge Miluska Cano, established that the sentences imposed must be computed from the year in which they are imprisoned. In the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, it must be counted from June 2001. Rivas, who has been Fujimori’s closest adviser, is also serving a sentence after being tried and found guilty along with Montesinos for the La Cantuta and Barrios Altos massacres, both recorded in the early 1990s.
Montesinos was the intelligence adviser to then-President Alberto Fujimori and remains in prison for a series of sentences for corruption crimes and human rights violations, committed during the years he was linked to the Peruvian Executive, from 1990 to 2000.
At the time of his murder, Barreto was a partner of Rivas. His crime, according to the judicial investigation, was the product of an Army counterintelligence plan to detect those who leaked secret information to the local press.
Barreto’s decapitated corpse was found in two plastic bags that same year on a highway in the north of Lima.
The court also handed down sentences for two other men related to the Barreto case, with 15 years in prison for Carlos Sánchez Noriega for considering him an accessory to the murder, and eight years for José Salinas as a secondary accomplice.
