Operation Chavín de Huántar took place on April 22, 1997, with the objective of liberating 72 hostages that were held captive by fourteen members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in the residency of Morihisa Aoki, the Japanese ambassador.
The rescue group, comprised of 140 commandos, was led by Peruvian Army General José Williams. Four teams entered the first floor and four others entered the second, all of them carrying HKM95 machineguns with silencers, while the MRTA members had AKM rifles, small arms, and grenades. The military action lasted 36 minutes.
Although the official version says that the terrorists fell while fighting in combat, there are reasons to believe that some of them were extrajudicially executed.
The exhumation of the bodies of the MRTA members was conducted in March 2001 by the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team. Eight of the bodies had gunshots to the back of the head, which is atypical of a wound suffered in battle.
According to this expert opinion, the moment that the victims were shot they were either not moving at all or moving very little.
Hidetaka Ogura affirmed that three MRTA members, among them Eduardo Cruz Sánchez a/k/a “Tito,” surrendered but were dead by the end of the operation. National Police of Peru General Máximo Rivera, former Chief of the National Counter-terrorism Directorate (DINCOTE), revealed that he heard an MRTA member ask for forgiveness. Similarly, Congressman Xavier Barrón declared that one of his friends who was also a hostage saw an MRTA member surrender.
Police officers Raúl Robles Reynoso and Marcial Torres Arteaga became key witnesses to these presumed extrajudicial executions. According to their declarations, after finishing the operation, they captured the MRTA member Eduardo Cruz Sánchez a/k/a “Tito” and handing him over to a commando sent by Peruvian Army Colonel Jesús Zamudio Arteaga.
In this context of silence of impunity, in May 2001 the anti-corruption judge Cecilia Pollack, at the request of the prosecutor Richard Saavedra, ordered the preliminary detention of twelve army officers. The then-congressmen José Barba Caballero and Rafael Rey of the National Unity Party and José Delgado of American Popular Revolutionary Alliance presented to Congress requests for amnesty for the soldiers who participated in the operation.
In June 2002, the Office of the Permanent Member of the Supreme Council of Military Justice started a trial of the commandos. However, days later a trial started in the civilian courts. The Anti-corruption judge Jorge Barreto Herrera oponed proceedings against Jesús Zamudio Aliaga (who was a fugitive), Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, Vladimiro Montesinos, and Roberto Huamán Azcurra. The latter three had not been included in the military trial. Jesús Zamudio Aliaga and Roberto Huamán Azcurra were included in the trial because they entered the residence after the hostage rescue. It was presumed that they entered under the orders of Vladimiro Montesinos and in some way participated in the extrajudicial executions that took place in the operation.
Later, in August, the Transitory Criminal Division of the Supreme Court transferred the trial of fifteen commandos who participated in the operation to the military courts under the justification that the crimes must be treated as crimes of military duty as they had taken place within an area that had been declared an emergency zone. Likewise, the Minister of Defense, Aurelio Loret de Mola, said that the commandos who participated in the operation were innocent.
This decision attempted to justify itself by claiming that the crimes were crimes of military duty because they took place in an area that had been declared as and Emergency Zone. However, this contradicts Article 8.1 of the Inter-American Convention of Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, of which Peru accepted jurisdiction in 2001. At the same time, the decision violates article 14 of the International Convention of Political and Civil Rights. These conventions stipulate that all human rights violations must be judged by the civil courts, even if they were committed by the armed forces.
Nevertheless, the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court of Justice ruled that some of the accused would be investigated by the military authorities and others in by the civil authorities. In the military court, the proceedings were for violating a truce or armistice or illegally making war (delito de gentes), homicide, and abuse of authority while in the civil courts a trial was opened for aggravated murder (this crime is not among the crimes of duty mentioned in the Military Code, and thus had to be investigated and judged in the civil courts). Furthermore it demanded the accumulation of all the unrelated cases against the men that were in various different procedural stages. Suspiciously, this was proposed by the Minister of Defense, Aurelio Loret de Mola.
On November 12, 2993, the military court decided to archive the case against Augusto Jaime Patiño (r), José Williams Zapata, Luis Alatrista Torres, Carlos Tello Aliaga, Benigno Leonel Cabrera Pino, Jorge Orlando Fernández Robles, Hugo Víctor Robles del Castillo, Víctor Hugo Sánchez Morales, Raúl Huarcaya Lovón, Walter Martín Becerra Noblecilla, José Alvarado Díaz, Manuel Antonio Paz Ramos, Jorge Félix Díaz, Juan Carlos Moral Rojas, Tomás César Rojas Villanueva and 94 other troops that participated in the Chavín de Huántar operation, on the charges of abuse of authority and homicide, ruling that there was no proof of their responsibility.
On April 5, 2004 the Appellate Court of the Supreme Council of Military Justice upheld the decision of the military court to archive the case.
For its part the civil courts, after the exclusion of the commandos, the criminal procedure followed its course. The judicial investigations concluded on November 22, 2004, with the case sent to the Special Criminal Court and later Special Criminal Court A to start the oral arguments stage.
Unfortunately, there was a dispute over jurisdiction in the case between Special Criminal Court A (today known simply as the Special Criminal Court) and Special Criminal Court C (today known as the Third Special Criminal Court) respecting who had jurisdiction to hear the oral arguments. This dispute delayed the case. On September 22, 2005, the Transitional Criminal Division of the Supreme Court gave jurisdiction to the Special Criminal Court C (Third Special Criminal Court) in order to continue the procedure.
On September 22, 2006, the Third Supreme Prosecutor’s Office Specializing in Crimes of Corruption of Officials accused Nicolás de Bari Hermoza Ríos, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, Roberto Edmundo Huamán Azcurra, and Jesús Salvador Zamudio Aliaga of the aggravated homicide of Herma Luz Meléndez Cueva, Victor Salomón Peceros Pedraza, and Nicolás Cruz Sánchez. The Prosecutor’s Office asked for 18, 20, 15, and 15 years of jail-time for them, respectively. It also asked for a civil reparation of 500,000 Peruvian Soles for the realitives of the victimes. Juan Fernando Dianderas Ottone, Martín Fortunato Luis Solari de la Fuente, and Herbert Danilo Angeles Villanueva were accused of Crimes Against the Administration of Jutice and Coverup Against the State, and the Prosecutor’s Office asked for five years and four months, three years, and four years of jail-time, respectively for them, as well as a ban on public officer and a payment of 500,000 Soles of civil reparations.
Due to the accusation made by the Third Superior Prosecutor’s Officer, the Third Specialized Criminal Court emitted a resolution that started the oral trial of all the previously mentioned people, except for Jesús Salvador Zamudio Aliaga, in whose case the court reserved judgment until he could be put at the disposition of the courts. The resolution started the oral trial on May 18th, 2007 at 8:30 am in the Third Special Criminal Court in the Callao Naval Base.
The Prosecutor’s Office also asked to bring to trial the former Director of the National Police of Peru, Fernando Dianderas Ottone, the Director of Police Health, General Martín Solari de la Puente, and the Chief of the Pathological Anatomy Service of the Central Police Hospital, Commander Herbert Ángeles Villanueva, for the crime of covering up the executions. However, the Tribunal considered the charges against them as expired since too much time passed from the time that the rescue of the hostages from the Japanese ambassador’s house on April 22, 1997. The Prosecutor’s Office had asked that they be brought to trial for not conducting the medical examinations necessary to determine the official causes of death of the subversives, an omission that permitted the illegal execution of three MRTA members who had surrendered to be covered up for many years.
Área de Comunicación
APRODEH
prensa@aprodeh.org.pe |
