Ap

La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, October 2, 2024, p. 31

Lime. Last Monday, 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 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 the rural town of Huanta. 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 newspaper The Republic and Radio Huanta 2000. On August 2, 1984, Ayala entered the Huanta soccer stadium – the Navy’s torture center – to complain about the military’s entry, the night before, into his mother’s house and where they broke his the nasal septum to his brother, according to witnesses. The journalist never came outthe judge said. 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 the death toll at 70,000. The majority of victims were peasants from the Andes.