The Judiciary sentenced Santiago Martin Rivas to 18 years in prison as the author of the crimes of qualified homicide and forced disappearance for the Cantuta-Pativilca cumulative case. From 4 in the afternoon this Friday, November 29, the Fourth National Superior Criminal Chamber for Temporary Liquidation, led by judges Miluska Cano López, Otto Verapinto Marquez and Helbert Llerena Lezama, read the arguments of the sentence against the head of the Colina Group. during the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori.
The families of the victims had been waiting for 32 years for justice for the violations of the human rights of their loved ones. The victims were: John Calderon Rios (18)Toribio Ortiz Aponte (25)Felandro Castillo Manrique (38)Pedro Agüero Rivera (35)Ernesto Arias Velásquez (27) and César Rodríguez Esquivel (29). These murdered people were falsely accused of belonging to the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso.
After the bodies of the deceased were found, at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office Exhumations and expert reports were carried out to find new evidence of their disappearances and, subsequently, their deaths, because no ballistics analysis was applied, nor on the injuries inflicted, since the appropriate protocols were not applied at that time. The tests were carried out by the Specialized Forensic Team (EFE) and were attached to the judicial process that handed down the sentence against those involved.
As a result, additional evidence was found indicating signs of torture on some of the bodies as well as the presence of gun projectiles, reinforcing the theory that the victims were tortured before being killed by the Hill Groupcreated in the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in the nineties.
The lawyer of the Association for Human Rights (Aprodeh), Christian Huaylinos, stated that, in the case Pativilca, Alberto Fujimori He managed to avoid a sentence due to his death on September 11. However, justice has shown that he headed an organized apparatus of power responsible for the creation of the Colina detachment, which approved actions of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions. These facts are related to the cases of La Cantuta and Pativilcawhich are accumulated in this trial.
