Global IssuesPERU: ‘My Father Was Killed for Reporting on Rights Abuses’
'I became a journalist to find out how they killed my father, to discover where his body is, and to take those responsible for his death to court,' Boris Ayala told IPS. 'I am not going to rest until I find out the whole truth.'
Ayala hopes the remains of his father, Jaime, will be found in the mass grave that forensic experts are exhuming in the cemetery in Huanta, a town in Peru’s southern highlands. His father, a journalist like himself, was seized by the military in 1984 and never heard from again.
Since Monday, Boris Ayala and the families of another 49 victims of forced disappearance have been closely following the excavation by a team of forensic experts, ordered by the courts in order to identify the bodies by means of DNA testing.
The military officer widely considered to be responsible for the killings disappeared in 1986. But there are signs that he was more fortunate than those buried in the mass grave in this remote town in the province of Ayacucho, 550 km southeast of Lima.
The grave apparently holds the remains of people who went missing in July and August 1984, when the navy set up a base in the Huanta football stadium under the command of Captain Álvaro Artaza, better known as 'Commander Camión' ('commander truck').
At the time, government forces were fighting the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas and the smaller Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). The 1980-2000 conflict left around 70,000 victims, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) report, published in 2003.
In August 1984, a number of bodies were found in a clandestine grave in a desolate area on the outskirts of Huanta. Local authorities claimed they did not have the funds to identify the bodies, and decided to bury them in a mass grave in the municipal cemetery.
When he was kidnapped, Jaime Ayala was the local correspondent for the Lima newspaper La República and had a news programme on the Radio Huanta 2000 station. In his coverage of the armed conflict, he did not hesitate to report on the extreme violence with which the military treated people suspected of belonging to Sendero Luminoso.
Ayala also covered the protests by the families of victims of arbitrary arrest, torture and disappearance, as well as the bloody operations carried out by Sendero.
On Jul. 31, 1984, La República published a report by Ayala on a massacre, presumably committed by Sendero guerrillas, and on the shooting of local residents, blamed on the military.
It was the last article by Jaime Ayala, who was just 22 years old at the time. On Aug. 2, he decided to set out to find 'Commander Camión'.
That day 'my father found out that the day before, a navy patrol went to his mother’s house and beat her and his siblings, for no reason at all. My grandmother was threatened at gunpoint, and they warned her not to report what had happened,' said Boris.
'Very upset, my father headed to the Investigative Police of Peru to file a complaint, accompanied by the administrator of Radio Huanta 2000, Carlos Paz. But the police refused to take his report,' he said.
'Then they went to the navy base in the Huanta Stadium and asked to see ‘Commander Camión’. But they only let my father in. Carlos Paz waited for him outside. But he never came out,' said Boris, who was just four months old at the time.
A former member of the navy who was posted during that period in Huanta under 'Commander Camión' told the CVR that his boss had put Jaime Ayala’s name on a black list, because his reporting was hurting the navy’s image.
'Camión said Ayala was hitting the navy hard,' testified the witness, who said the captain himself tortured the reporter, but that 'he went too far.'
'My father was killed because he was a journalist and because he was reporting on human rights violations,' said Boris Ayala.
The captain was accused of Ayala’s kidnapping and disappearance. But he denied the charges and told the prosecutor who investigated the case, Simón Palomino, that the journalist was a member of Sendero.
Shortly after the judiciary rejected the navy’s request to try 'Commander Camión' in a military court, and just when he was about to be brought to trial in an ordinary court, the navy told the judge that the captain had been kidnapped on Feb. 6, 1986.
But Artaza’s family recorded in the inheritance record, which IPS saw, that the captain had died on Feb. 2, 1986, four days before the supposed kidnapping.
According to another document obtained by IPS, 'Commander Camión' issued a power of attorney to Sergio Tapia, a lawyer, on Feb. 18, 1986 two weeks after his supposed death or kidnapping.
'We have found signs that ‘Commander Camión' was taken out of the country by the navy and is apparently living in the United States or Canada,' said Boris Ayala.
Tapia has defended members of the navy implicated in the massacre of 118 prisoners at the El Frontón prison, committed in 1986 during the first administration of current President Alan García.
Tapia is now an adviser to Vice President Luis Giampietri, a retired vice admiral who was investigated at the time in connection with the El Frontón massacre.
A Mar. 6, 1986 cable sent by the United States Embassy in Peru to the State Department reinforces suspicions that the navy was involved in the purported kidnapping of 'Commander Camión', to keep him from being tried.
'We believe that the navy probably carried out Artaza’s disappearance in order to avoid a civilian (and public) trial that would discredit that institution, and would establish a dangerous precedent,' says the cable, which was declassified in response to a request by the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).
'Possibility that terrorists (either SL or MRTA) kidnapped Artaza is remote, as the body would have surfaced by now. Police and military do not appear to be searching for the alleged kidnapped victim, nor have they approached us for any information in this regard. Although possibility exists that Artaza vanished on his own, it is more likely that he cooperated with the navy,' it adds.
Because Artaza is officially dead, the courts have issued no warrant for his arrest.
'All the evidence indicates that he is alive and that his disappearance was a maneuver carried out to evade justice. They should issue an international warrant for his capture,' said Ayala.
Meanwhile, the specialised forensic team will continue working at the mass grave until Mar. 23. The first remains have been found, and the area of excavation has been expanded.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service