Justice sought for slain journalists

HUANTA, Peru (AP) - The night before her husband and seven other journalists were killed high in the Andes by having their heads crushed with rocks and farm tools, Alcira Velasquez said she dreamed of his death.

"I had a premonition. I dreamed their murders," Velasquez, now 58 and the widow of photographer Jorge Sedano, told a newly formed truth commission looking into two decades of civil strife in Peru.

The horrific murders of eight Peruvian journalists in the village of Uchuraccay in Ayacucho province in January 1983 focused the world's spotlight for the first time on the savage war under way between ferocious Maoist rebels and a military bent on defeating them at any cost.

On Thursday, widows of two of the journalists and the mother of a third gave heart-wrenching testimony to a newly formed truth commission looking into two decades of civil strife in Peru.

"This is the last opportunity I may have," said Gloria Trelles, now 70 and the mother of Jorge Mendivil, who was only 22 when he was killed. "For me the crime has gone unpunished. For me everything continues the same as on Jan. 26 and I only ask as a mother that justice be done."

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's mission is to determine the root causes and political climate that led to the deaths of 30,000 people and to the disappearance of at least 6,000 more from 1980 to 2000. Its mission also includes gathering information whenever possible to identify human rights violators for state prosecutors.

Ayacucho province, a region of rugged mountains and deep, jungle-cloaked valleys, was the birthplace of the Shining Path insurgency and the site of the worst atrocities in a state-sponsored campaign of brutal repression.

Velasquez said in her dream, her husband was killed by soldiers. Relatives of the slain journalists have always claimed that Peru's elected government participated in a cover-up to place the blame for the murders on Quechua-speaking Indian villagers instead of where it belonged, on the military.

Sedano, Mendivil and six other journalists had trekked all day to Uchuraccay on the way to an even more remote village, Huaychao, to investigate the government's claim that villagers there had killed seven young guerrillas. If true, it would have been the first time a village had fought the rebels, a strategy the army was pushing hard.

But the journalists too were killed. The government of President Fernando Belaunde named famed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to head a commission to investigate the killings. After a one-day trip to Ayacucho, including a four-hour visit to Uchuraccay, the commission determined that the villagers had confused the journalists for rebels.

It noted that few of the villagers could speak Spanish, were unfamiliar with journalists and may have taken the photographers' zoom lenses to be weapons. The report said the villagers had killed the journalists by crushing their heads with rocks and metal farm tools.

Eventually only three villagers were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The three women who testified Thursday cast scorn on the Vargas Llosa commission. They charged that it had based its findings on the official police report and had never sought to investigate deeply what had occurred in Uchuraccay.

Trelles said the Vargas Llosa commission's real name "should have been the Cover-up Commission because they weren't interested in investigating anything."

She noted that during their trial in Lima, one of the villagers had said he had been warned while he was detained in Huanta that he and his family would be killed if he told the truth about what happened in Uchuraccay.

Eudocia Reynoso, now 45 and the widow of reporter Felix Gavilan, one of two journalists on the trek who spoke Quechua, said she grew up in Huanta, the closest town to Uchuraccay, and knew the ways of the peasants, or campesinos, who live there.

"The campesinos are good people, just as we are. The people of the countryside are not like what Mr. Vargas Llosa says," she said. "That is a lie, a vile lie. Campesinos would never have killed them in that way.

"Campesinos adore their dead. They wouldn't have been capable of burying them naked, two to a grave, one on top of another face down. That is the work of soldiers and they must be punished. I ask that justice be done and that we not be forgotten."

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