Environmental activists and indigenous communities in the Amazon are awaiting a verdict in the emblematic case of the Saweto murders, which has seen a decade-long search for justice become a test case for impunity for environmental crime in Peru.
After four months of hearings, the retrial in the case of the 2014 murders of indigenous Asháninka leaders Edwin Chota, Leoncio Quintisima, Jorge Ríos, and Francisco Pinedo is now reaching the final stages, with a verdict expected on April 11.
The defendants, alleged illegal loggers Eurico Mapes Gómez and Segundo and Josimar Atachi Félix, and timber businessmen José Estrada Huayta and Hugo Soria Flores, have already been convicted once, receiving 28-year sentences for the murders in 2023. However, that conviction was controversially overturned on a technicality just months later.
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In the decade since the Saweto murders, violence against those defending the Peruvian Amazon has become ever more common. And for those in the crosshairs, the case is now not only about justice, but also about whether the state is willing and able to act against the actors trying to wipe out resistance to environmental crime.
“They didn’t kill just anyone, they killed the leaders. What they were trying to do was to silence the reports about their illegal logging,” Yusen Caraza, the lawyer representing the victims’ widows in the case, told InSight Crime. “That has been the impact, the silencing of indigenous leaders and environmental and human rights defenders.”
Blood Timber
Chota, Quintisima, Ríos, and Pinedo set out on their final journey along a remote rainforest trail on September 1, 2014. They were on their way to meet with indigenous leaders of the Asháninka community of Apiwtxa, in the Brazilian state of Acre, to discuss the illegal logging that was tearing through their ancestral homes. But the four men did not make it to their destination.
Chota and Quintisima were found six hours away from their village, days after their disappearance. Witnesses described how vultures had begun to feed on their mutilated bodies, while authorities uncovered burned body parts — a femur, a tibia, and parts of a foot. Ríos and Pinedo’s bodies were never recovered.
The four men were community leaders from the Alto Tamaya-Saweto community in the state of Ucayali, a jungle region bordering Brazil and a hotspot for Peru’s illegal timber trade. Chota in particular had taken the lead in denouncing logging. He made his first official complaint against illegal loggers in February 2008, when he reported that Brazilian national Mapes Gómez and the Atachi Félix brothers were illegal logging on their community land.
Chota’s complaint was met with indifference from authorities, but it angered the loggers, beginning a feud that, according to the first verdict in the case, would end with his death six years later. As he continued to denounce illegal logging, Chota began to receive death threats, and eventually had to flee his home and seek refuge in an Asháninka community on the Brazilian side of the border.
Still, Chota was determined, and in 2013 he carried out his own investigation. He and other community leaders followed the river route of illegally logged timber to Ucayali’s capital, the Amazon port city of Pucallpa, where they saw it enter a sawmill. Chota again filed a complaint, and this time prosecutors responded, opening an investigation into the shipment and the companies behind it.
The owner of the timber, Hugo Soria Flores, confronted Chota and Ríos after the timber was seized.
“A Sawetino is going to die,” Soria Flores told them, according to another complaint later filed by Chota.
Following the threats, Chota requested “personal safety guarantees” for himself and other community leaders from the Ucayali regional government. But the officials did not act on the request, and a little more than a year later, he and his companions were dead.
Searching for Justice
The killings garnered global attention as the case was covered extensively by international media and condemned by environmental groups around the world. Indigenous and environmental groups held it up as an example of the attacks faced by those resisting organized crime in the Amazon. According to the non-governmental organization Global Witness, since then, Peru has emerged as one of the top ten most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders, with 42 activists killed between 2014 and 2022, the majority of them in the Amazon region.
Little progress was made in the investigation into the murders until 2018, when a lawyer representing the victims’ families filed a complaint to the Internal Control Office of the Public Ministry about the handling of the case. The complaint resulted in the removal of the assigned prosecutor, and his replacement soon drove the case forwards.
Finally, in June 2022, Mapes Gómez and the Atachi Félix brothers, the same loggers Chota had reported in 2008, were charged with committing the murder, while Estrada Huayta and Soria Flores, whose timber was seized as a result of Chota’s complaints, were charged as the intellectual authors of the crime.
The trial lasted almost eight months, when, in February 2023, the Ucayali criminal court found the five suspects guilty and sentenced them to 28 years and three months in prison. Just six months later, however, the sentences were overturned on appeal because the ruling had included evidence from a witness whose testimony had not been correctly added to the record.
The retrial began with the news that Mapes Gómez and Josimar Atachi Félix had absconded, which led the authorities to issue arrest warrants.
However, the prosecution scored a key victory when the court ruled to allow the testimony of a protected witness whose testimony was not included in the first trial.
The witness, who testified by video link with the camera turned off and with a distorted voice, described how he had heard the defendants discuss their plans to kill Chota and his companions shortly before the murders. According to his testimony, the defendants heard that Chota and the others were heading out into the jungle, and they sensed an opportunity.
“They said that they were miserable sons of bitches, gossips, and loudmouths and that this was an opportunity to kill them. Then Don Estrada said, ‘If you bring me their heads on a silver platter, I will pay you,’” he said, referring to the alleged owner of the seized timber.
The witness added they celebrated finishing the job with a raucous drinking session in a local bar. The defendants, he said, described how they had beat, tortured, and sexually abused the victims before finally killing them.
“It was painful to listen to those people [talk about] what they had done like that, without any fear, without pity or feeling,” he said.
Setting a Precedent
The addition of the protected witness has given new impetus to the prosecution’s case, according to Caraza. However, he added, the decade of struggle has taken its toll on the widows’ faith in the Peruvian justice system.
“There has been a strong psychological impact on them. They don’t believe in justice. Just the fact that they have had to walk this road for nearly ten years has left them with the fear that this isn’t going to happen,” he said.
For environmental activists, the importance of the verdict extends beyond justice for the families and communities. The Saweto case may be one of many of a growing number of such murders in the Peruvian Amazon, but few if any cases have received the same levels of international attention. In addition, the families have able to pursue the case in large part because of the logistical and financial assistance provided by non-governmental organizations such as the coalition behind the “Justice for Saweto” campaign.
If there is no justice with that backing, then there is little hope for those without, according to Silvana Baldovino Beas, program director for biodiversity and indigenous peoples at the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law (Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental – SPDA).
“Saweto is a really critical starting point. Even with the eight years of delays and everything else, at least it restarted. This new start came because they have support, whether it’s from civil society, international agencies or allies, if it wasn’t for that, it would never have restarted and it all would have been forgotten,” she said.
That support has created an opportunity for those seeking to shatter the impunity long enjoyed by the powerful political, business, and criminal interests behind environmental crime in Peru, but, Baldovino added, their hope for the case is tempered by fear and cynicism.
“Success for the families in the Saweto case would be a very good precedent for us, but it would be a very bad precedent for them, and to be honest, although I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I don’t think they will let that happen,” she said.