LIMA ( Associated Press) — In a ravine in Lima between desert hills, the coroners of the Peruvian prosecutor’s office resumed Monday the search for five murdered and disappeared university students after a massacre carried out in 1992 for which the former president was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Alberto Fujimori.
The investigations to find the remains stopped in 1993, after only the skeletal remains of four other students and a teacher were found. The ten were kidnapped from the Enrique Guzmán y Valle university, known as “La Cantuta”, to later be killed by a clandestine military group that carried out the crime with the knowledge of the former president.
“I hope they find something of my son,” Raida Cóndor, mother of Armando Amaro, one of the five university students whose remains have not been found, told The Associated Press. Sitting on a stone while she rested, the 77-year-old woman indicated that, after almost three decades, she hopes to find some garment of her son, who was studying Electronics, to give him a decent burial.
The new coronavirus pandemic, which killed more than 213,000 in Peru, stopped forensic work in 2020, which resumed early.
“If I don’t find him, I’ll keep thinking about him,” said Mrs. Condor, who described her missing son as tall, dark, and with a beautiful calligraphy that made him a secretary while he was doing his mandatory military service and was a soldier, years before he died. they kill him The soldiers of the clandestine group carried out extrajudicial assassinations to supposedly combat the Shining Path terrorist group, which in those years sought to seize power.
One of the difficulties is that the land in the area could have been removed in recent years by people who extract sand to sell it as an input for building houses. “We will move several tons of soil,” said coroner Flavio Estrada. “The land here was very high… they have lowered the entire hill of land,” said Cóndor, who visits the area frequently and carried in his hands a portrait of his son, who disappeared at the age of 26.
The relatives of the disappeared brought flowers and photographs of the disappeared, which they placed at the foot of a hill. Also reminders of the absent, among them, a small toy car and a miniature of a camelid made of wool.
Forensics set up a tent and also brought a front lifter alongside a truck to remove tons of earth in an area called Cieneguilla, east of Lima. The experts are guided by the testimony of some soldiers, former members of the annihilation group, during the trial, but also by other stories, including that of a waste recycler.
The kidnapping occurred on July 18, 1992 and that same day they were killed and buried in a first point called Huachipa. In 1993, after the case was made public, the murderers dug up some bodies, burned them and took them to Cieneguilla, where one morning they buried them again without knowing that a cardboard recycler was watching them from hiding. The man produced a map that was published in a local magazine and later served to initiate investigations.
Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 for his indirect responsibility in this massacre and in another carried out by the same group of soldiers in 1991 in which another 15 people were executed. The military group operated under the guise of an architecture office and received public funding.
Justice has calculated that the clandestine military group killed some 53 civilians during the Fujimori government (1990-2000), including one of its agents who was dismembered and beheaded on suspicion of leaking data to the press. They also killed an opposition journalist who was forced to dig his grave, tortured him and shot him in the head with a rifle.
The 83-year-old former president was sentenced to 25 years in prison, which he is serving in a prison where he is the only inmate.
