Prosecutions and Amnesty
In April 1993, a group of Peruvian military officers anonymously released a document detailing the events at La Cantuta. Their document claimed the death squad had abducted the victims, tortured and murdered them, and then hurriedly buried them; later, they claimed, after questions had been raised in Congress, that the armed forces had exhumed, incinerated, and reburied the bodies in another location. The military whistleblowers named the members of Grupo Colina involved, identified the operations chief as Major Santiago Martín Rivas, and suggested that the group operated on the orders of Vladimiro Montesinos, head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) and a close advisor to President Fujimori.
On 6 May, Lt. Gen. Humberto Robles Espinoza, the army's third highest-ranking officer, publicly denounced a number of human rights violations committed by the SIN and the armed forces, including the La Cantuta killings. He was later dismissed from duty and subjected to death threats, and finally fled the country for political asylum in Argentina.
In June 1993, Justo Arizapana Vicente, a recycler, and his friend Guillermo Cataroca, leaked a marked map to congress man Roger Cáceres Velásquez and Radio Comas journalist Juan Jara Berrospi. Cáceres then shared the map with Ricardo Uceda at the news magazine Sí, who published it in July of that year. Mariella Barreto, an agent of the Peruvian Army Intelligence Service, is also sometimes credited with leaking this map to a Peruvian magazine. An investigation of the site indicated on the map by the public prosecutor revealed four clandestine graves. Forensic tests conducted on the remains, and on another set of bones found at another site, revealed that they belonged to Muñoz Sánchez and the students Luis Enrique Ortiz Perea, Armando Amaro Condor, and Juan Gabriel Mariños Figueroa, and that at least some of them had been tortured prior to receiving an execution-style coup-de-grâce to the base of the neck. Barreto was murdered some years later: her decapitated and dismembered corpse, showing signs of ante-mortem torture, was found in March 1997. A few weeks after Mariella Barreto's death, her colleague Leonor La Rosa, was on TV in a hospital bed, declaring she had been tortured and that Barreto had been killed in retaliation for leaking information to the press about the Groupo Colina's plan to intimidate journalists and politicians from the opposition.
The military authorities had begun an investigation into the killings in May 1993. In addition, in December 1993, a civilian prosecutor filed criminal charges against several named members of the military. A conflict of jurisdiction thus arose between the military and civilian courts. The controversy was placed before the Supreme Court which, on 3 February 1994, ruled that it was unable to reach agreement on which venue should apply. Consequently, on the night of 7 February, Congress enacted a new law whereby the Supreme Court could decide such matters with a simple majority, instead of a unanimous vote. By a three-to-two vote of the Supreme Court's criminal division, the case was placed under military jurisdiction.
On 21 February 1994, the Supreme Council of Military Justice (CSJM) sentenced ten of the perpetrators to prison sentences of between one and 20 years.
Following Fujimori's landslide re-election in April 1995, in another all-night session on 14 June 1995, Congress enacted law No. 26479, the "Amnesty Law", ordering the release of all police officers, soldiers, and civil servants convicted of or charged with civilian or military crimes during Peru's War on Terrorism. On 15 July, the Supreme Council of Military Justice ordered the release of all the individuals convicted for the La Cantuta killings.
Read more about this topic: La Cantuta Massacre