Godorsecio

Are there mining agents using the same methods for dismissing their debunkers?

 

by Liliana Alzamora Flores & Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo

 

SULLANA, Peru – An environmentalist leader denounces attempts against his environment and he doesn’t shut up despite the threats. He’s murdered and his killer leaves many clues to discover him, but by some reason –and there are documents proving it—his closest son in the fight ends becoming the top suspect of a criminal fact.

 

It’s the case of Arsecio Gonza Castillo but it’s also the same model of another happened in 2001 with the beloved Godofredo Garcia Baca. Was the same script followed up, or is there a criminal involvement for real on behalf of a justice that has been blocked?  Is it a vendetta?  But whose against whom?

 

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011, four handmade miners were murdered near a minehole in Pueblo Nuevo de Santa Rosa Town, Suyo District, Ayabaca. It started to awake and the miners prepared a rock load on a pick-up. At the same time, many fellas, possibly 10, get them close. Just before introducing them, they wore skimasks for covering their faces. Next, the masked men shot their guns to the miners killing four and leaving about ten wounded, at least.

 

At 2:00 pm., the pólice got to Edinson Gonza Chinchay’s house for detaining him next to his brother, Neptali, due to be allegedly  the skimasked guys, and easing his house for a previous meeting to the attempt. With them, it was detained Anacleto Maza Livia, who was reported as a fugitive of Ayabaca City Jail several months before.

 

At the detention moment, the police found a bag where there were pellets shotguns and it sustained they were the used ones in the murder. Immediately, they were carried to Sullana City’s Criminal Investigation Division, where they spent as detainees until Saturday, March 5^th, when during a hearing, they were jailed preventively for nine months while the investigations were conducted.

 

This is the oficial version that has led Maza and the Gonza brothers to stay jailed in Rio Seco Prison, in Castilla, Piura.

 

Edinson

One hour before his detention, Edinson Gonza was home in Pueblo Nuevo, less than a mile of the murder site. During the whole morning, he was reviewing accountability of the Santa Rosa Community which he became the vice-president.

 

He learned about the four miners murder and he had heard that in Suyo Town, the community peasants were accused of that fact because of their explicit opposition to handmade mining. The community had joined on the issue and it was beginning to make alliances with other grassroot and civil society organizations. The meetings, even, became to broadcast on live. It wasn’t a secret that March 5th, it was scheduled a mineholes closure.

 

The fact is that Gonza worried when he listened on Radio Cutivalu that the rumor turned a headline. We contacted him to know his version. “I wanna get in contact with them to say that the community has nothing to do,” he said us.

 

We warned the radio station and just later, he ratified this version on the air. It was 1:40 pm. When the contact finished, we called him again to know details and analyzing the fact impact. Gonza was telling his meeting with the community board some hours before and the documents they were reviewing. His voice was quiet, paused, like he ever spoke.

 

During his radio interview, it was heard a ringtone in the background: “It was my neighbor calling at me to warn that the police was coming here.” Until that right moment, edinson Gonza continued quiet and he was reviewing with us the police intervention protocol according to the written in Peru’s Constitution. It was 1:57 and the closing headlines started on the radio. “I gotta hang off because the police arrived my home – talk later.” It was the last communication we had with him.

 

Vile destiny

Benicia Chinchay told it between sad and furious. The mother of Gonza brothers was overcoming his husband’s mourn, and she should deal now with her two detained sons. She eyewitnesses that when edinson hang off the phone, the police entered his home violently, forced with knocks to the guys posing in front of the shotguns, and brough them to Sullana.

 

Mrs Chinchay confirmed that the police confiscated their cellphones those held turned on until mid-afternoon receiving calls from the press that wanted to know reactions not having any success. “Yes… this is Edinson… I’m in Sullana Police Station,” somebody who pretended to be the stud said us. After that, the cellphone got over.

 

The hearing when the preventive prison was ordered, on March 5^th, was other bitter drink for Santa Rosa people and who supported them. Two Toyota Caldinas parked near the Criminal Courtroom, located amid Sullana Downtown. 15 people, mostly young mothers with their kids, picked down and began to attack physically and verbally whom supported the community peasants.

 

The two drivers vanished quicly in a legal office just beside the courtroom. Before being jailed in Rio Seco, edinson and the Prosecutor Raymundo Peñafor Asto-Gutarra saw their faces each other again, although this time in different roles.

 

Tricked balance

After Arsecio Gonza’s murder, on August 22^nd, 2010, Edinson was the plaintiff and he continuously visited the Prosecution Office in Suyo trusting that the justice would manifest soom. There were hard indications leading to the murderer who the guy had identified.

 

The prosecutor in charge of the investigation was Raymundo Peñafor Asto-Gutarra, but despite Gonza’s pressure, there were no results, and the papers seemed to be held like a stone. Until his substitution, in January 2011, there were not advances neither explanations about the lack of results. The substitutes did not anything for the issue neither.

 

Now, in matter of three days, we had a jailed but it wasn’t Arsecio Gonza’s murderer, although in spite of one, he was accused by four amid many confusing facts.

 

How to match a circle in a square

When everything was matching, inclusive a convenient under legal age witness who assured to have seen the face of the skimasked, and was under police protection, resulted that the found bullets in the corpses were not the same caliber than the shotguns. It transcended that Edinson Gonza admited to be the weapons owner but the projectiles shot against the miners could not be consistent to these ones. The police shut up. At least, it did it so with the press that began to question it.

 

The plot point came in when Benicia Chinchay denounced that on Thursday, March 3^rd, police officers dabbled in her home while she accompanied their sons in Sullana: “They entered my home, forced my daughters-in-law to declare, they took my husband’s stuff, my sons’, some money we had kept,” she said to FACTORTIERRA. The police had not debunked, openly, such version.

 

Human Rights specialists sustain the detention process, and even the preventive imprisonment had irregularities and it was full of contradictions from the prosecuting part. They say that, against the preset in the law, the presumed authors of the assassination were not released when 24 hours of detention were over,that the jail was not justified because, as they are peasants –and in Edinson’s case, a community leader--, it was not a run-out danger due to their livelihood inside it.

 

And in Maza’s case, if it’s known that a fugitive must be immediately caught and his location was known, why didn’t it proceed about this particular on time? The last development was the atomic absortion test was positive for Maza and the Gonzas, but are they they the required legally levels to accuse them?

 

The clue

The police ignored key facts. Two months before the events in Suyo, a retired cop was murdered by gunshots near Tambograndé City while he was going to Piura City. He also transported mineral on a vehicle and he was intercepted by skimasked fellas.

 

An ecuadorian man who lived in Cachaco, Suyo Distric, was died under the same system some months before, and the assaults to miners transporting rock were usual but not solved. One of them with subsequent death (reported) was the farmer Franklin Culquiconddor, killed by knife in a village located 20 minutes away the place of the miners murder, apparently, awakening Monday, March 14^th.

 

Two martyrs

The last time a civil pretended to be a police officer in this type of cases was when Godofredo Garcia Baca was murdered on March 31^st, 2001. A skimasked man shot against the emblematic leader of Tambograndé Case and left him to die while he ran away Somattillo Hill in Somaté, Sullana District, Despite Ulíses Garcia, the leader’s son and top eyewitness of the crime presented a list of evidences that ended connecting to Melendez Zapata Atocha, the authorities didn’t move a finger until the case overflooded Peru’s boundaries.

 

Inclusive, the pólice slided the possibility that Ulíses could be the murderer. They also spoke about an atomic absortion test that was positive, but it was discovered that the levels were less than the required ones for accusing anybody. More by pressure than by a motivation to work, Zapata was condemned to prison but it was never known who ordered to kill Godofredo.

 

Ten years later, Zapata, Maza, and the Gonzas shared the same prison. It’s not the only common spot. The company that the murdered handmade miners worked for has a headquarter in Las Lomas, according to a paper by the Peruvian Society of Mining, Petroleum, and energy what FACTORTIERRA had access.

 

Two weeks before Garcia’s murder, two Las Lomas men  asked to speak with him pretending to be employees of Buenaventura Mining, that has interests in the region. The leader rejected them violently out of his then property that was occupied by interests linked to handmade mining.

 

Who are revenging?

The asasination of the miners in Suyo was pointed out by the defenders of that activity as a revenge act of who oppose to it. If that’s true, the justice should determine it. But the similitudes to Garcia Baca are, at least, intriguing. Maybe what solved in the long term the Garcia Case was its constant visibility and its closeness to Piura, what allowed a constant information flow despite that time’s Internet was very slow. In Arsecio’s scenario, we have far facts, complicated access, less visibility.

 

In that sense, as the Garcias were in Piura, ignoring them was difficult. But, as the Gonzas live further, hiding their claim was easy, and to avoid problems, they were accused and brought to Sullana where there is much access for the media.

 

Meanwhile, Benicia Chinchay was alone in Pueblo Nuevo. Her daughters-in-law accompanied her and the lawyer Quique Rodriguez sporadically, who worked practically free and amid mining aggressions. Some leaders of self-disarticulated San Lorenzo Valley& Tambograndé Defense Front were also expectant about them, and a human rights organization in Lima was granting legal support.

 

Aside them, the Gonza-Chinchay were alone, victims of the own system for what they tried to preserve spaces where the healthy life continue to be possible.

 

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