"Legal Impunity for Loggers Behind the Brutal Murders of Four Indigenous Earth Defenders in Saweto", 05 October 2023

...On August 29, the Criminal Court of Appeals of Ucayali annulled the 28-year prison sentences that had been handed down in February against two logging businessmen who were found guilty of masterminding the murder of four Indigenous leaders on the Peru-Brazil border in 2014. The judges argued a lack of evidence and procedural errors in the initial decision, which took seven years of legal battles to achieve, and sent the case back to the beginning.

The Asháninka leaders Edwin Chota, Jorge Ríos, Leoncio Quintisima, and Francisco Pinedo were killed for defending their territories and rainforest from illegal logging, an illicit activity that threatens Indigenous peoples’ lives and culture. Even though they repeatedly denounced the death threats they received from clandestine logging mafias, the Peruvian government failed to provide the necessary protection...

The court’s decision is a strong affront to justice, memory, and the dignity of the victims and their families, who now face yet another chapter of legal strife and uncertainty.

Organizations that accompany cases of Indigenous defenders are concerned that the Saweto case demonstrates that the Public Ministry and the judiciary “in recent years have acted with bias, delays and lack of effectiveness in cases of Indigenous defenders, applying discretionary and disproportionate criteria to convict them for minor crimes, while in processes involving material and intellectual authors of attacks against the lives of these defenders, delays, and irregularities have been reported, despite the fact that the alleged perpetrators maintain links with illegal activities such as drug trafficking, mining, land trafficking, or illegal logging.”

Unfortunately, the trend that must be reversed shows how criminalization and impunity are the two faces of the judicial treatment of Indigenous defenders in the Amazon...