- Eleven years after the murders of four Indigenous leaders of the Alto Tamaya Saweto community, an appeals court ratified the sentences for four loggers.
- The judges upheld the initial sentence of 28 years and three months in prison for loggers José Estrada and Hugo Soria, as well as brothers Josimar and Segundo Atachi.
- Meanwhile, Eurico Mapes Gómez, accused by the Public Ministry of being a third material author of the murders, was not sentenced, having been a fugitive of justice since 2022, when the first trial took place.
- The defendants failed to attend the hearing, and an arrest warrant was issued for the four loggers.
After 11 years, the Alto Tamaya Saweto community has finally received confirmation of convictions in the 2014 murders of Indigenous Ashéninka leaders Edwin Chota, Jorge Ríos, Leoncio Quintanísima and Francisco Pinedo. The killings occurred along the Peru-Brazil border, where the leaders had been actively campaigning against illegal logging in their territory since 2008.
On Aug. 25, the appeals chamber of the Superior Court of Ucayali, the department where the killings occurred, ratified the ruling of the first trial, which sentenced timber contractors José Estrada and Hugo Soria, as well as two timber workers, brothers Josimar and Segundo Atachi, to 28 years and three months of prison.
“This is a historic ruling for Peru because it’s the first time the judiciary has recognized the work of Indigenous peoples in the defense of human rights and their relationship with nature,” Maritza Quispe, a constitutional lawyer of the Legal Defense Institute (IDL), told Mongabay Latam.
The loggers did not attend the sentencing hearing, which lasted approximately eight hours; therefore, the judiciary issued an immediate arrest warrant.
“We ask the police to arrest those sentenced. If they are not in prison, there is no justice,” said Ergilia Rengifo, Ríos’ widow, after learning of the decision of the bench composed of senior judges Robin Barreda, Jonatan Basagoitia, and Marco Santa Cruz.
A fifth defendant, Eurico Mapes Gómez, has been a fugitive of justice since 2022, when the first trial took place.
The sentencing hearing was attended by representatives of the U.N. human rights office, the ministry of culture and Amnesty International.
The supreme court judges also increased civil damages from a total of 200,000 soles ($57,000) for the four families to 400,000 soles ($114,000). That is, 100,000 soles ($28,500) in favor of each of the four widows.
“The sentence not only recognizes nonmaterial damage to the widows and children, but to all of the Indigenous Saweto community and to the Ashéninka people,” said Rocío Trujillo Solís, the widows’ lawyer.
The Saweto case
On Feb. 27, 2023, the judiciary issued an initial prison sentence of 28 years and three months for Soria and Estrada as the intellectual authors of the murders and to the Atachi brothers as material co-authors of the leaders’ killings. However, the sentence would only be enforceable after being confirmed at a second instance court hearing. The defendants pleaded innocent and rejected the charges.
“This meant they were free until the appeal was heard, and despite failure to comply with restrictive measures, no arrest warrant was issued. Now we hope they can be located to serve their sentences,” Trujillo Solís said.
The Alto Tamaya Saweto community is located in the Masisea district, in the Ucayali region of the central Peruvian Amazon, and adjoins the Kampa community on the Amônia River in Brazil. In 2008, Chota, the leader of the community at the time, registered his first complaint of illegal logging with the Forest and Wildlife Technical Administration of Pucallpa, which was overseen by what was then the National Institute of Natural Resources. The case was transferred to the Ucayali Environmental Prosecutor’s Office but was archived in 2010.
In 2011, a vessel of the company Eurosac — represented by Estrada, one of the defendants — was prohibited from disembarking in the Saweto community. At the time, the community was in constant conflict with loggers and registered complaints with the Executive Directorate for Forestry of Ucayali, under the administration of the Ucayali regional government.
A year before the murder of the four leaders from Saweto, in August 2013, Chota reported the same loggers to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and, on this occasion, complained about the failure of the Ucayali regional government to verify the presence of illegal logging. However, the case did not progress once again.
The leaders disappeared Aug. 31, 2014, when they left the community to travel to Brazil for a meeting with other Ashéninka leaders. They never reached their destination.
The leaders’ remains were found Sept. 6, 2014. Forensics determined they were killed by gunshots. Their bodies were also dismembered and incinerated.
Defense of the territory
“I can’t go back to my community. We receive death threats for demanding justice,” Rengifo told Mongabay Latam. “Although we now have a property title, illegal loggers are still in the territory and won’t let us go back.”
Rengifo left her community permanently in 2022. Today, 25 women and children live in Saweto.
“There were 20 families before the murders, but afterward, most of the men left because they received threats or because they didn’t have work. Those of us who continue to resist in the territory are women,” said Karen Shawiri López, the current leader of the community.
Shawiri López, 34, first became leader of the community in 2018, succeeding Rengifo, who had taken over the position after Chota’s murder.
The leader confirmed that illegal logging continues despite the community now having a property title, which it obtained in April 2015, following the assassination of their leaders. She said there is also illegal hunting and fishing.
“The monitoring committee carried out an intervention with the main promoter of illegal hunting, and we’ve managed to put a stop to this activity for now,” Shawiri López said.
The presence of outsiders is also increasing on the border between Peru and Brazil.
“We haven’t exactly seen the presence of drug traffickers in our community, but we have noticed more and more outsiders traveling through neighboring communities, and there isn’t any police control,” the leader said.
Other pending cases
The status hearing of the case of Quinto Inuma, an Indigenous leader killed in the Lower Huallaga in November 2023, was also held Aug. 25. The alleged motive of the homicide was the Kichwa’s opposition to drug trafficking. Similar to the Saweto case, the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu community lacked a property title and reported the invasion of their territory.
According to the 2024 coca crop monitoring report, illegal coca plantations have been present in Inuma’s community since 2021, the same year the leader registered a complaint about illegal logging with the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the San Martín region.
Because of these complaints, Inuma was threatened repeatedly and eventually killed, despite benefiting from protective measures under the Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders. In March 2024, four months after his murder, the judiciary sentenced three suspects in the case to 18 months of preventive detention.
“While progress has been made in these cases, another 30 assassinations of leaders defending their land remain unresolved. We trust that the sentence of the Saweto case will mark a turning point in access to justice for Indigenous peoples,” said Miguel Guimaraes, leader of the Ucayali Regional Organization of AIDESEP (ORAU), an organization representing Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.
For lawyer Maritza Quispe, of the IDL, access to justice for Indigenous peoples is complicated by structural problems, as there is no budget assigned to the Public Ministry for it to access Indigenous territories quickly.
“While having intercultural prosecutors [who deal with cases involving Indigenous communities] are a step forward, they don’t solve the problem. Prosecutors cannot access the areas being investigated because they neither have the resources to mobilize nor specialists in the provinces,” she said.
Indigenous leaders who spoke to Mongabay Latam agree that the sentence of the Saweto case grants them justice, but say that processes should be faster.
“There are another 36 cases of leaders yet to achieve justice. We hope the Saweto case can speed up investigations so that Indigenous peoples achieve justice; communities can’t wait over a decade for justice,” Jamer López, ORAU president, said after the sentencing hearing of the Saweto case.
Banner image: The second instance court sentencing in the Saweto case was held August 25 and lasted approximately eight hours. Image by Geraldine Santos.
This story was first published here in Spanish on August 26, 2025, on Mongabay Latam.
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