Thirty years after the crime which ended Melissa Alfaro’s life, the Peruvian Justice’s system was unable to punish those responsible. An amnesty, an archive, and an expedient lost later on, the case waits for a reschedule to an oral trial.
What were you doing when Melissa’s thing happened? A question which only were the family members of Melissa Alfaro Mendez were able to make themselves, 20 years after the tragic success which marked their lives forever. Melissa’s thing, without suggesting it, it has muted them, as if the explosion of her body and dreams had submerged them into silence. Also, until now, the formulation of the question, this is made amongst them in distrust, and a way of keeping to themselves. And what happened to Melissa has no name. It can’t be described, or be told, without the need to refer to the violence used to finish the journalist’s life.
It is October 10th of 1991 afternoon, when an explosion thunders the drafting area from the Cambio Magazine, in Lima, destroying everything meters around the block. Reporters and collaborators from the establishment, still stunned, try to check the origin of what happened, without an answer. In return, they found Melissa Alfaro dead, the young and talented journalism’s student which, at her 23 years old, served as the chief of Information. Everything was confusion. But, what had happened? What originated the explosion in the interior of the drafting area, and how an explosive could have gotten there? The answer will only be given by a small recreation of the events.
Explosive envelope
On 1991, a little more than a year in the power, the government of Alberto Fujimori started to show a radical change in political antiterrorist. Delegating in the Special Forces the control of red zones from the country, where files of Sendero Luminoso operated – the terrorist group ravished, until then, cities from the Peruvian Andes- , it was the main sign of the political decision to confront. And with the strategic change, countless complaints of abuse of power and crimes against the population, got to the capital, not only by Sendero Luminoso, but also from the Peruvian Army as an executor. Any dissonant voice to that policy, or amplification of the complaints, began to be silenced. One of those was from Cambio Magazine, a publication from a ultra-leftism, enough to be related to terrorist purposes.
At the time lawyers and congressmen of the Republic began to receive dangerous mails. Wrappers like envelopes, charged with explosive material, which detonated as soon as it was opened. These being artifacts, handmade fabricated, which began to be sent to Lima in that year, causing to the recipients mutilations or their death. One of those explosive envelopes, as how the press named them, was the one which arrived on October 10th to the drafting area of Cambio magazine. The recipient, showed on the label of the mail, was Carlos Arroyo, director of the journalistic publication. That day was Melissa Alfaro the one in charge to receive the package in the reception’s office. Opening the package, as it was one of her usual duties, it will end up taking her life, in a second.
A report given by the UDEX, the Police’s Explosives Unit, immediately after the event, determined to identify of the sender of the criminal mail. The experts determined that the explosives were composed by a mix of ammonium nitrate and petroleum fuel. In a country where an only handler of a complex explosive: the Peruvian Army.
Detonating the solar system
“She was like a generation bridge for us, that was her role in the family”, says Igor Alfaro, the journalist’s brother. The Alfaro Mendez were five, everyone with a great age difference, and being Melissa the middle sister, the family recognized in her the center, the hinge which joined interests, the affection and the duties from the oldest with the youngest. When Melissa’s thing happened, Igor was 13 years old, but as of the nucleus of the family, it took them time to process what had happened. It was him, unintentionally, who had to push a conversation to the interior of the family about the event, thanks to an assignment from college. As a final documentary photography project, he proposed to tell and photograph his sister’s case.
“We never had opened her purse. There was such a way to evade the topic, we never dared to even do that”, says Igor, which as part of his documentary, he photographs his sister’s belongings, amongst them the purse which Melissa used the day of the attack.
Iris Alfaro went to the district attorneys, media and congressmen of the Republic’s offices in search of justice for her sister’s case. But everyone heard nothing in light of a government which had been surrounding everything. She assumed the leadership in the family to complain about the case, right outside the house, because inside of it, for some reason, it was a topic which for many years was evaded. “We’ve been slightly drawing out information about the event: where were we, how did we find out. We’ve been chatting, but it still a really hard topic to talk about”, says Iris, who is an active protester in every manifestation of the dead and disappearance during the government of Alberto Fujimori. When that regimen fell, it was one thing she felt: relief.
In 2001, Fujimori’s the resignation to the presidency, after 10 years in power, marked the Alfaro Mendez family a new era, of hope. Around that year, a new member of the family sums up to the fight on Melissa’s case: her mother. Norma Mendez had gone through a long process of depression as the product of her daughter’s death, and it was almost impossible enunciate what had happened. Even though, seen the country’s new political panorama, she decides to take on her own the call for an investigation process, an active and fair, to find the responsible of the crime.
As if it was the very least to lose a family member like that, the Alfaro Mendez were subjected, the following years after the attack against Melissa, to a political fear. Norma Mendez narrated to this report, how army agents, armed, walked through and guarded in front of their house; they received calls where nobody on the other side answered back; or in the early morning they would knock on their door with the only intention to disturb them, to make them feel they were being watched. A fear which had taken Norma, for example, to Igor around those years to report himself every two hours, or to not get far from four blocks from their home whenever he wanted to play with his friends.
“My sister was the center of the solar system, and we were like the planets. And when that center bursts, literally, we went out of orbit. That was the feeling for many years. After a long time we are returning to our orbit”, illustrates Melissa’s youngest brother, on how her loss meant for them.
Amnesty, archive and lost record
From the Human Pro Rights Association (APRODECH), the lawyer Gloria Canto took the case in 2003, becoming the main ally of the family in search of justice for Melissa. Sixteen years later, after gathering testimonies, new proceedings, and expertise processes, the Public Ministry achieves to formalize the accusation against the mediate and immediate responsible of the crime. We find ourselves already in 2019, just a step to start the oral trial on which the ex-president Alberto Fujimori; his intelligence ex-adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos; the Army’s General, Julio Salazar Monroe; and the military intelligence’s agent, Victor Penas, are about to be seated on the bench of the accused, when the pandemic does its thing: sending a undetermined pause at the beginning of the trial. It was not easy to get this far.
The first complaint for Melissa’s murder was made by Carlos Arroyo, the director from the Cambio magazine, in 1991. Since then, begins an attorney’s investigation, a slow and little active, which did not obtain further information due to the lack of support from the Army with the case. On the very peak of his power, the government neither was interested on the truth to be known. That’s how the Public Ministry’s investigations went, stumbling, when on April 5th of 1992, the “self-coup” of State from Alberto Fujimori which dissolved the Republic’s Congress, shortening the citizens warranties. During these days, arrests and multiple interventions were made on the edge of the law. One of them were the Cambio magazine, disappearing documentation and evidence which helped the attorneys.
Nobody since then seemed to be interested in the case. In the Public Ministry barely made the effort to maintain active. The archive from the expedient would arrive in 1997, after a new attack from the Alberto Fujimori’s government against the state of right. From the Republic’s Congress, where he had a broaden majority, a law of amnesty is approved in favor of the military and policemen processed for cases of human rights. The legal effect is immediate: any kind of archive from that nature. It is since that moment, the case rests without the possibility to be reopened. Not until Fujimori’s fall.
The reopening of serious state crimes, such as The Cantuta, on which it was kidnapped and murdered nine students and an university teacher; or Barrios Altos, where a dozen of merchants were wiped out during a party, both cases are on the loop of terrorism, opening a trail which will allow to feed other “minor” cases with information. From these records, it was known that the Army described, in an Operations Manual, about the explosive envelopes as a mean to intimidation and sabotage.
From the checking of this information, like the administrative piles of papers, where the Military Institution detailed the operations on which each agent participated, it allowed to identify a presumed executor on the Melissa Alfaro’s attack: Victor Penas, a retired captain who, for the attorneys, manufactured and sent the explosive artifacts. He barely got preventive prison for 3 years, with expired without finding a real sentence. He now enjoys his liberty. Like him, the trial Fujimori awaits, Montesinos and Salazar as presumed as mediate authors, people whom below orders, or in compliances, acted in the edge of the law.
Igor, Iris, Norma, and all the members of the family Alfaro Mendez awaits, on which finally, the Justice Court will begin an oral trial which allows exposing evidence found against those presumed to be implicated in the case. Maybe, after finding justice, someday, they might talk about what happened to Melissa.
