Early on the morning of December 15, Leonardo David Hancco Chacca, a 32-year-old heavy machinery operator, left his home in the Andean town of Ayacucho. He was heading out to take part in the wave of protests rocking Peru’s impoverished and heavily Indigenous south.
That afternoon, his wife, Ruth Bárcena Loayza saw on social media that her husband had been shot.
Bárcena Loayza, who was pregnant at the time, ran to the hospital in search of her husband, bullets whizzing over her head. She found him there with severe internal injuries from gunshot wounds.
The next day, an ambulance took him and two other injured people to the nearby airport, where medical staff asked military officials to fly them on a small military plane to a hospital in the capital, Lima. A military officer told them to get lost.
“Terrorists deserve to die like that,” he said.
The ambulance took the wounded back to the hospital, and Hancco Chacca died in the early hours of December 17.
He was not the only one.
Some 49 people died at the hands of Peru’s security forces as they responded to the recent wave of mass protests with extreme force against both demonstrators and bystanders. More than 1,000 people were injured.
The vast majority of fatalities were, as with Hancco Chacca, due to gunshot wounds from assault rifles and handguns. These deaths are likely to be what human rights experts label “extrajudicial killings,” that is, the deliberate killings of individuals outside any legal framework.
It’s what you and I might simply call, murders by agents of the state.
That things have sunk to this level in Peru is shocking, but it’s not surprising.
These abuses come after years of erosion of democratic institutions and the rule of law in Peru. They also happened in the context of long-term inequality and marginalization of rural and Indigenous communities – who were often those at the forefront of protests.
What needs to happen now is clear: justice.
We’re calling on prosecutors to conduct prompt and impartial investigations into the deaths and all other serious human rights violations. They should aim for the highest levels of responsibility possible: not just security force commanders but the presidency and cabinet members, as well.
Hancco Chacca’s family, and all the families, deserve nothing less.
“My husband loved life,” Ruth Bárcena Loayza says. “He was full of life. He did not deserve to die. They took away my daughter’s right to have a father.”