REPORT Nº 55/98 CASE 11.768 PEDRO HUILCA TECSE PERU September 25, 1998 I. SUMMARY 1. On May 13, 1997, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter "the Commission") received a complaint against the Republic of Peru (hereinafter "Peru," "the State," or "the Peruvian State") 1 for violating the right to life of Pedro Huilca Tecse (hereinafter "the victim"). II. EVENTS 2. The petitioner informed the Commission that on December 18, 1992 at 8:00 a.m., Pedro Huilca Tecse, Secretary General of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), was killed at Avenida Las Palmeras No. 4391, Urbanización Carlos Cueto Fernandini, in the Los Olivos district of Lima. This act was attributed to a commando group of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). Some members of that group were captured and convicted. 3. On April 14, 1997, Retired General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza showed the press a letter dated April 22, 1994 in which a former agent of the army intelligence service (SIE), Mesmer Carles Talledo, who was convicted to life imprisonment for treason, attributes the murder of Pedro Huilca to members of the Colina Paramilitary Group and names the following persons as responsible: Major Santiago Martín Rivas, and specialists Juan José Sosa Saavedra, Yarleque, Pedro Pretell (deceased), and Nelson Caravajal García, as well as several female noncommissioned army officers. Another letter by the same man confirms the foregoing information and states that the political motive was Huilca's demonstrations in favor of nationwide strikes in 1993. 4. On May 23, 1997, Martha Flórez Gutiérrez, Pedro Huilca Tecse's widow, filed criminal charges with the Office of the Attorney General against members of the Colina Group, citing former agents Mesmer Carles Talledo and Clemente Alayo as witnesses. III. PROCESSING BYTHE COMMISSION 5. The Commission opened case No. 11,768 on July 3, 1997 and transmitted the pertinent parts of the complaint to the Peruvian State, through a note on that date, giving the State 90 days to respond. On August 8, 1997, the petitioner requested to be heard by the Commission at one of its regular sessions to present an oral report on the arguments in the petition. The Commission set the hearing for October 9th of that year at 10:00 a.m., however the party in question requested that the presentation be postponed until the next regular session. The State did not respond to the observations until October 24, 1997 and requested that the Commission declare the case inadmissible. The State used two arguments; the first was regarding the failure to exhaust domestic remedies, since the petitioner had not gone before the members of the Supreme Court or the Office of the Attorney General. The second was regarding the lapse of the time limit for lodging a complaint, on the grounds that the date of submittal exceeded six months, from the date of the offense or of the final sentencing. This information was transmitted to the petitioner on October 24, 1997, giving that party 30 days to make observations. The Commission Secretariat received those observations on December 9, 1997, along with a video containing Carles Talledo's version of the events, accusing members of the Colina Group, including General Juan Rivero Lozano, former Director of Army Intelligence, of killing Huilca Tecse. In the response, the petitioner reiterated that domestic remedies had been exhausted through a variety of bodies that declared the final sentencing enforceable and that the complaint had been presented to the Commission on time, i.e. within 1 The petitioner also directed the complaint at members of the Colina Paramilitary Group in Peru (hereinafter "the Paramilitary Group," "government paramilitary agents," or "the Colina Group"). However, the Commission is only competent to hear human rights violations for which the State is responsible, because state employees or officials were perpetrators of or participants in the violation. Therefore, the case names the Peruvian State. 1