The leader in the race to be mayor of Lima found not guilty of killing reporter during bloody conflict with Maoist guerrillas in 1980s

The leading candidate in the race to be mayor of Lima has been cleared of murdering a journalist 30 years ago after a four-year trial that opened up the scars of Peru’s long fight against the communist Shining Path guerrillas insurgency.

Daniel Urresti, a former army general who was facing 25 years in jail for planning the murder of Hugo Bustíos, is now free to continue his campaign to lead one of South America’s biggest cities. With two days to go before the vote on Sunday, the charismatic Urresti is leading the polls.

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Urresti, who denied the charges throughout the trial, tweeted: “The law has declared me innocent, it’s time to do the job of turning Lima into the city we deserve.”

Anti-Urresti demonstrators skirmished with riot police who tried to prevent them from clashing with supporters of the candidate whose tough-on-crime image has earned him fervent backing in the city’s poorer neighbourhoods.

Leading most opinion polls with around 15% of voter intention, Urresti’s charisma and crime crackdown message has pushed him just ahead in a crowded race against a former TV host whose blamed Venezuelan immigrants for the city’s woes, other former mayors and many non-entities.

Peru, particularly Lima, has one of the highest perceptions of crime in the Americas, polling just below Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, according to one survey . This despite having one of the lowest murder rates in the region with eight murders per 100,000 people in 2016, according to the World Bank.

In a rough-and-tumble career, Urresti served as Peru’s interior minister between 2014 and 2015 and ran for the presidency a year later. Throughout that time he courted notoriety for his social media attacks on politicians while brushing off accusations that police used excessive force against protesters.

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Shortly after he resigned as interior minister he was put on trial for the murder of Bustíos, a journalist who wrote for the Peruvian weekly magazine Caretas, in Ayacucho, a mountainous region at the centre of the political violence. Urresti was accused by two fellow officers from his military base, who had been convicted of the journalist’s murder in 2007. They claim Urresti, then a captain in charge of intelligence, took part in the ambush in which Bustíos was killed in November 1988.

Bustíos was shot at by a group of soldiers while riding a motorbike, forcing him to lose control and crash. His companion, another journalist who had been riding pillion, managed to escape. As Bustíos lay badly wounded, prosecutors say, soldiers detonated explosives on his body, killing him.

Prosecutors initially alleged Urresti was among a group of soldiers who shot at Bustíos. But then they said he had planned, but not participated in the killing.

Bustíos’ eldest daughter, Sharmeli, tweeted that the judges’ decision was “manipulated and without legitimacy” and said the family would appeal. “How cheap it is to kill a journalist in this country,” she shouted after the acquittal.

In 2003, a truth and reconciliation commission estimated that 69,280 people had been killed between 1980 and 2000 in Peru’s civil conflict. Most died at the hands of the Shining Path but atrocities were also committed by security forces.



