The Barrios Altos Massacre

A neighbourhood fundraiser in central Lima

On the night of 3 November 1991, residents of an old tenement building at Jirón Huanta 840, in the Barrios Altos district of central Lima, were holding a pollada, a common Peruvian fundraiser where food is sold to raise money, in this case to pay for repairs to the building. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights later recorded the names of the fifteen people killed that night, among them Placentina Chumbipuma Aguirre, Nelly María Rubina Arquiñigo, Benedicta Yanque Churo and members of the León and Ríos families. The youngest victim was eight-year-old Javier Manuel Ríos Rojas. Four other people were seriously hurt, and one survivor, Tomás Livias Ortega, was left permanently disabled.

The attack

At about 10:30 p.m., six armed men with their faces covered arrived in two vehicles fitted with police lights and sirens, which they switched off as they pulled up. They then opened fire on the people at the party. The attackers wrongly believed the gathering was linked to the Shining Path insurgency, and in the immediate aftermath officials attributed the killings to rebel groups. Those accusations against the victims were false: the people at the party were neighbours raising money for their building.

The Colina Group and the amnesty laws

Investigations eventually traced the massacre to the Colina Group, a covert detachment of army intelligence led in this operation by Major Santiago Martín Rivas. Instead of a prosecution, the response of the state in 1995 was impunity. In June of that year Congress passed Law 26479, an amnesty for members of the security forces accused of human rights violations. A Lima judge, Antonia Saquicuray, ruled on 16 June 1995 that the amnesty could not be applied to the pending Barrios Altos case, but Congress answered with a second law, 26492, intended to stop judges from reviewing the first, and a higher court reversed her decision in July 1995.

The Inter-American Court ruling

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took the case to the Inter-American Court, which received it in June 2000. Peru formally accepted international responsibility in February 2001. In its judgment of 14 March 2001, the Court held that the two amnesty laws were incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights and lacked legal effect, ordered Peru to investigate, identify and punish those responsible, and set out a process for reparations.

Convictions, a pardon and Fujimori's death

With the amnesties set aside, cases reopened in Peru. In 2009 a special criminal court convicted former president Alberto Fujimori as the indirect perpetrator of the Barrios Altos killings and the 1992 La Cantuta murders, both carried out by Colina agents, and sentenced him to 25 years; the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2010. RPP reports that by 2013 the convictions of Colina members including Martín Rivas, of Fujimori's adviser Vladimiro Montesinos and of several army generals had become final. In 2017 President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pardoned Fujimori, prompting protests; the pardon was annulled, then reinstated by the Constitutional Tribunal, and Fujimori left prison on 6 December 2023 after about 16 years. He died of cancer on 11 September 2024, aged 86.

New laws and a renewed clash with the Inter-American system

The case returned to the centre of Peruvian politics in 2024 and 2025. Law 32107, published on 9 August 2024, bars the prosecution of crimes against humanity committed before 1 July 2002. Peru's Board of Supreme Prosecutors had called the measure legally unviable, United Nations rights chief Volker Türk said he deeply regretted it, and a day before publication the Inter-American Court reminded Peru of its duty to guarantee justice for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta victims. In August 2025 President Dina Boluarte signed a further amnesty covering soldiers, police and self-defence militia members investigated or prosecuted for acts committed between 1980 and 2000, and extending release to those already convicted who are 70 or older. The court's president, Nancy Hernández López, asked Peru to halt it and called a hearing for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta victims; BBC Mundo reported that Martín Rivas was among those who could benefit.

Why Barrios Altos matters

For Peru, Barrios Altos is the case that dismantled the 1995 amnesties and made it possible to put a former head of state on trial for human rights crimes in his own country. Thirty years on, the victims' families, represented by lawyers including Carlos Rivera of the Instituto de Defensa Legal, were still fighting to keep those gains. The recent statute-of-limitations and amnesty laws show that the legal fight the case began in 1995 has not ended.