The “Monster of Armendáriz” Case

A small boy lost in Barranco

The victim at the centre of this case was Julio Hidalgo, a boy of about three who lived in the Lima area in 1954. Peruvian outlets do not fully agree on his second surname: RPP gives it as Hidalgo Zavaleta, while Infobae writes Hidalgo Zavala. His body was discovered in early September 1954 in the Quebrada de Armendáriz, the ravine that separates the districts of Miraflores and Barranco. According to Infobae, two students came across him, and his father, Abraham, was among the people who went to the scene. The autopsy was carried out at Lima's central morgue on 8 September 1954.

How suspicion fell on Jorge Villanueva Torres

The police inquiry quickly turned toward Jorge Villanueva Torres, an Afro-Peruvian man of about 35 who was known in Barranco by the nickname "Negro Torpedo" and who had a record of petty theft and earlier spells in jail. A street vendor who sold sweets and nougat, named in the press as Ulderico or Uldarico Salazar, told investigators he had seen the child with a Black man. Officers detained several men who matched that loose description, and Salazar picked out Villanueva. LP Derecho notes that the location of the body, close to the shack where Villanueva lived, was the other main element pointing at him. According to RPP, police detained him six days after the boy was found.

A disputed confession

Infobae reports that after several days of questioning Villanueva confessed on 14 September 1954. He soon withdrew that statement, saying he had been pushed into incriminating himself, and from then on he denied the killing. His defence lawyer, Carlos Enrique Melgar, argued that the confession had been obtained with promises of a lighter punishment. Villanueva admitted to other, minor offences over the years but insisted that he had nothing to do with the boy's death. Contemporary newspapers covered the case intensely, and later accounts agree that the press and public opinion created enormous pressure for a conviction. A sexual assault allegation that had been part of the early accusations was dropped for lack of evidence, yet the "monster" label stuck.

Trial, death sentence and execution

The investigation was handled by Lima's Third Investigating Court, and the case passed to the Third Correctional Tribunal on 6 July 1955. The tribunal convicted Villanueva of abducting and killing the child and sentenced him to death under Decree Law 10976. The date of that verdict is reported as 8 October 1956 by LP Derecho and Infobae and as 7 October 1956 by RPP, while La República places the sentence in 1957. The Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in December 1957; LP Derecho dates that ruling to 11 December. A pardon request his lawyer sent to the Senate was never debated because the chamber lacked a quorum. Villanueva was executed by firing squad at the old Lima Penitentiary in the early hours of 12 December 1957, still declaring that he was innocent.

Doubts that grew after his death

Questions about the verdict began early and deepened over the following decades. The newspaper La Prensa reported that Salazar contradicted himself some 30 times, although LP Derecho cautions that this figure rests on second-hand accounts because the original case file is not publicly available. In 2004 Víctor Maúrtua, a forensic doctor and lawyer who had witnessed the execution, published a study arguing that the 1954 reading of the boy's injuries was mistaken and that he may have been struck by a vehicle and then fallen down the slope, meaning there may have been no murder at all. In May 2017 the president of Peru's judiciary, Duberlí Rodríguez, said the institution would consider a posthumous acquittal and told RPP that there was a great deal of evidence the conviction had been unjust. Lawyers consulted by RPP explained that the route would be a rehabilitation claim brought by a descendant or a prosecutor before the Supreme Court, and one of them, Carlos Caro Coria, doubted it could succeed so long after the facts. As of Infobae's April 2022 report, no posthumous acquittal had been granted, and none of the sources consulted for this file records a formal rehabilitation since then. A 2024 La República feature still describes Villanueva as a man condemned for a crime he did not commit.

Why the case still matters in Peru

The Armendáriz case has become a fixture of Peruvian debate about wrongful convictions, the reliability of eyewitness identification and confessions, and the influence of sensational journalism on courts. Commentators repeatedly point to the role that racial prejudice played in focusing suspicion on a poor Black man. The story was retold in Francisco Lombardi's 1977 film Muerte al amanecer, and in 2017 Alfredo Bullard returned to it in an El Comercio column titled Rehabilitado. The case also sits within Peru's long argument over capital punishment: according to RPP, the death penalty was first abolished in 1856, reintroduced under the 1933 Constitution and removed again in 1979. For many Peruvians, Villanueva's fate remains the clearest example of why an irreversible punishment is so dangerous when the evidence behind it is weak.