(CNN Spanish) –– Peruvian court sentenced former presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos (as mediator) and Martín Rivas (as perpetrator) to 23 years in prison for qualified murder with the aggravating circumstance of treason for the murder of an army intelligence agent Mariella Barreto, which took place in 1997.
The Fourth Transitional Settlement Penal Chamber of the National Superior Court of Peru, presided over by Judge Miluska Cano, ruled that the sentences inflicted must be calculated starting from the year in which they are incarcerated. In the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, it must be counted from June 2001. Rivas, who was Fujimori’s closest adviser, is also serving a sentence after being tried and found guilty together with Montesinos for the massacres of La Cantuta and Barrios Altos, both registered in the early 90s.
Montesinos was the intelligence adviser to then-President Alberto Fujimori and remains in prison for a series of convictions for crimes of corruption and violation of human rights, committed in the years in which he was linked to the Peruvian executive, from 1990 to 2000.
At the time of his murder, Barreto was a partner of Rivas. His crime, according to the judicial investigation, was the product of an army counterintelligence plan to identify those who leaked classified information to the local press.
Barreto’s decapitated corpse was found in two plastic bags that same year on a highway north of Lima.
The court also handed down sentences to two other men linked to the Barreto case, with 15 years in prison for Carlos Sánchez Noriega for considering him an accessory to the murder and eight years for José Salinas as a secondary accomplice.
