Trial & Execution

Seventeen months after seizing power in 1948, General Manuel Odria's government finally achieved its avowed aim of eliminating the top leadership of the outlawed Aprista party. The non-Stalinist group, once the most powerful in the country, draws its doctrine from Marx and its support from Peru's impoverished Indian agrarians. When APRA's founder Victor Raul Haya de la Torre sought refuge in the Colombian embassy a year ago last January, he left a triumvirate to direct the party. Last fortnight two of the three, Senator Cirilo Cornejo and Deputy Luis Felipe de las Casas, were condemned to prison terms by a military court. Next night, the third, scrappy, square-faced Luis Negreiros, who had managed to remain at large, was shot to death by police on a Lima street.

Cornejo and de las Casas were tried with 48 other civilians and 190 members of the navy for complicity in a naval revolt in Callao in October 1948. Cornejo got five years, de las Casas six. Of the remaining defendants, ten civilians were acquitted; the others got terms of from one year to life. Only one, a naval petty officer, was condemned to death.

Police Story. Most of the sentences, observers agreed, were mild enough. But the killing of Negreiros by the police was quite another matter.

The underground leader was driving along tree-lined Avenida 28 de Julio the night after the trial. At the corner of Avenida Dupetit-Thouars, the car stopped. At this point, according to the official communique, police, who had been tracking Negreiros for weeks, ordered him to put up his hands and surrender. He jumped out of the car and began firing in the darkness. The cops returned the fire.

Sixteen hours later, Negreiros' body, escorted by Lima's chief of police and a detachment of assault guards, was buried in the municipal cemetery.

Police Trap? Two days after Negreiros' death the Aprista underground distributed mimeographed sheets giving their own version of the story.* Negreiros, they said, had been lured to his death by a traitor. According to the Apristas, as soon as the man had identified Negreiros, the police came from ambush with guns blazing, and cut him down with 28 bullets.

Whatever the facts, many Peruvians would surely regard Negreiros as a martyr to his political faith. With only three months to go before national elections, Odria could boast that he had finally decapitated Aprismo. But it looked as if its ghost would haunt him for years to come.

*Aprista mimeographs have deeply annoyed the Junta; last month it decreed that all duplicating machines must be registered and licensed by the police.

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