Vanesa Escobar is a JURIST correspondent in Peru and a law graduate of Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco.
On December 10, Peru suffered yet another murder. This time, however, the case was directly related to the parliament, reflecting the amount of power it possesses, and its close relations with criminality.
The murder victims were José Daniel Vargas Briceño and Andrea Vidal. Briceño was driving Vidal through te Lima district of La Victoria when suddenly their vehicle was attacked by a group of people, who ended the lives of these two in a hail of 62 bullets.
After Andrea died, an investigation conducted by the Peruvian investigative journalism program “Beto a saber” revealed that Andrea was the main target of the attack due to the important role she used to play in the parliament as a pimp dedicated to contacting women to provide sexual services there.
Theoretically, Andrea was hired in the Legal Office of the parliament, led by Jorge Torres Saravia. It’s important to know that, previously, Torres Saravia was accused by Rosita Navarro Rivera, a government worker in La Liberta region, of sexual harassment. This came as Torres Saravia was close to Alianza para el Pogreso (APP), a Peruvian political party led by Cesar Acuña. According to Rivera, Jorge Torres drugged her before carrying out the assault. There’s an audio where we can hear Jorge Torres trying to negotiate with Rosita’s boyfriend, saying that he would compensate for the event, and, as unbelievable as it sounds, insisting that alcohol makes people act stupidly.
Despite this serious accusation, Jorge Torres maintained his position in the parliament, being promoted to head of the Legal Office, a responsibility that presumably gave him the power to hire lots of women as “advisers.” In fact, their only charge was providing sexual services to parliamentarians.
This version was confirmed by one of the women, who not only stated that sexual services were provided in exchange for votes in the parliament, but also that they were provided to former president Alejandro Soto. Additionally, Peruvian police discovered important information in Andrea’s phonebook related to Alianza Para el Progreso. In the information advanced by the police, we can read names such as “Joaquín APP”, “Juan APP”, “Marc APP”, “Sean APP”, “Diego APP”, “Cristobal APP” and “Santiago APP,” in addition to people who used to contact Andrea using foreign telephone numbers.
The most convincing theory points to the people inside parliament as responsible for Andrea’s death, supported by the fact that Andrea was fired just one week before this event. If this is true, we are now in a scenario where we have evidence of a criminal network operating inside the Parliament, with the power to silence people who possess crucial information.
Obviously, parliamentarians involved in this terrible event have denied everything. The members of the commission in charge of the investigation have said that “there is no relevant information to continue”, and if this was not enough, recently the Parliament posted a release affirming Andrea was just another victim of criminality, and that she was not the main victim of the attack on her car, forgetting that there’s still an investigation lead by Prosecutor’s Office.
All this is happening while another parliamentarian, Jose Jerí, faces another accusation of sexual harassment by one of his workers.
What is even more abhorrent is that the only measure taken by Congress after this information has come to light was to ban miniskirts and shorts for women, thereby disregarding the grave allegations against Congress members and shamelessly shifting the blame for sexual assaults to the victims themselves, even though the victims may be their own coworkers. We hope they will not become statistics anytime soon.
