"Peruvian loggers given 28 years in jail for murder of four Indigenous leaders", 17 February 2023

...Five loggers in Peru have been given 28-year jail sentences for the murder of four Indigenous leaders, among them the prominent anti-logging campaigner Edwin Chota, in a rare win for environmental justice.

Nearly eight years after the 2014 quadruple murder, a court in Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon found the loggers, Eurico Mapes Gómez and the brothers Segundo and Josimar Atachi Félix, guilty of aggravated homicide against the leaders, and sentenced them on Thursday to 28 years and three months in prison.

The court imposed the same sentence against Hugo Soria Flores and José Estrada Huayta, the timber businessmen convicted of planning the murder – one of the most notorious crimes against environmental defenders in Peru’s recent history.

The judge said the victims – Chota, Leoncio Quintisima, Jorge Ríos and Francisco Piñedo – were tortured before they were killed near Peru’s Amazon border with Brazil.

Chota, the leader of Alto Tamaya-Saweto, an Ashéninka community in Peru’s Amazon Ucayali region, fought for his people’s right to gain titles to their land and expel illegal loggers who raided their forests on the Brazilian border...