Rafael Castillo-Paez CASE
On October 21, 1990, a student of Sociology at the Catholic University of Lima, was arrested in the district of Villa El Salvador by police officers who descended from a police car at 11:30 am with many people from the neighborhood they were very close arrest, while walking down a street. Ernesto would visit the poor districts that surround Lima to do their internship in Sociology. Unfortunately that day Shining Path held a march in the district that led to the creation of a police operation to suppress in which several people were arrested, among them Ernesto that had nothing to do with that event.
From that time his family began a tireless search that lasts until today that government authorities are reluctant to admit his arrest and, therefore, refuse to reveal what happened to him and where his remains.
Ernesto's case was judicialized from the start, as his family appealed to all national and international institutions and courts in demand for live delivery of Ernesto, an effort that unfortunately became, as the official state response in a lengthy legal process to seek justice, without showing his remains, despite having been convicted of 4 police officers as responsible for arrest, after nearly 16 years of hard insistence on justice.
Part of this ongoing struggle of the family to find Ernesto, is condensed in the book written by his father Cromwell Castillo, titled "Where is Ernesto?".
The struggle to find the remains of Ernesto continues and is the responsibility of the Peruvian State to comply with this obligation not only moral but legal, as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the two judgments against the Peruvian government urged it to comply with this obligation.
