The victims of the attack were transferred to Nauta, where Luisa Cánepa and “Freckle” received the medical attention they required, both showing a great deal of spirit and liveliness despite their injuries. The victims’ first statements about the terrible experience they had just lived through were taken on the spot. Due to judicial proceedings, the corpse of the unfortunate Olga Arellano Rosaura could only be brought to Iquitos on the 4th, by air, in the hydroplane Delilah. Still only a Mr. at that time, Capt. Pantaleón Pantoja had himself transferred to Nauta in order to accompany the remains and make the preliminary investigation. The rest of the specialists returned to Iquitos by water, on the Eve, which had not sustained major damages during the assault, while the seven arrested men were held in Nauta for two more days and subjected to exhaustive interrogation by the authorities. Yesterday, under a heavy escort, they arrived in Iquitos on a PAF hydroplane and they are currently in the cells of the central jail on Sergeant Lores Street, where, without doubt, they will remain for some time on account of their despicable conduct.
Troubled and Scandalous Life
of Dead Specialist
She was born on April 17, 1936, in the then remote village of Nanay—the highway that joins the resort to Iquitos was not yet in existence—the daughter of Hermenegilda Arellano Rosaura and an unknown father. She was baptized May 8 of the same year in the church of Punchana with the name of Olga and her mother’s two surnames. According to what people in the district who remember her say, the latter took on various jobs, such as cleaning woman at the Punchana Naval Base and at bars and restaurants in the area. She was fired from these jobs because of her taste for alcohol, which at its worst, they say, made familiar the sight of the staggering figure of “Chug-a-lug Hermes,” as they nicknamed her, passing through the neighborhood in the midst of people’s laughter, followed by her very young daughter, Olguita. When the child was nine or ten, a little bit of good fortune came her way. “Chug-a-lug Hermes” disappeared from Nanay, abandoning the unprotected little girl, who was charitably taken by the Seventh-Day Adventists into their little orphanage on the corner of Samanez Ocampo and Napo, where currently only the church stands. In said situation, the poor girl, who until then had been raised in filth and ignorance, like a mongrel, received her first lessons, learned to read, write and count, and led a modest but healthy and decent life, ruled by the severe moral precepts of that church. (“Those precepts can’t be as sound as they make them out to be, judging by the dame’s service file,” commented one of our editors, with his characteristic severeness. A Catholic priest who was connected with the Army until last year, he is famous for the constant ironies of his sermons against the numerous Protestant churches housed in Iquitos and has asked us not to reveal his name.)
Drama of Young Missionary
“I remember her very well,” the Adventist pastor, Rev. Abraham MacPherson, who directed the orphanage during the years in which the young Olga Arellano Rosaura stayed there has told us. “She was a happy little brown-haired girl with a quick mind and a lively spirit, who obediently followed the preachings of her guardians and teachers and from whom we expected many good things. Undoubtedly, what made her go astray was her great physical beauty, which nature endowed her with from adolescence. But then let us pray for her and take inspiration from her case to mend our own lives, instead of remembering the sad, bitter things that do no one any good and lead nowhere.” Rev. MacPherson refers, in veiled terms, to an event that at the time caused a great deal of commotion in Iquitos: the sensational flight from the Seventh-Day Adventists’ orphanage of the beautiful thirteen-year-old who at that time was Olguita Arellano Rosaura with one of her tutors, the young Adventist minister Richard Jay Pierce, Jr., who in those days had recently come to Iquitos from his distant land, the United States, to take up arms in his first missionary battles here. The episode ended tragically, as many readers of El Oriente will remember, since it was to this newspaper—already the most prestigious in Iquitos—that the tormented missionary, desperate with remorse for having succumbed to Olguita’s adolescent beauty, sent his letter asking for forgiveness in the eyes of the Loreto public before putting an end to his days by hanging himself from a palm tree on the outskirts of the village of San Juan. (El Oriente published the complete text of his letter, in its half-English, half-Spanish, on September 20, 1949.)
Toboggan of Prostitution
After this precocious and unfortunate romantic adventure, Olga Arellano Rosaura began to slide down the slope of evil habits and a loose life, to which she was unquestionably impelled by her physical beauty and her great kindness. Thus, from that time on, it was common to make out her beautiful silhouette in the night spots of Iquitos, such as the Mau Mau, The Jungle, and that now defunct den of iniquity The Flower Garden, which authorities had to close because they discovered that the above-mentioned bar, living up to its name, was a brothel where, from 4 to 7 P.M., girls from the secondary schools in Iquitos were losing their virtue. Its owner, the almost mythical Humberto Sipa (a.k.a. “Snotnose”), who spent several months in jail, has since made a successful career in that field of endeavor, as everyone knows. It would take a very long time, of course, to trace the romantic itinerary of the attractive Olguita Arellano Rosaura, to whom in those years gossip and idle talk attributed countless protectors and powerful friends, many of them married, with whom the girl did not hesitate to show herself in public. One of those unverifiable rumors asserts that Olguita was discreetly expelled from Iquitos at the end of 1952 by the then departmental prefect, Miguel Torres Salamino, because of the passionate love affair between the dissolute Olguita and the prefect’s son, engineering student Miguelito Torres Saavedra, whose death in the murky waters of Quistococha Lagoon was considered a suicide by many on account of the repeated signs of desolation that the young man exhibited after his sweetheart’s departure, although his family energetically denied that rumor. In any case, the restless Olguita left for the Brazilian city of Manaos, and the only thing that has been learned about the years she stayed there was that instead of correcting her conduct, she worsened it, devoting herself to a bad life in plain daylight, since she began to practice fully, in obvious places—bordellos and brothels—the age-old profession of prostitution.
Return to Homeland
Accustomed to those indecent occupations and more beautiful than ever, Olga Arellano Rosaura—to whom Loreto inventively gave the pseudonym the “Brazilian”—returned after a couple of years to her native Iquitos. Through the famous ensnarer of women in that area, Chino Porfirio, from the district of Bethlehem, she almost immediately entered the Special Service, that institution which transports women of evil ways to the frontier garrisons as if they were so many head of cattle or basic commodities. But, a little earlier, the incorrigible Olguita was the protagonist in another noisy scandal when she was taken by surprise in the last row of the Bolognesi movie house during the evening show, immorally touching and performing immodest acts with a police lieutenant, who was thereupon transferred from Loreto. There even was—our readers will remember—an attempt at aggression on the part of the officer’s wife, who assaulted the “Brazilian” during a Thursday concert, the two women exchanging blows and insults on the lawn of the Army Plaza.
Thanks to her physical attributes, Olga Arellano Rosaura would soon be transformed into the star specialist of the infamous area on the Itaya River and into the favorite friend of the establishment’s administrator and director, who, up until yesterday, we ingenuously believed to be an ordinary citizen, Mr. Pantaleón Pantoja, and who turned out to be, to the perplexity and confusion of many, nothing less than a captain in our Army. The close and intimate relationship that existed between the attractive dead woman and Mr. (excuse us) Capt. on active duty Pantoja is a secret to no one in this city: it was not rare to see this couple strolling lovey-dovey across the Plaza of 28 July or furiously embracing at sunset on the Tarapacá Embankment. An unwilling sower of tragedies, Olguita Arellano Rosaura, the seductive “Brazilian,�
�� was, sadly, the reason for the departure from Iquitos of Capt. Pantoja’s neglected wife in a deeply felt family drama that was revealed by a colleague of ours, a famous radio commentator in this city.
Tragic End
And so we come to the denouement of this life that at dusk on the second day of 1959 in the Cacique Cocama Bend, while still in full bloom, met its premature and shocking end, occasioned by traitorous shots which, perhaps bewitched by her beauty, like so many men, preferred her in their lethal path to the worthless trash of a few degenerates or fanatics. Coming to the infamous spot on the Itaya River where the Modus Vivendi Funeral Home had installed a first-class catafalque surrounded by candelabra, the many people who attended the wake for Olga Arellano Rosaura approached the coffin and admired through the transparent glass, shining intact under the funeral candles, the dark beauty of the Brazilian!
Exclusive Extra of El Oriente
Epistle to the Good Concerning the Wicked
from Brother Francisco
* * *
As an “exclusive extra” we publish below a text that reached our editorial offices last night and was written in his own hand by the very renowned Brother Francisco, prophet and high priest of the Brotherhood of the Ark, who is being hunted by the police of four countries as the mastermind behind the crucifixions that for some time now have been soaking our beloved Amazon region in blood. El Oriente is in the position to guarantee the authenticity of this sensational document.
* * *
In the name of the Father, the Holy Ghost and the SON WHO DIED ON THE CROSS and with the permission and inspiration of the heavenly voices that await the GOOD PEOPLE, I direct myself to the public opinion of all Peru and the world in order to disprove and deny as wicked, slanderous and lacking in any truth the accusations of the WICKED PEOPLE who attempt to marry the SISTERS AND BROTHERS OF THE ARK to the violation, death and subsequent CRUCIFIXION of Miss Olga Arellano Rosaura, which sadly occurred in the Cacique Cocama Bend on the outskirts of Nauta. From my remote refuge where I bear the CROSS that the Lord in his generous and infinite wisdom has chosen as my destiny, and keeping myself far from the impious hands that cannot and will never be able to capture me or remove me from the believing, holy, GOOD people of the Sisters and the Brothers, united in divine copulation by their love for God and their hatred for wickedness, I raise my hand and, moving it powerfully from left to right and from right to left, I say, joining the shout to the gesture, NO! It is not true that the Sisters and Brothers of the Ark—whose objective is to do GOOD and to prepare themselves for rising into heaven when the Father, the Holy Ghost and the SON WHO DIED ON THE CROSS decide that this world full of EVIL and impiety should be ended in fire and water as is foretold in the GOOD book of the Bible, which will happen very soon because that is what the voices I listen to tell me, and they do not proceed from this world—have had anything to do with the crime that the WICKED committed and want to attribute to us in order to divert their guilt and make thicker and sharper our nails and rougher the WOOD of our CROSSES. None of those accused of the death of Miss Arellano has ever belonged to our BROTHERHOOD of GOOD people, neither has any of them ever attended a single one of our meetings—either in the capacity of plain spectator or in that of curiosity-seeker—which the ARKS have celebrated in the region where they have lived, that is, those in Nauta, Bagazán and Requena, as the GOOD Apostles of those Arks have confirmed for me. Not one of the accused was ever seen at the meetings celebrated to offer praise to the Father, the Holy Ghost and the SON WHO DIED ON THE CROSS and to ask them for their forgiveness for their sins in order to have a cleansed soul when the FINAL MOMENT arrives. The Sisters, the Brothers, do not kill, do not rape, do not assault, do not steal and only hate the violence of the WICKED, as heaven has taught them through my lips. It will never be possible to throw in our faces even one act contrary to GOOD and it is not true that we preach crime, as is imputed to us by those who pursue us and force us to hide and to live like vicious animals in the depths of the jungles. But we pardon them because they are simple, obedient slaves in the hands of Heaven, which uses them as CROSSES that will earn for us the immortality of eternal glory. And as for our poor Olga Arellano, although she had not yet heard the word, we will henceforth incorporate her into our prayers and henceforth remember her along with our martyrs and saints who watch us, listen to us, speak to us, protect us and deservedly enjoy celestial peace up above, next to the Father, the Holy Ghost and the SON WHO DIED ON THE CROSS.
BROTHER FRANCISCO
ED. NOTE: As a matter of fact, during the burial, prayer cards with the image of Olga Arellano Rosaura, similar to those that exist for the other crucified members of the Ark, such as the famous boy martyr of Moronacocha and Santa Ignacia, were seen circulating in the public cemetery of Iquitos.
Editorial in El Oreinte, January 6, 1959
Assault on Loreto Journalist
The publication, as an exclusive extra in our edition yesterday, of the “Epistle to the Good Concerning the Wicked,” which was sent to our editorial offices from his secret hiding place in some spot in the jungle by Brother Francisco, leader and principal spiritual director of the “crosses” or “Brothers of the Ark,” has been a pretext for our editor in chief, the well-known journalist of international reputation, Joaquín Andoa, to become the object of an unspeakable assault by police authorities of the Loreto Department and serves to swell the list of martyrs for freedom of the press. In fact, our editor in chief was summoned yesterday morning by Police Chief Juan Amézaga Riofrío, Region V (Loreto), and by the Chief Inspector, Loreto Branch, of the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI), Federico Chumpitaz Fernández. Said authorities demanded that he reveal the manner in which the newspaper El Oriente had obtained the missive from Brother Francisco, a suspect pursued by the police as the éminence grise behind the various cases of crucifixion that have occurred in the Amazon. When our editor in chief responded, respectfully but firmly, that a journalist’s sources of information constitute a professional secret and are for that reason as sacred and inviolable as revelations obtained in confession by a priest, the two police chiefs broke out into improprieties of unprecedented vulgarity against Mr. Joaquín Andoa, even threatening him with physical punishment (“We’ll work you over,” were their exact words) if he did not answer their questions. Since our editor in chief honorably refused to fall short of his professional ethics, he was locked up in a cell in the station house for a period of eight hours, that is, until 7 P.M., when he was released by arrangement with the departmental prefect himself. United as one man in the defense of freedom of the press, of professional secrecy and of media ethics, the entire editorial staff of El Oriente protests this abuse committed against an outstanding intellectual and journalist of Loreto and makes known that it has sent telegrams denouncing the act to both the National Federation of Journalists of Peru and the National Association of Journalists, our highest union organizations in the country.
Cacique Cocama Bend Murderers
Not to Face Military Tribunal
Iquitos, Jan. 6—A well-informed source very close to the High Command of Region V (Amazon) denied this morning the persistent rumors that have been circulating in Iquitos to the effect that the seven assailants from Nauta would be transferred to military jurisdiction to be tried in a military tribunal by means of summary proceedings. According to this source, the armed forces have not at any moment demanded that they be entrusted with the task of judging and sentencing the criminals, with the result that they will remain under the regular jurisdiction of civil justice.
Apparently the origin of the denied rumor was a request sent up to the high Army courts from Quartermaster Capt. Pantaleón Pantoja—whose functions are only too well known in this city—so that the military court’s jurisdiction would require the legal investigation and punishment of those responsible for the assault at Nauta, on the basis of the argument that the boat Eve and its crew members belonged to the nation’s navy and that the convoy of harlots formed
part of a militarized organization, which would be the case of the unpopular Special Service directed by that officer. The armed forces may have rejected as “far out”—that is the term employed by our informant—Capt. Pantoja’s request, indicating that when victimized by the assault, the transport boat Eve and its crew members were not performing any military service, but rather strictly civilian duties, and that the so-called Special Service is not nor ever can be under any circumstances a militarized institution, being only a civilian, commercial enterprise that has had incidental and merely tolerated, but never supported or officialized, relations with the Army. With this in mind, the same source added, an investigation of the said Special Service that the Army general staff should have ordered will be conducted with the purpose of discovering its origin, composition, functions and benefits in order to determine its legality, and if appropriate, the liabilities and pertinent sanctions.
10
“Ah, you’re up already, son,” Mother Leonor spends the night frightened—in a dream a cockroach is eaten by a rat who is eaten by a lizard who is eaten by a jaguar who is crucified and whose remains are devoured by cockroaches—gets up at dawn, paces around the room in the dark, wringing her hands, and, hearing the bells chime six, she knocks at Panta’s bedroom door. “What, you’ve put on your uniform again?”
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service Page 24
