Julio Vargas Garayar

Julio Alfonso Vargas Garayar (1949 – 20 January 1979) was a Peruvian soldier who was the last person to be executed in Peru. Vargas Garayar, a 29-year-old non-commissioned officer of the Peruvian Air Force, was convicted of spying on local military air fields and giving the information to Chilean intelligence. His execution in January 1979 took place amid increasing historical tensions between Peru and Chile.

Since Vargas Garayar's execution, Peru has not applied the death sentence again, becoming an abolitionist country for common crimes, allowing its usage in wartime and for acts of terrorism.

Background Vargas Garayar Little is known about Vargas Garayar's early life. He was born in 1949 in Lima into a severely poor family, being evicted along with his mother when he was 15 days old while suffering from whooping cough and bronchopneumonia. In his adolescence, Vargas Garayar began to work washing cars in front of a movie theater in Lima, dreaming of pursuing a military career. He is said to have been subjected to physical punishments during his time in Pisco, with superiors abusing military discipline against him. He failed an exam for a promotion on two occasions,

In October 1978, a Chilean Navy ship docked in Talara, claiming it was short of fuel. Bulnes did not contest the decision, but he asked Morales Bermúdez to allow the officers to leave Peru with him.

Vargas Garayar was found guilty on both counts on 14 December 1978 and sentenced to death. He denied any responsibility and appealed the verdict to different courts, also asking the Council of Ministers to grant him a pardon. On 19 January 1979, the Supreme Council of Military Justice rejected the appeal and upheld Vargas Garayar's death sentence. That same day, his petition to be spared from execution was also denied by the government.

Execution and aftermath

César Lozano, Vargas Garayar's attorney, lobbied for the commutation of his death sentence. On 19 January 1979, Lozano went to the military headquarters in Lima to file an emergency appeal, but he was denied entry and threatened with arrest. As the press arrived, Lozano and Vargas Garayar's parents drove to the Apostolic Nunciature to Peru and asked the nuncio for the intervention of Pope John Paul II to stop the execution. The nuncio promised them an answer from the Pope by 5 p.m. the next day. However, the government was firm in the position that Vargas Garayar had represented a serious security risk to the country and subsequently signed his death warrant. Vargas Garayar was executed by firing squad at 6 a.m. (PET) on 20 January 1979, maintaining that he was an innocent man.

His daughter, María Consuelo Vargas Chávez, was interviewed on ATV in April 2023, where she put into question her father's guilt and claimed that he had been psychologically and physically tortured before and after the trial. Despite his attorney's request for medical records to be released, Vargas Garayar was buried shortly after the execution, with his family not being allowed to claim his body. In a 2022 interview, his attorney recalled that the morning of the execution, he learned of Vargas Garayar's death by the radio and cried, taking the execution as a personal frustration.

In 1993, the Peruvian government modified Article 140 of the Constitution and kept the death penalty as an option only for cases of high treason during wartime and for acts of terrorism.