I want to start today by tapping into a very
specific, very modern kind of fear. Okay. It's
not just the fear of crime itself, though, and
that obviously plays a big part, but the fear
of the bureaucracy that comes after. Oh, yeah.
The aftermath. Right. Imagine you are... You
know, the model citizen. You check every single
box. You get the permits. You file the paperwork.
You study the regulations. You basically operate
under the assumption that the system is this
machine designed to protect the people who follow
the rules. Because that's the social contract,
right? We trade some of our absolute freedom
for the protection of the state. We follow the
law. And in return, the law has our back. Exactly.
But what happens when that machine just completely
malfunctions? And I don't mean a small glitch
like a... parking ticket error. I mean, a catastrophic
failure where the system actually tries to destroy
you using a rule that doesn't even exist anymore.
Yeah, it's terrifying. So today, for our deep
dive, we are looking at a case from Lima, Peru,
back in January 2012. It's the story of a young
university student named Gaston Gabriel Mancilla
Yupanqui. And this is a case that I've been really
looking forward to unpacking because it's not
just your standard true crime story. It's a legal
horror story. It really is. It involves violent
mugging, a fatal shooting, and a judge whose
interpretation of the law was so baffled it actually
triggered a national political crisis. Right.
And for our sources today, we're going to be
pulling from the actual investigation records
surrounding this specific case, the court documents
from the Third Penal The massive media storm
that erupted at the time. We really need to talk
about the concept of legal inertia here. Yeah,
where the system just keeps moving in a direction
even after the laws have totally changed. Exactly.
And at the center of all of this is this bizarre
concept of a zombie law. You know, a statute
that was repealed, totally dead and buried, yet
somehow crawled out of the grave to put a 20
-year -old student in prison. It's wild. So let's
set the scene on the ground first. It's January
7th, 2012, a Saturday. We are in the historic
center of Lima, specifically the intersection
of Tacna Avenue and Colmena Avenue. And if you
know Lima, you know this isn't some quiet suburban
street. Tacna and Colmena is a major, major artery.
It's chaotic. It's loud. There's a ton of traffic,
lots of pedestrians. It's the kind of place where
you really need to be aware of your surroundings.
And Gaston Menci is there. He's 20 years old,
a student at the Universidad Nacional Federico
Villarreal. He's essentially just a kid with
his whole future ahead of him navigating the
city. But he's not alone for long. He's approached
by two men. Right. The police reports identify
them as Christian Arenas Perona and Victor Rios
Acevedo. And I want to just pause on Acevedo
for a second. OK. Because in the criminal underworld,
he was known by the alias Nino Viejo. Nino Viejo,
which translates to old boy. Yeah. It sounds
almost literary, doesn't it? Like a character
in a gritty novel. But in this context, an alias
like that usually implies someone who has been
in the life for a long time. Right. Someone who
grew up in crime. Exactly. These guys weren't
amateurs. They were armed with switchblades.
So the dynamic is just immediately terrifying.
You're a student. You're outnumbered two to one
and they have knives out. They demand his backpack
and his phone. Standard mugging procedure. Now,
usually the advice is just to hand it over. Property
can be replaced. Your life can't. That is the
standard advice. Yeah. But there is a huge variable
here that Acevedo and Perona didn't account for.
Gaston Mancilla was armed. And this is crucial
for you to keep in mind. He wasn't carrying a
weapon illicitly. He held a fully valid license
for a .38 caliber pistol. Which changes the profile
of the victim completely. Right. We aren't talking
about a vigilante out looking for trouble. We
are talking about someone who went through all
the bureaucratic hoops. The background checks,
the psychological evils, the paperwork. All of
it just to legally carry a tool for self -defense.
Which brings us right back to that social contract.
He did the prep work the state required. Right.
So the muggers close in. A physical struggle
breaks out. This isn't a standoff at 10 paces.
It's a chaotic, close -quarters scuffle. Mancilla
draws his .38 and fires. At point -blank range,
the shot kills Acevedo Niño Viejo. The other
attacker, Perona, he tries to flee the scene,
but is caught by police shortly after. Now let's
look at the immediate aftermath. You have a dead
body on the pavement. You have a shooter. Police
arrive. And Mancilla's lawyer later pointed out
that they even had an eyewitness right there
who corroborated Gaston's story completely. Wow.
So no ambiguity. None. Two guys, knives, robbery,
self -defense. So in a functioning legal system,
what should happen here? In a clear -cut case
of self -defense like this, typically the shooter
is detained for questioning just to verify the
permit and the facts. Make sure the story lines
up. Right. Once it's established that he was
the victim of an armed robbery and acted to save
his life, he might be released pending the investigation.
You don't usually lock the victim up with the
general prison population unless there's a really
strong suspicion he instigated the violence.
But that is not what happened to Gaston. Not
at all. The third penal court, which was presided
over by Judge Asuncion Pumaleon, ordered his
actual detention. They charged him with simple
homicide, which is essentially second -degree
murder, and threw him in jail. And this is where
we have to get into the weeds of the legal reasoning.
Because the judge didn't just say, I think he's
dangerous. She cited a very specific violation.
She claimed he violated the law of proportionality.
This is the aha moment of the disaster. The judge
argued that for self -defense to be legitimate,
the means of defense must be strictly proportional
to the means of attack. OK, let's play devil's
advocate for a second. I can sort of see a logic
where the state doesn't want someone using, say,
a machine gun to stop a guy from punching them.
Proportionality sounds somewhat reasonable on
the surface. In theory, yes. You want to prevent
excessive force. But Judge Pumalion's interpretation
was incredibly literal. She effectively ruled
that because the attackers had knives, bladed
weapons, and Mancilla used a gun, a firearm,
the response was legally disproportionate. That
feels like video game logic. Like, oh, you can
only use Class B weapons if the enemy is using
Class B weapons. Exactly. It completely ignores
the messy reality of violence. A knife is a lethal
weapon. At close range, a knife is arguably as
dangerous as a gun. Absolutely. To say that a
victim must essentially match the weaponry of
their attacker to justify saving their own life
is just absurd. It implies Mancilla should have
engaged in a knife fight to be legally in the
right. Or what? That he should have let them
stab him a little bit before firing? It puts
this insane burden of calculation on the victim
in a split second life or death moment. Right.
It demands this calm, rational calculation of
ballistics and weaponry equality while adrenaline
is literally dumping into your system. But here
is the part that makes this a scandal rather
than just a bad, rigid ruling. The zombie element.
The zombie element. This specific, rigid interpretation
of the law of proportionality, the idea that
the weapons must be strictly similar, came from
a law that had been repealed in 2003. Wait. Let
me just check the timeline here for a second.
The shooting is January 2012. The lot was repealed
in 2003. Nine years earlier. So the judge is
basing a murder charge and actual physical imprisonment
on a statute that hadn't existed for almost a
decade. Correct. The penal code had been updated
to focus on rational necessity rather than strict
proportionality. The new standard essentially
asked, was it rational to use the weapon you
had to stop the threat? And the answer is obviously
yes. Yes, obviously. But the judge was operating
on old firmware. This is what you meant by legal
inertia. It's terrifying. It suggests that a
judge, someone who holds the power to strip a
citizen of their freedom, wasn't keeping up with
the basic updates to the penal code. She was
enforcing a phantom rule. And for Gaston Mancilla,
that phantom rule meant sitting in a cell. The
psychological toll of that must have been just
immense. You know you're innocent. You know you
have the permit. But the person in the robe says
no. And that profound feeling of helplessness
is what triggered the explosion of public outrage.
This case went viral before going viral was really
the standard terminology we use for legal cases.
It started with the family. Obviously, they staged
demonstrations outside the court. But it quickly
went way beyond just the family. This became
a symbol for basically every student in Peru.
It did. The academic community mobilized completely.
Manuel Asma, the dean of the education faculty
where Mancilla studied, stepped up. He didn't
just write a strongly worded letter. He physically
went to the legal front lines. And his classmates.
We're furious. We have quotes from Marco Hargis
Romero, fellow student, calling the decision
arbitrary and unbelievable. You can really feel
the shock in their reaction. It shattered their
belief in the system. That shock is exactly what
pushed this out of the courts and into the political
sphere. And this is rare, frankly. Usually, politicians
try to stay far away from specific ongoing judicial
matters because of the separation of powers.
You don't want Congress telling judges how to
rule. Right. It sets a bad precedent. But here,
the error was so egregious that the firewall
just came completely down. It was a bipartisan
pylon. You had Congressman Renzo Rigiardo openly
criticizing the judge on the record. You had
Congressman Victor S. Garcia Bellamunda calling
the imprisonment an abuse and demanding sanctions.
S. Garcia Bellamunda actually went straight to
the OCMA, right? The Office of the Control of
the Magistrate. Yes. That's... essentially internal
affairs for judges. He basically said, this isn't
just a mistake, this is misconduct. And Congressman
Juan Diaz -Dios joined Dean Asmat to actually
present a writ of habeas corpus on Mancilla's
behalf. I want to dig into habeas corpus for
a moment. We hear the term all the time on TV
dramas, but what does it actually signal in a
real case like this? Well, habeas corpus literally
translates to that you have the body. It is a
fundamental legal recourse that challenges the
actual legality of a detention. It is your break
glass in case of emergency tool. You are asking
a higher court to look at the detention and say,
there is no legal basis for this person to be
in jail. Release them. And usually that's reserved
for when someone is held without charge or held
past a legal deadline. But here they were using
it to attack the core reasoning of the judge.
Exactly. They were arguing that a detention based
on a repealed law is by definition an illegal
detention. It's a very powerful argument. So
the pressure is just mounting from all sides.
You have students in the street. The media is
running the story 24 -7 and congressmen are filing
briefs. The system had to blink. And it did.
The timeline is incredibly compressed here. The
shooting was January 7th. By January 12th, a
new order comes down. This time from Judge Juan
Carlos Aranda Giroldo. Right, from the second
penal court. He reviews the habeas corpus and
the facts, and he revokes the detention order
entirely. He sends the notification straight
to Jose Luis Perez, the head of the National
Penitentiary Institute, the INPE. And on January
13th, Gaston Mancia walks out of prison. Amidst
total jubilation. There are photos from the day
of him being lifted onto people's shoulders.
It was a massive victory for him, but also a
victory for the public who felt like they had
successfully checked a broken system. But the
story doesn't end with him walking out into the
sunshine. We really have to talk about Judge
Asuncion Pumalion. Because her reaction to all
of this is, well, it's a fascinating study in
human psychology. It really is. On the exact
same day Mancilla is released, the OCMA suspends
her. They initiate a formal disciplinary process.
Now, most people in that position would go silent.
Lawyer up, stay quiet, hope the news cycle moves
on. She did the exact opposite. She went on national
TV. She appeared on the TV program 90 Seconds.
Yeah. And she was incredibly defensive. She point
blank refused to admit she made a mistake. She
gave us that famous quote, I am not inept. I
am not inept. Which, historically speaking, is
a phrase that if you find yourself having to
say it on television, you've probably already
lost the argument. Definitely. But she doubled
down. She claimed her ruling was an appealable
jurisdictional decision. Which is basically legal
translation for, if I was wrong, let the appeals
court fix it. Don't blame me. Exactly. She was
trying to frame it as a mere difference of legal
opinion rather than a glaring factual error about
which laws were currently in effect. And incredibly,
she even denied using the repealed law of proportionality
in her interview, which directly contradicted
the written records of the case. That is the
part that gets me, the gaslighting. The official
court documents say one thing, but on TV she
says, I never said that. It really shows the
difficulty of holding the judiciary accountable.
Even when caught red handed applying a dead law,
her instinct was to protect her status and authority
rather than apologize to the young man she illegally
imprisoned. But eventually she resigned. She
did. She tendered her resignation, presumably
to avoid the utter humiliation of being fired.
But our sources note that the investigation against
her continued regardless. Resigning doesn't just
magically absolve you of administrative liability.
So we have a resolution. Mancilla is free. The
judge is out. The zombie law is put back in its
grave. But when you look at this case as a whole,
what is the lingering lesson here? Because to
me, it feels like Mancilla was the perfect victim.
That is the key takeaway. Think about the checklist
of his circumstances. He was a university student,
which makes him sympathetic. He had a valid permit,
making him legally sound. He had an eyewitness
to provide corroboration. And he had a dean and
multiple congressmen willing to fight for him.
He had connections. Right. But if you take away
any one of those things. If he had been a dropout,
or if he had been working a blue -collar job
with no academic dean to vouch for him. What
if he had just lost his permit paperwork in the
scuffle? He would probably still be in jail.
Or he would have spent years and thousands of
dollars fighting a murder charge from inside
a cell. Exactly. The system worked eventually,
but it required an extraordinary amount of external
force to correct itself. That is not how justice
is supposed to function on a daily basis. Justice
shouldn't require a national media firestorm
just to get a judge to read the current year's
penal code. It also highlights the fragility
of the concept of self -defense. We tend to think
of it as a magical shield. I was defending myself,
so I'm safe. But this case shows you that self
-defense is an affirmative defense. You're basically
standing up and admitting, yes, I did the shooting,
and then you have to prove... But I had a really
good reason. And that good reason is entirely
subject to the interpretation of a human being
in a robe who might be having a bad day or who
might not have read the memo that the law fundamentally
changed in 2003. It's a sobering reality check.
Being in the right isn't always enough. You also
have to survive the system's interpretation of
your actions. And that brings us right back to
the attacker's alias, Nino Viejo. The system
was very quick to process him as a known criminal,
but when a law -abiding student entered the machinery,
it ground him up just as fast. The bureaucracy
couldn't distinguish between the predator and
the prey. Gaston Manseil eventually got his life
back. But that week in January 2012 serves as
a permanent warning label on the justice system
of that era. It's a stark reminder that laws
on paper are completely meaningless if the people
enforcing them are incompetent. I'll leave you
with a final thought to mull over today. We always
ask, who watches the Watchmen? But in this case,
the question is a bit more specific. When the
referee creates a rule that doesn't exist just
to penalize a player, and the game is your actual
life, what is your recourse? In 2012, the recourse
was to scream until the wall shook. But that's
not a legal strategy. That's desperation. And
hopefully, looking back at a deep dive like this
helps ensure that desperation isn't the only
option next time. Thanks for listening.