The Briefing:
- Peruvian journalist and regional candidate Susy Aponte Polo, 43, was fatally shot on Sept. 19 during a campaign stop in Caraz, in Peru's Áncash region, days after publicly naming an alleged threat against her.
- Three people are now in custody, including two Venezuelan nationals; prosecutors shifted the case from a feminicidio probe toward a suspected contract-killing theory, but no motive has been officially confirmed.
- The killing lands weeks before Peru's Oct. 4 regional elections — a domestic-only vote that Peruvians living abroad cannot cast ballots in, even as it reverberates through diaspora communities with ties to Áncash.
A Peruvian journalist running for regional office was gunned down in broad daylight on Saturday, in a killing that has jolted a country already grappling with one of the deadliest stretches for its press corps in recent memory. Susy Isabel Aponte Polo, known to her audience as "La China Polo," was shot while greeting voters in the Andean city of Caraz — and she had spent the preceding days warning, on camera, that someone wanted her dead.
How the Attack Unfolded
Aponte Polo was walking through a market in Caraz, in Áncash's Huaylas province, roughly 12:40 p.m. local time on Sept. 19, greeting supporters and speaking with reporters as part of her bid for the regional governorship, according to an account from La República. A gunman approached and opened fire, striking her in the head. Five bystanders were also wounded by gunfire, Peru's national police reported. Cellphone footage of the shooting spread quickly on social media in the hours that followed; out of respect for the victim, this article does not link to or describe that footage.
The Threats She Had Already Reported
Aponte Polo ran the digital outlet "China Polo Dominical," where she published investigations into alleged corruption inside Áncash's public agencies, the prosecutor's office and the national police. In a broadcast days before her death, she said she had received warnings from inmates at three separate prisons that a senior police official was behind a plot against her. Infobae Perú reported that she publicly named Gen. Víctor Revoredo Farfán, then the national police's criminal-investigations chief, accusing him of retaliating over her reporting on alleged ties between police commanders and a criminal group known as "Los Pulpos." Translated from her own remarks: "They have ordered an attack against my life," she said in the broadcast. Authorities have not established any link between Revoredo and the killing; he was among roughly two dozen senior police officers reassigned in a shake-up announced the day after the shooting, according to LatinUS's reporting on the personnel order.
Who's in Custody — and What Prosecutors Are Still Sorting Out
Investigators detained a Venezuelan national, Luis Iván Obispo Díaz, 32, at the scene with a firearm, and by Sunday had added two more suspects: a second Venezuelan national, identified as Ronald José Toro Artila, and a 29-year-old man captured in Lima's Surco district. National prosecutor Tomás Gálvez told reporters investigators are working several hypotheses about who paid for and ordered the attack, but stressed that nothing has been ruled in or out and additional arrests are possible. The case initially opened as a preliminary feminicidio investigation under a specialized Huaylas prosecutor's unit; by Sunday, a separate Huaylas prosecutorial office had taken over the file under a suspected contract-killing theory, according to a report detailing the reclassification. Neither framework has been confirmed as the final theory of the case, and officials have not named who, if anyone, ordered the killing.
Aponte Polo's death follows what press advocates in Peru have called the bloodiest year for the country's journalists in decades. Four reporters — Gastón Medina, Raúl Celis, Fernando Núñez and Mitzar Castillejos — were killed in 2025 alone, and Peru's national journalists' council logged 458 separate attacks on the press that year, a 17% jump from 2024. The Committee to Protect Journalists' Latin America coordinator, Cristina Zahar, has warned that unprosecuted masterminds behind such killings send a message that attacking reporters carries no cost. None of the four 2025 cases has produced a conviction of whoever ordered the attacks.
What the Oct. 4 Vote Actually Involves
The killing lands three weeks before Peru elects more than 13,000 regional and municipal officials nationwide. But this ballot is not the same as the presidential and congressional election Peru held earlier this year — it's a subnational vote limited to roughly 26.3 million citizens registered inside the country, plus a small pool of 76 foreign residents of Peru who may vote only for mayor, according to Peru's electoral authorities. Peruvians registered abroad, including in the U.S., cast ballots in April's and June's general elections but are not on the roll for this round. President Keiko Fujimori, who took office in July on a hardline public-safety platform, now governs a country where a sitting candidate has been assassinated weeks before a vote her own administration will oversee.
Why the Story Resonates Beyond Peru's Borders
Even without a ballot at stake for them, Peruvian communities in the U.S. — concentrated in South Florida, the New York metropolitan area and Southern California — have closely tracked this year's elections because of family and hometown ties to regions like Áncash. Aponte Polo's death adds a violent, unresolved case to a broader wave of anti-press and anti-candidate violence that Peruvian-American audiences have watched unfold from a distance, at a moment when two of the men accused in her killing are themselves migrants caught up in the same hemispheric currents shaping debates in the U.S.
Peru's Jurado Nacional de Elecciones, the country's top electoral body, condemned the killing and called for a swift, independent investigation. As of this writing, no one has been charged with ordering the attack, and prosecutors have not closed off either the sicariato or feminicidio lines of inquiry.
