PIURA (PERU)
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

November 2, 2026

Piura, Peru, October 2018. Journalist Paola Ugaz flew almost 900 kilometres from Lima to see a judge. No source or story awaited her, but a criminal defamation complaint filed by the region’s archbishop, a member of the founding generation of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Catholic organisation she had been investigating since 2011. The archbishop was asking for around US$50,000 over a Twitter thread.

Eight years later, in August 2026, another complaint arrived. In between came more than five proceedings opened in 2019 alone, some thirty notarial letters, prosecutorial investigations for money laundering, illicit enrichment, bribery, false testimony and influence peddling, death threats and a court order to open seven years of her communications.

“What these lawsuits hit hardest is the human side,” Ugaz said. “That’s what they’re designed for: so that you spend your time going to court, going to the prosecutor’s office, printing briefs, talking to lawyers, thinking about how to defend yourself.”

Type her name into a social network and up come the insults, “where they dehumanise me, where they mock my body, where they mock my intelligence, where they talk about my private life,” Ugaz said.

On her Instagram, a threat appeared: “We’ll make you disappear with lead.”

“Your life is affected; there’s no avoiding it. There’s no way it isn’t, and on top of all that, you must carry on,” Ugaz added.

Within that carrying on there is one presence Ugaz named clearly.

“From day one, UN Human Rights was there to listen. From the first email, the second, the third,” she said. “More than a thousand emails have been sent recounting what has happened to me each day, and they have been there.”

UN Human Rights in Peru has followed Ugaz’s case since it began operating in the country in 2022.

“That continuous monitoring allowed us to identify that the attacks, the stigmatisation campaigns and the criminalisation proceedings against Paola were not isolated events,” said Jane Anttila, Head of Mission of UN Human Rights in Peru. “They were part of a sustained pattern of harassment.”

A factory of lies

The Sodalitium was founded in Peru in 1971 and approved by the Vatican in 1997. In 2015, Ugaz and fellow journalist Pedro Salinas published “Half Monks, Half Soldiers”, with the testimonies of some thirty people who described sexual, physical, psychological and spiritual abuse inside the organisation.

“When I began publishing about its financial management, in 2016, another part of my biography as a journalist began: persecution,” Ugaz said.

The mechanism had two phases. First, sympathetic media outlets published that Ugaz was running a money-laundering ring, that she was trafficking uranium.

“

They put you at the centre of a factory of lies.

“

— Paola Ugaz, Peruvian journalist

Those publications were then filed as complaints with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which admitted them without any filter.

“To this day those investigations remain open and nobody says anything,” Ugaz said.

For Anttila, that is what makes the case emblematic: violence against the press does not always come from the traditional repressive apparatus.

“It can also operate through a network of private actors with economic, political, religious or media power, who rely on private complainants and set State institutions in motion, including the justice system,” Anttila said.

That requires looking not at each complaint in isolation, but at how they are coordinated and how they accumulate.

“

The process itself can become a form of punishment.

“

— Jane Anttila, Head of Mission of UN Human Rights in Peru

Zuliana Lainez, President of the National Association of Journalists of Peru and of the International Federation of Journalists, agreed.

“The Sodalitium case was the guinea pig for what is now a pattern,” Lainez said.

Proceedings last more than four years, and close to 90 per cent of journalists taken to court are ultimately acquitted.

“The process is the punishment,” she said.

The Office’s monitoring bears this out: since 2022 it has recorded 485 incidents against media workers in Peru, with 629 victims; in 2025, four journalists were killed.

“This is only the most visible part of a pattern that ends up creating an environment conducive to self-censorship on issues such as corruption or illicit economies,” Anttila said.

The body, private life and children

There is a layer Ugaz described as the hardest to name. In a case she won, she told the judge that the other party had published where her children went to school. The opposing lawyer asked to speak.

“‘What are you worried about?’ he said. ‘We haven’t talked about kidnapping or attempted murder. Only about where your children study.’ That’s when I said: ‘now I really am worried,’” Ugaz recalled.

Lainez confirmed the pattern: women account for a third of documented victims, “but the attack doesn’t target the investigation: it targets you, your intimacy, your family. I have never seen a man questioned over things like that,” she added.

“Attacks aimed at a journalist’s body, intimacy, private life or children seek to generate fear, isolation, guilt and exhaustion,” Anttila said. “They frequently carry a gender component and seek to discredit the person, not to debate her journalistic work.”

That is why, according to UN Human Rights, protection cannot be limited to physical security: it must also address the psychological, family, legal and economic effects.

UN Human Rights: A bridge

In November 2022, with support from the Office and the International Federation of Journalists, Ugaz travelled to Rome, Italy, to tell Pope Francis about the persecution of her and the victims.

“I said to him: ‘Holy Father, don’t believe me. Send a team to Peru and check for yourself,’” Ugaz said.

Eight months later a Vatican mission arrived; in 2025, the Sodalitium was suppressed.

In Peru, the Office pushed for her to become the first journalist included in the Intersectoral Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, coordinated by the Ministry of Justice, which granted her protection guarantees.

“They told me: ‘Get in, so that it’s on record in case something happens,’” Ugaz said.

Since 2022, the Office has been working to ensure the Mechanism covers journalists and has encouraged it to read Ugaz’s case not as an individual situation but as one that makes it possible to anticipate other risks.

The limit appears when the risk comes from the Public Prosecutor’s Office itself, an autonomous body whose investigations the Mechanism cannot intervene in.

“Its mandate means providing protection even when the possible aggressors act from within public institutions,” Anttila said.

What the Mechanism can offer: free legal defence and, through an emergency fund set up by the Office with support from the European Union, medical and psychosocial assistance.

“But it still needs greater capacity, resources and tools to respond when the source of the risk lies within the State apparatus itself,” Anttila added.

For Lainez, the value of UN Human Rights comes down to one idea: being a bridge.

“

Getting the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the Ministry of Justice to sit at a table with journalists is very difficult, and the Office has managed it. And it brings the international standards: these are not concessions, they are duties.

“

— Zuliana Lainez, Journalist and President of the National Association of Journalists of Peru

Sources exposed

In September 2024, Ugaz was notified that a judge had lifted the confidentiality of her communications between 2013 and 2020. The order had existed since 2023 and had been kept secret.

“As if I were the head of a kidnapping gang. I’m a journalist,” Ugaz said.

Those seven years included the Sodalitium victims who had spoken to her in confidence.

“It is the most lethal blow to journalism,” Lainez said.

That same month, Ugaz raised something with the Office that was not only about her: that journalists in her situation should have access to psychological, legal and financial support.

Two years on, Anttila acknowledges that such support remains insufficient and uneven. In 2025 the Office published a self-protection manual for human rights defenders and journalists.

“There is still no sufficiently coordinated, accessible and sustainable response. That remains one of the main challenges,” Anttila added.

Publish, publish, publish

Outside Peru, Ugaz said, everyone is writing about how this story led to the suppression of the Sodalitium.

“You come home to your country and this story doesn’t exist,” she said.

What keeps her going are the people who trusted their stories to her and told her how they went looking for God and found a living hell, and the young journalists who might give up on journalism because of her persecution but don’t.

“

You feel very alone, but the international community is always there. What has made me stronger is empathy.

“

— Paola Ugaz, Peruvian journalist

Ugaz’s answer to the hate campaigns? “Publish, publish, publish. Nothing more.”