ORANJESTAD — John ‘Poentje’ Castro was a popular Aruban journalist, but not everyone appreciated his efforts. In December 2010 the 47-year old was shot to death in the front garden of his house. The murder was never solved and seemed, almost fifteen years after the crime was committed, as good as forgotten. This inspired journalist and jurist Luis Anibal Villegas Hernandez to take action. He wants to prevent that the murder is swept under the carpet, Emiel Hakkenes reports in the Dutch newspaper Trouw.
For nine years, Castro presented his program Un Dia den Bida (A Day from Life) on Aruban television. He interviewed many personalities – from politicians to criminals.
A prime example of his work is his interview with the Dutch criminal Patrick van der Eem in 2008 about his cooperation with the late crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, At the latter’s request, Van der Eem built a relationship with Joran van der Sloot, a notorious suspect in the disappearance of the American student Nathalie Holloway. Van der Eem had equipped his car with hidden recording equipment and Van der Sloot started talking, thereby creating the suggestion that he had murdered Holloway. Peter de Vries broadcast the recording on Dutch TV.
The police opened an investigation into Castro’s murder but it went nowhere. Ten years later there was a new attempt to solve the crime and the police arrested a suspect who was seen on security cameras near Castro’s house at the time of the murder.
The man acknowledged that it was him on the camera footage but he said that he had nothing to do with the crime. The prosecutor’s office took him to court, where has was acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
Villegas Hernandez was unhappy with the outcome. The 31-year old journalist was born in Venezuela and spent most of his youth on Aruba. Currently he lives in the Netherlands.
“I never watched Castro’s programs,” he told Trouw. “I was too young and anyway, my parents did not have a television. But when I heard about this murder later on I thought: this is something big and the killer and the man who ordered the crime are still walking around free. That is so unfair.”
That the crime is about the murder of a journalist, a representative of free speech, ought to be a strong reason for the police to make every effort to solve the case, Villegas Hernandez says.
“This case shows exactly how things often go in Aruba,” Villegas Hernandez says. “Something terrible happens, the community is in shock and the authorities promise that they will take action. Then they start an investigation and at a certain moment they forget all about it.”
That did not sit well with Villegas Hernandez and he decided to start an investigation of his own. At first he thought about a journalistic investigation. “I have spoken with people who were close to Castro. Those talks made me fearful. I heard all kinds of stories, for instance about the criminality in his environment. That was all speculation but still, I thought it would be better to keep my distance.”
He then opted for a legal approach: administrative law. He used the Government Public Access Act to request the file about the investigation. This had a couple of advantages: it was safe and cheap. It was safe because everything happens in the public domain and it was cheap because you can take the government to administrative court without a lawyer.
There was indeed a court case but in 2021 the Ministry of Justice and Safety denied most of his demands. Making details public from reports composed by the Dutch Forensic Institute could harm the murder investigation. Villegas Hernandez was surprised because as far as he knew there was no investigation anymore. The file was shelved unsolved.
Villegas Hernandez appealed the decision and when that was not successful he took the case to the administrative court in 2013. During the hearing, the ministry claimed that there was an ongoing investigation and that it had arrested a suspect. For this reason, the court denied the demand for information.
“I do not expect to find a smoking gun in those documents,” Villegas Hernandez says. “If it were possible to solve this murder with the available documents, the authorities in Aruba would have done that. But the information is of great interest for the community. A journalist has been murdered. Maybe this was due of his work because according to some sources he was close to revealing something big. If we do not know what has been investigated after his death and how this was done, one can ask the question how safe other journalists are.”
After he lost the case, Villegas Hernandez went to the Council of State where he lost again. “Legally it is probably simple,” he admits. “The reasons for denying my request for information were correct. But again, this is about the murder of a journalist. It is something shocking and according to me, that justifies the release of more information.”
In spite of all these legal hurdles, Villegas Hernandez is not giving up. He intends to present the case to the European Human Rights court. “After all,” he says, this is about the freedom of the press and about the governance culture in Aruba. Journalists encounter too many limitations there. If you are critical about the government, you will quickly get a phone call from a minister. Newspapers are also dependent on the government for advertisements. In such a small country, where everything hangs close together, it is difficult to be critical. But Castro’s murder should not be allowed to be swept under the carpet.”
