Arrests loom after Peruvian villagers 'lynch' tourist

Five years ago, Sebastian Woodroffe decided to quit his job and leave his home in Canada, and travel thousands of miles to the Amazon rain forests to study the healing rituals of indigenous shamans.

A relative's battle with alcoholism inspired the then-36-year-old father to go, Woodroffe explained in a YouTube video. He was particularly interested in ayahuasca, a sludgelike hallucinogenic potion that some Peruvians call "the sacred vine of the soul," and which many tourists believe can heal anything from depression to childhood trauma.

Woodroffe wanted to become an addictions counselor, he wrote in a pitch to raise funds for his trip, but not a conventional one. He wanted to apprentice with Amazonian healers and "retain some of their treasure in me and my family, and share it with those that wish to learn."

While it's not entirely clear what happened to Woodroffe in Peru's rain forests over the next five years, a friend in Canada told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that he returned from his ayahuasca retreats "troubled," and more distant.

But he kept going back, until late last week.

That, Peruvian authorities say, is when villagers accused Woodroffe of killing a celebrated and beloved local shaman who refused to treat him, and put his face on an amateur wanted poster.

Then a mob caught him, tied a cord around his neck and made a video of him being dragged through the dirt until he died.

Peru's attorney general ordered the arrest of two suspects in Woodroffe's death Monday, The Associated Press reported, and has not accused the Canadian of any crime. But prosecutors are now investigating both Woodroffe's "lynching" and the unsolved shooting of the 81-year-old shaman, Olivia Arévalo Lomas - and how and whether the two deaths are linked.

The shaman

Arévalo was not simply a shaman, but also an activist for indigenous rights in this remote rain forest in northeastern Peru. A nephew described her to a Peruvian TV station as "the mother that protects the Earth in the jungle" and "the most beloved woman" in the Shipibo-Konibo tribe.

She descended from a long line of healers, and had been working with traditional plant medicine since she was a teen in the early 1950s, according to the Temple of the Way of Light - a traditional healing center where she sang curing songs and performed ayahuasca rituals.

Lately, business has been good for a shaman.

Each year, thousands of tourists from the United States, Australia and Canada travel to the Peruvian Amazon to experiment with ayahuasca, also known as yage. The potion contains dimethyltryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen that is legal in Peru only as part of spiritual exercises.

But the potion has a dark side, too. In 2015, the National Post reported, a British man took ayahuasca during a Peruvian retreat, began "screaming at the top of his lungs" and tried to attack another tourist with a butcher knife.

The tourist had to kill the British man in self-defense, the paper wrote - one of several violent incidents linked to ayahuasca tourism, even before Arévalo was fatally shot during a ritual last week. Her family said Woodroffe held the gun.

The student

Woodroffe was a person "who likes to poke, and likes to test the boundaries of people's beliefs," his friend Yarrow Willard told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., "but is very much a gentle person underneath all that."

He grew up on Vancouver Island, Willard said, and worked odd jobs in recent years between his trips to Peru.

"He had a beautiful spark to him that people respected and loved," Willard said. And even though Woodroffe had become more distant after trying ayahuasca, and would return from his retreats in Peru seeming "troubled," Willard could not believe his friend capable of violence.

"This man has never had a gun or talked about anything along that line," he said.

In his online fundraising campaign to study in Peru, Woodroffe spoke of wanting to make several trips to the Amazon and learn Spanish so he could better befriend and learn from its indigenous inhabitants.

Woodroffe wrote specifically of Arévalo's tribe. He wanted to protect the tribe from modern industrial forces - to "preserve their eroding perch in the Amazon."

"Acceptance of their wisdom's potency will bring value to the Shipibo," he wrote. And while his fundraiser fell far short of its $10,000 goal, Woodroffe has apparently been able to make repeated trips since 2013.

By last week he was in the remote Ucayali region of northeastern Peru, among the tribe. There, villagers told the BBC, he met Arévalo and asked for her guidance.

And there, on Thursday, the old shaman was shot dead outside her home.

Accounts of Arévalo's death conflict wildly. A prosecutor said no one witnessed it, and no weapon was found, according to the BBC.

But residents told an indigenous news outlet that witnesses saw Woodroffe shoot Arévalo multiple times after she sang an ikaro, or curing song. The shaman's family claimed she had refused to conduct a ritual with ayahuasca for the Canadian, the BBC wrote, provoking his rage.

When residents could not find Woodroffe after the shooting, a crude "wanted" bulletin circulated online.

It would not take long to find him.

'There is justice'

Arévalo's killing spurred outrage within her tribe and across Peru, particularly in light of many recent unsolved killings of environmental and human rights activists in the region.

The Amazon was cited in a 2016 study by the environmental watchdog group Global Witness as one of the regions worldwide with the most killings of activists, particularly indigenous activists - often over disputes about mining, logging, dams and other hallmarks of industrialization.

In the thinly policed remote regions of the Amazon, the BBC wrote, "crimes often go unpunished [and] communities sometimes bypass the police altogether, choosing to punish those they suspect of committing crimes themselves."

Residents of Arévalo's town were particularly frustrated about a double standard in the way indigenous people were treated in the criminal justice system, local residents told Peruvian news broadcasters. They were angry at the tourists.

"There is justice for those with money," one local resident told TV Peru.

"A foreigner can come and kill us, day after day, like dogs or cats, and nothing happens," a woman told a Peruvian vice minister on TV, the weekend after Arévalo's death.

Officials urged patience. A Peruvian ombudsman wrote tweets condemning the killing, but a prosecutor said it would take weeks to test gunshot residue on the woman's body. They were looking into claims of Woodroffe's involvement, the BBC wrote, but also "the theory that she may have been killed by another foreigner over an unpaid debt," and other leads.

That didn't matter to the mob that caught Woodroffe.

Peruvian authorities have confirmed that he is the man seen in a cellphone video shot last week and shared online - a man gibbering and moaning as he lies in a mud puddle, surrounded by dozens of people in a village of dirt streets and thatch-roofed huts.

Most of the onlookers stare silently. One loops a cord around Woodroffe's neck and drags him from the puddle onto the grass, and then across the grass until he stops moving.

Woodroffe's body was found in a makeshift grave over the weekend, less than a mile from Arévalo's home. An autopsy revealed that he had beaten, then strangled, prosecutors told Reuters.

Peru's interior ministry released a statement, vowing to aggressively investigate his killing and that of the shaman.

It's unclear whether the two suspects ordered arrested in the lynching have been caught, and The Associated Press reported that investigators are studying Woodroffe's body to find out whether he really did kill the shaman he once hoped to learn from.

"We want the people of the Amazon to know that there is justice," lead prosecutor Ricardo Palma Jimenez told a Peruvian news station, "but not justice by their own hands."