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DIEGO'S DIARY
Volume II
XIV. The day of no return
( October 2023 - January 2026)
When 2023 came to an end, I no longer had any doubts: my relationship with Mary was broken. Not deteriorated, not in crisis, not awaiting a difficult conversation. Broken. There was no way to repair it or to find even the smallest point from which to speak of a solution that would not be destructive for everyone involved.
I did not understand it all at once. I understood it slowly, as one understands things one resists accepting.
I spoke with my daughters. It was a long and tense conversation. I recorded it.
For some time, on the advice of my psychologist and other people close to me, I had begun recording the most tense conversations that took place in the house. Not as a legal strategy, but as a way to protect myself and to leave a record of what was actually happening during those moments of conflict.
That conversation was one of them.
I explained to them, in simple terms, that I could no longer continue living under the same roof as their mother. That there were no intermediate options left. One of the two of us would have to leave.
I also told them something that was difficult for me to say: that if I were the one to leave the ranch, my ability to generate income would almost completely disappear. The ranch was not just a house. It was my work, my horses, my economic livelihood. If I left, all of us would suffer financially.
They asked me to stay. To wait until they had finished their studies. I replied that it was not possible. That a separation was inevitable and that, painful as it might be, it was the best outcome for everyone — for them as well. I explained that their mother did not want to discuss any agreement or any way of organising the separation responsibly. That I had no room left to manoeuvre.
Shortly afterwards, on 27 October, I left for Arequipa.
At first I thought that distance might serve some purpose. Not as an escape, but as a signal. I wanted Mary to understand that I was serious, that it was not an empty threat. That despite having warned her for months about the economic and family consequences, there would be no turning back if she continued refusing any dialogue.
I believed — naïvely — that when she saw me leave, she might be willing to talk.
During the first weeks in Arequipa, I received an email from her. In it she spoke about the need to buy hay for the horses, that she only had alfalfa, about bills that had to be paid. She also returned to what had happened years earlier in Tilkapata and the harm it had caused our daughter. The tone was the usual one: a mixture of reproach, victimhood and practical demands.
I did not reply.
Not because I did not care, but because I understood that replying meant re-entering the same closed circuit with no way out.
Two weeks later I received an official message via WhatsApp. A notification from the police station in Urubamba. Mary had filed a complaint for “psychological aggression”. I was summoned to give a statement within a few days.
I looked for a lawyer in Arequipa, recommended by acquaintances. We travelled together to the valley to present ourselves at the police station in Urubamba. I expected a summons, questions, perhaps an initial investigation. What I found was something else.
There they informed me that the family court had already issued protection measures. That I had to remove my personal belongings from the ranch that very same day, under police supervision. We knew nothing about this. We had received no prior notification.
Everything happened suddenly.
With no time to prepare — no suitcases, no vehicle, nothing organised — we had to improvise on the spot. I packed what I could. We wrapped my things in blankets, called a friend, who called another friend with a pickup truck. My belongings ended up in a hotel in the village.
Later I received the official notification from the court: several pages based exclusively on Mary’s verbal statement and on an old audio recording, made years earlier, in 2016, cut and presented out of context.
Half of the document was devoted to general explanations about women’s rights, domestic violence, prevention and protocols. It repeated that the measures were “standard” and “preventive” while the investigation was ongoing.
In practice this meant that I had to maintain a certain distance from the house and from the family, that I could not communicate with or have any contact whatsoever with Mary or with my two daughters, and that I could not access my horses, my vehicle, or my workplace. I was excluded from my own daily life by a decision taken without my ever having been heard.
From one day to the next, I was outside my own life.
I left with a few changes of clothes, shoes and basic personal items. Nothing more.
When I went to collect my things from the ranch, Mary was present together with her daughter Melany. Also present was the sister of the prosecutor — the same prosecutor who is married to Mary’s sister, in other words her brother-in-law. Both remained there the entire time.
The prosecutor’s sister wore a white apron, as if she were domestic staff. She did not say a single word. She did not intervene in anything. Her presence was constant and silent.
At that moment I tried to take at least one of the dogs with me. I wanted to take the female German Shepherd I had brought from the Netherlands shortly after COVID.
I even explained it to the police: the dog had a pedigree and, moreover, formally still belonged to my brother in the Netherlands, who had lent her to me for breeding. It was a partial truth, but also a desperate attempt to save at least one of my animals.
Mary refused outright. She did not allow me to take any of the dogs. There was no room to argue. Thus both German Shepherds — the female I had brought from the Netherlands and the male, also with pedigree — remained at the ranch. I left without them.
I tried. It was not possible.
A week later another notification arrived.
This time the complaint had been filed by Melany. She accused me of “indecent touching”, allegedly occurring when she was between ten and thirteen years old.
The dates indicated coincided with the years in which the abuses by Professor Walter had taken place at Tilkapata school. In her account elements from that period reappeared, including references that pointed back to the school context and to the bed whose presence there had never been explained.
In those days I sent money directly to her. Until then it had usually been her mother who did so. I had not replied to Mary’s email asking for money, and I wanted to make sure that Melany would not be left without resources. Melany, now 21, was studying veterinary medicine in Sicuani and living alone, renting a room in a town several hours from the valley, while I was in Arequipa. She accepted the money without objection.
Two weeks later she filed the complaint, one week after her mother’s complaint.
I read the accusation and felt as if the ground had disappeared beneath my feet. It described incoherent episodes, scenes that had never happened. It spoke of a trip, of Lake Huaypo, of her sitting on my lap in the car, and then of not remembering what had happened afterwards. It was obvious that the account did not hold together. Even so, it was written down exactly as it had been said.
At the police station, during that second statement, I could barely speak. I answered: “completely false.” Nothing more. There were no words available for something like that.
The following days were unreal. It took time to understand what was happening. Not only on a legal level, but on a human one. The sensation was like looking at an infinite sky and trying to comprehend space: the mind runs out of tools. There is no way to grasp it.
Months later, already in 2024, something happened that changed my understanding of everything I had lived through. It was then that the man who had been her secret lover for four years confessed to me what had been happening behind my back. Only then did I understand how the pieces had been connected.
I began to see that what was happening was not a chaotic succession of conflicts nor an accumulation of uncontrolled reactions, but a process that had taken shape over time. A process that had begun years earlier, with Maruja’s arrival at the end of 2015, and had been sustained since then with patience and persistence.
I understood that it was not merely the deterioration of a relationship, but a strategy aimed at displacing me, emptying me of my place, removing me from what I had built. To achieve this, different mechanisms had been used: manipulation, gradual erosion, progressive alignments and, finally, the involvement of my own daughters within that scheme.
The objective was not to resolve a conflict or to reach an orderly separation. It was to eliminate me from the equation. And the driving force behind everything, I realised then, was not emotional or moral, but economic.
That understanding did not arrive suddenly, nor did it bring relief. It came late, when the damage had already been done and all that remained was to try to understand how it had been possible.
At that moment — not before — I understood that these were not isolated events nor a chaotic succession of conflicts, but a structure that had been quietly built while I was trying to sustain an impossible coexistence.
That was the true beginning of Volume II.
Starting again while the process continued
The two years that followed the complaints are difficult to describe. Not for lack of events, but because the experience bears little resemblance to what one imagines when hearing the word “justice”.
Before all this, I had no experience whatsoever with legal proceedings. I assumed that a complaint opened an orderly investigation: both sides would be heard, facts would be verified, and decisions would be taken within reasonable timeframes. It was a simple idea, almost naïve, based on common sense.
The reality was different.
During those two years, my life became trapped between notifications, summonses, statements, interviews, psychological examinations, expert reports, meetings with prosecutors and lawyers, documents that arrived late or with errors, procedures that were rescheduled without explanation, and constant travel between Arequipa and the valley.
Nothing moved forward with clarity. Everything moved slowly.
At times the sensation was not one of investigation, but of waiting. A waiting without form, without understandable deadlines, without control.
My lawyers travelled on several occasions to comply with procedures and statements. On one occasion, a meeting with the prosecutor was cancelled just minutes before it was due to begin. Both had travelled there, with flights and hotel already paid for, and the appointment was simply suspended without explanation. Situations like that became part of the exhaustion of the process.
I learned that the process did not follow the rhythm of real life. Everyday logic — cause, effect, response — stopped functioning.
Meanwhile, the procedures multiplied. Witness statements from both sides. Mandatory psychological evaluations. A psychiatric interview to determine whether I had any sexual disorder. The interview in the Cámara Gesell. Medical reports. Forensic examinations.
Five different proceedings were advancing at the same time.
All of this implied constant expenses: criminal and civil lawyers, specialists, travel, accommodation, administrative procedures. And I no longer had access to my economic unit: the ranch, the horses, the equipment, the vehicle, the work that had sustained my life for decades.
It was a silent but constant pressure.
In the middle of that scenario another claim appeared: Mary requested financial support for Gaia, who was already about twenty years old. She asked for a monthly amount completely disproportionate to reality, based on income that simply did not exist. That confirmed something that was beginning to become evident: the conflict was not diminishing, it was expanding.
For a long time I tried to find a logic behind all of it. If the objective had been economic, it would have been far simpler to reach an agreement when I was still at the ranch. Nothing that was happening seemed to lead to a solution. It only produced exhaustion.
At times I wondered whether it responded to rational calculation, to an obsession with destroying me, or to something I simply could not understand. I had no answers. Only questions.
During that same period, in Arequipa, my life took another unexpected direction.
The equestrian community of Arequipa, with whom I had maintained relationships for years, became an unexpected support. Among them was Claudio, a well-known breeder with a stud of more than a hundred horses. We had known each other for many years. Between 2010 and 2014 we had organised equestrian expeditions together across the coastal desert of Arequipa.
It was he who first helped me reopen those coastal routes so that I could generate some income while everything else was paralysed. Later he also supported me with the logistics necessary to maintain the rides that had already been established in Cusco.
I arrived in Arequipa practically from zero. Without a ranch, without my own horses, without equipment, without any structure. Only with my experience and a few friends who did not hesitate to help.
During the first year we began to rebuild the operation step by step. Claudio’s horses had to be trained specifically for long-distance routes. We had to buy new saddlebags, obtain breastplates to keep the saddles in place on steep climbs, review equipment and adjust every detail.
It was also necessary to form a support team from the start. We worked with Claudio’s staff and horse trainers, teaching them the logic of the routes, the timing, the rest stops, the lunch points and campsites. We had to find a cook, organise the logistics of lunches along the trail, and plan in advance what to carry and what not to carry. Everything that for years had functioned naturally at the ranch had to be rebuilt from scratch.
The first year was difficult. The second began to consolidate.
Little by little we managed to recover the same level of service and quality that we had before, although the road to reach that point was long and demanding.
Some agencies withdrew. Others did not.
The most important ones stayed. They reduced commissions, offered support and understood the situation. They did not need long explanations. They knew who I was and how I had always worked.
It was during that period that I understood something simple: true friends are not recognised in moments of success, but when one is on the ground.
While in the valley the legal processes moved forward slowly, in Arequipa I was trying to rebuild my life step by step.
It was not a victory. It was resistance.
While I was trying to rebuild work in Arequipa, the proceedings in the valley continued along their slow and fragmented course.
One of the most difficult moments of that period was the Cámara Gesell procedure. I knew from the beginning of the accusation that that moment would come, but nothing truly prepares one to face it.
The interview was carried out without my presence, as required by that procedure. I could only wait for the result. That waiting was particularly hard, because the accusations affected not only my legal situation, but also my identity as a person and as a father.
When the conclusions of the forensic psychological report were finally known, I felt a relief that is difficult to describe.
The expert was clear: the psychological evaluation presented in the process did not meet the technical standards of a forensic assessment. An appropriate methodology had not been applied, risk and vulnerability factors had not been evaluated, and the contradictions and gaps present in the testimony had not been critically analysed.
In a forensic evaluation, the objective is to examine the reliability of a statement. According to the expert, that had not happened. For that reason he concluded that the psychological report had a high margin of error and could not be considered reliable as expert evidence.
It did not mean that the process would end.
But for the first time an independent technical assessment appeared within the case file that seriously questioned the basis of the accusation.
Even so, the system did not change its rhythm.
The procedures continued, the timelines kept extending, and the sensation of being trapped in a mechanism I did not control did not disappear. I learned that even when favourable elements appear, the process neither stops nor accelerates. It simply continues.
That was perhaps one of the most difficult lessons to accept: within a judicial process, the truth does not necessarily produce immediate relief.
It produces waiting.
During that time I was also evaluated by psychologists and psychiatrists appointed within the process. The interviews were long, repetitive and technical. I answered questions about my life, my personal history, my relationship with my family, my behaviour, my emotions. Everything was examined with a level of detail that felt strange, but was necessary in that context.
The reports concluded that I did not present psychological or psychiatric disorders. It was an important result, but once again it did not change the rhythm of the process.
Life remained suspended between minimal advances and long periods of waiting.
Over time that waiting stopped feeling like a parenthesis and began to become a way of life. I learned to live with uncertainty, with the impossibility of publicly explaining what was happening, with the constant sensation of being judged by people who did not know the full story.
It was a silent burden.
However, in the midst of that period of exhaustion, something unexpected happened that began to change my understanding of what had truly taken place during the previous years.
Months after the Cámara Gesell interview, when the process was already continuing on its course, explanations began to appear that had not existed before.
It was then that Rubén appeared.
He was not part of the judicial process, but he ended up being one of the most important pieces in understanding what had happened during those years.
Rubén had for a long time been a person close to Mary. I knew him indirectly from before, but I had never had a personal relationship with him. His name had appeared at different moments in our history, always in the background, without my truly understanding his place in everything that was happening.
Between April and May of 2024, Rubén called me.
It was not a long conversation at first. Nor was it dramatic. It was rather cautious, as if he himself were measuring how far he could speak. With time, however, he began to tell me things I had not known. Facts, conversations, decisions taken behind my back for years.
It was then that I began to understand the dimension of what had been happening while I was trying to sustain family life and work at the ranch.
Rubén confirmed that there had been a secret relationship with Mary for approximately four years — a parallel relationship whose true extent I had never suspected. It was not merely an affair, but a space of conversation and decision-making from which I had been completely excluded.
Many things that had been incomprehensible to me began to find a context.
It was not a sudden revelation or a moment of absolute clarity. Rather, it was a slow process, made up of fragments that gradually began to fit together: comments that previously had made no sense, attitudes that at the time had seemed inexplicable, decisions that had directly affected life at the ranch and my relationship with my daughters.
Listening to him was difficult, but also necessary.
For the first time in a long while, I felt that someone was willing to speak without shouting, without accusations, without shifting versions. Only facts, as he had experienced them.
Not everything he said was easy to accept. Some things were painful. Others confirmed intuitions I had preferred not to pursue. But little by little the confusion began to diminish.
During the following months, in several conversations, Rubén helped me reconstruct a part of the story that I had not been able to see from within.
It was not a complete explanation. Nor an absolution of anyone. But it was a fundamental piece in understanding how decisions, silences and relationships had gradually aligned until they culminated in the accusations and the definitive rupture of my life in the valley.
While the judicial process continued to move slowly forward, that personal understanding began to restore something I had lost during those two years: a certain sense of reality.
It solved nothing in the courts.
But it allowed me to understand.
And at that moment, understanding was the only thing I truly needed.
During those two years I learned to live in two different times.
On the one hand, the slow and unpredictable time of the judicial process, where each advance seemed to dissolve into new waiting. On the other, the concrete time of daily work in Arequipa, where each ride organised, each horse trained and each satisfied client confirmed that it was still possible to move forward.
None of that resolved the conflict in the valley. The accusations continued, the files grew, and decisions were postponed. But at least my life was not completely paralysed.
Looking back, that period was a strange combination of exhaustion and reconstruction. I lost almost everything I had built during decades at the ranch, but I did not lose my profession nor the trust of those who truly knew me.
That made the difference.
Over time I understood that institutional justice has its own rhythm, detached from human urgency. One may become desperate, but the system does not move faster because of that. The only thing left is to endure and continue living while the process unfolds.
And that is what I did.
I kept working. I kept travelling. I kept waiting.
Until, in the midst of that fragile balance, something happened that shook everything again.
An email sent by Mary to my international contacts changed the situation once more.
Starting again while the process continued
The two years that followed the complaints are difficult to describe. Not for lack of events, but because the experience bears little resemblance to what one imagines when hearing the word “justice”.
Before all this, I had no experience whatsoever with legal proceedings. I assumed that a complaint opened an orderly investigation: both sides would be heard, facts would be verified, and decisions would be taken within reasonable timeframes. It was a simple idea, almost naïve, based on common sense.
The reality was different.
During those two years, my life became trapped between notifications, summonses, statements, interviews, psychological examinations, expert reports, meetings with prosecutors and lawyers, documents that arrived late or with errors, procedures that were rescheduled without explanation, and constant travel between Arequipa and the valley.
Nothing moved forward with clarity. Everything moved slowly.
At times the sensation was not one of investigation, but of waiting. A waiting without form, without understandable deadlines, without control.
My lawyers travelled on several occasions to comply with procedures and statements. On one occasion, a meeting with the prosecutor was cancelled just minutes before it was due to begin. Both had travelled there, with flights and hotel already paid for, and the appointment was simply suspended without explanation. Situations like that became part of the exhaustion of the process.
I learned that the process did not follow the rhythm of real life. Everyday logic — cause, effect, response — stopped functioning.
Meanwhile, the procedures multiplied. Witness statements from both sides. Mandatory psychological evaluations. A psychiatric interview to determine whether I had any sexual disorder. The interview in the Cámara Gesell. Medical reports. Forensic examinations.
Five different proceedings were advancing at the same time.
All of this implied constant expenses: criminal and civil lawyers, specialists, travel, accommodation, administrative procedures. And I no longer had access to my economic unit: the ranch, the horses, the equipment, the vehicle, the work that had sustained my life for decades.
It was a silent but constant pressure.
In the middle of that scenario another claim appeared: Mary requested financial support for Gaia, who was already about twenty years old. She asked for a monthly amount completely disproportionate to reality, based on income that simply did not exist. That confirmed something that was beginning to become evident: the conflict was not diminishing, it was expanding.
For a long time I tried to find a logic behind all of it. If the objective had been economic, it would have been far simpler to reach an agreement when I was still at the ranch. Nothing that was happening seemed to lead to a solution. It only produced exhaustion.
At times I wondered whether it responded to rational calculation, to an obsession with destroying me, or to something I simply could not understand. I had no answers. Only questions.
During that same period, in Arequipa, my life took another unexpected direction.
The equestrian community of Arequipa, with whom I had maintained relationships for years, became an unexpected support. Among them was Claudio, a well-known breeder with a stud of more than a hundred horses. We had known each other for many years. Between 2010 and 2014 we had organised equestrian expeditions together across the coastal desert of Arequipa.
It was he who first helped me reopen those coastal routes so that I could generate some income while everything else was paralysed. Later he also supported me with the logistics necessary to maintain the rides that had already been established in Cusco.
I arrived in Arequipa practically from zero. Without a ranch, without my own horses, without equipment, without any structure. Only with my experience and a few friends who did not hesitate to help.
During the first year we began to rebuild the operation step by step. Claudio’s horses had to be trained specifically for long-distance routes. We had to buy new saddlebags, obtain breastplates to keep the saddles in place on steep climbs, review equipment and adjust every detail.
It was also necessary to form a support team from the start. We worked with Claudio’s staff and horse trainers, teaching them the logic of the routes, the timing, the rest stops, the lunch points and campsites. We had to find a cook, organise the logistics of lunches along the trail, and plan in advance what to carry and what not to carry. Everything that for years had functioned naturally at the ranch had to be rebuilt from scratch.
The first year was difficult. The second began to consolidate.
Little by little we managed to recover the same level of service and quality that we had before, although the road to reach that point was long and demanding.
Some agencies withdrew. Others did not.
The most important ones stayed. They reduced commissions, offered support and understood the situation. They did not need long explanations. They knew who I was and how I had always worked.
It was during that period that I understood something simple: true friends are not recognised in moments of success, but when one is on the ground.
While in the valley the legal processes moved forward slowly, in Arequipa I was trying to rebuild my life step by step.
It was not a victory. It was resistance.
While I was trying to rebuild work in Arequipa, the proceedings in the valley continued along their slow and fragmented course.
One of the most difficult moments of that period was the Cámara Gesell procedure. I knew from the beginning of the accusation that that moment would come, but nothing truly prepares one to face it.
The interview was carried out without my presence, as required by that procedure. I could only wait for the result. That waiting was particularly hard, because the accusations affected not only my legal situation, but also my identity as a person and as a father.
When the conclusions of the forensic psychological report were finally known, I felt a relief that is difficult to describe.
The expert was clear: the psychological evaluation presented in the process did not meet the technical standards of a forensic assessment. An appropriate methodology had not been applied, risk and vulnerability factors had not been evaluated, and the contradictions and gaps present in the testimony had not been critically analysed.
In a forensic evaluation, the objective is to examine the reliability of a statement. According to the expert, that had not happened. For that reason he concluded that the psychological report had a high margin of error and could not be considered reliable as expert evidence.
It did not mean that the process would end.
But for the first time an independent technical assessment appeared within the case file that seriously questioned the basis of the accusation.
Even so, the system did not change its rhythm.
The procedures continued, the timelines kept extending, and the sensation of being trapped in a mechanism I did not control did not disappear. I learned that even when favourable elements appear, the process neither stops nor accelerates. It simply continues.
That was perhaps one of the most difficult lessons to accept: within a judicial process, the truth does not necessarily produce immediate relief.
It produces waiting.
During that time I was also evaluated by psychologists and psychiatrists appointed within the process. The interviews were long, repetitive and technical. I answered questions about my life, my personal history, my relationship with my family, my behaviour, my emotions. Everything was examined with a level of detail that felt strange, but was necessary in that context.
The reports concluded that I did not present psychological or psychiatric disorders. It was an important result, but once again it did not change the rhythm of the process.
Life remained suspended between minimal advances and long periods of waiting.
Over time that waiting stopped feeling like a parenthesis and began to become a way of life. I learned to live with uncertainty, with the impossibility of publicly explaining what was happening, with the constant sensation of being judged by people who did not know the full story.
It was a silent burden.
However, in the midst of that period of exhaustion, something unexpected happened that began to change my understanding of what had truly taken place during the previous years.
Months after the Cámara Gesell interview, when the process was already continuing on its course, explanations began to appear that had not existed before.
It was then that Rubén appeared.
He was not part of the judicial process, but he ended up being one of the most important pieces in understanding what had happened during those years.
Rubén had for a long time been a person close to Mary. I knew him indirectly from before, but I had never had a personal relationship with him. His name had appeared at different moments in our history, always in the background, without my truly understanding his place in everything that was happening.
Between April and May of 2024, Rubén called me.
It was not a long conversation at first. Nor was it dramatic. It was rather cautious, as if he himself were measuring how far he could speak. With time, however, he began to tell me things I had not known. Facts, conversations, decisions taken behind my back for years.
It was then that I began to understand the dimension of what had been happening while I was trying to sustain family life and work at the ranch.
Rubén confirmed that there had been a secret relationship with Mary for approximately four years — a parallel relationship whose true extent I had never suspected. It was not merely an affair, but a space of conversation and decision-making from which I had been completely excluded.
Many things that had been incomprehensible to me began to find a context.
It was not a sudden revelation or a moment of absolute clarity. Rather, it was a slow process, made up of fragments that gradually began to fit together: comments that previously had made no sense, attitudes that at the time had seemed inexplicable, decisions that had directly affected life at the ranch and my relationship with my daughters.
Listening to him was difficult, but also necessary.
For the first time in a long while, I felt that someone was willing to speak without shouting, without accusations, without shifting versions. Only facts, as he had experienced them.
Not everything he said was easy to accept. Some things were painful. Others confirmed intuitions I had preferred not to pursue. But little by little the confusion began to diminish.
During the following months, in several conversations, Rubén helped me reconstruct a part of the story that I had not been able to see from within.
It was not a complete explanation. Nor an absolution of anyone. But it was a fundamental piece in understanding how decisions, silences and relationships had gradually aligned until they culminated in the accusations and the definitive rupture of my life in the valley.
While the judicial process continued to move slowly forward, that personal understanding began to restore something I had lost during those two years: a certain sense of reality.
It solved nothing in the courts.
But it allowed me to understand.
And at that moment, understanding was the only thing I truly needed.
During those two years I learned to live in two different times.
On the one hand, the slow and unpredictable time of the judicial process, where each advance seemed to dissolve into new waiting. On the other, the concrete time of daily work in Arequipa, where each ride organised, each horse trained and each satisfied client confirmed that it was still possible to move forward.
None of that resolved the conflict in the valley. The accusations continued, the files grew, and decisions were postponed. But at least my life was not completely paralysed.
Looking back, that period was a strange combination of exhaustion and reconstruction. I lost almost everything I had built during decades at the ranch, but I did not lose my profession nor the trust of those who truly knew me.
That made the difference.
Over time I understood that institutional justice has its own rhythm, detached from human urgency. One may become desperate, but the system does not move faster because of that. The only thing left is to endure and continue living while the process unfolds.
And that is what I did.
I kept working. I kept travelling. I kept waiting.
Until, in the midst of that fragile balance, something happened that shook everything again.
An email sent by Mary to my international contacts changed the situation once more.
The Email
On 9 January 2024, Mary sent an email to several of my international contacts, people with whom I had worked for more than two decades in organising horseback rides and equestrian journeys in Peru.
The message was long and confusing. It mixed personal accusations, distorted accounts and claims about the ranch’s financial situation. At the centre of it all was one particularly serious accusation: that I had abandoned my family and the animals, and that one of my dogs had died as a result of that abandonment.
She attached a photograph of Antón.
But the email was not limited to accusations. It also had an explicit commercial aim.
Mary claimed that I had taken all the business’s money and was now working in Arequipa with other horses, forgetting the ranch altogether. She presented Antón’s death as a direct consequence of that supposed abandonment.
Towards the end of the message, she directly asked the agencies to continue their bookings with her new company. She announced the creation of her own website and presented a riding calendar for 2024 with the same programmes, dates and routes that we had offered for years from the ranch.
She also claimed that she had always been responsible for the logistics of the rides and that she would now assume the role of principal guide.
Defamation and a commercial proposal appeared in the same message.
Several of those contacts forwarded the email to me. Some wrote to me directly. Not to accuse me, but to understand what was happening. They were agencies and colleagues with whom I had worked for many years, people who knew the way I worked and the care I had always shown towards the animals.
Not everyone reacted in the same way. Some agencies preferred to keep their distance. Not because they believed the content of the email, but because they asked me directly what was happening, and I explained the situation honestly: the legal proceedings, my inability to access the ranch and my horses, and the fact that I was reorganising the rides from Arequipa with the support of friends and using their horses and logistics.
In international equestrian tourism, some operators prefer to avoid risks when there are personal conflicts or ongoing legal proceedings. For them, sending clients in the middle of that uncertainty was simply too complicated, regardless of who was right.
Only a few agencies took that decision. The most important ones did not. They had known me for years, they knew how I had always worked, and they understood that the situation was temporary. Some even adjusted their commercial terms in order to help me maintain the operation while everything was being clarified.
That support made a real difference at a moment when everything else seemed unstable.
It confirmed something I had already begun to understand during those years: real trust does not disappear because of an email.
After the email was sent, representatives of an animal protection organisation visited the ranch. The visit took place as a result of the accusations contained in Mary’s message.
At that time, one of the lawyers linked to the organisation assumed that there was a veterinary certificate explaining Antón’s death as due to natural causes. That assertion was based on what Mary had said, not on a verified document.
For a long time it was assumed that such a certificate existed.
Only much later, when I insisted on obtaining a copy, did I learn that no such veterinary certificate had ever existed. The reference to the document had been an assumption made by the lawyer, who had believed the initial version without knowing the full context or the prior facts.
That episode showed clearly how a story can establish itself as truth before it has been verified.
The defamation lawsuit continued along the usual timelines of the judicial system. Statements, submission of documents, hearings spaced out over time. Each step moved slowly, as though the conflict were always trailing slightly behind real life.
During the proceedings, she maintained that the email had been a private message, a kind of plea for help, and that she was acting as the victim of the situation. She also presented photographs of the dogs’ shelter and of protection-training sessions in order to support the idea of animal mistreatment.
The shelter was not a cage or a place of permanent confinement. It was a spacious kennel, with a roof and shade, built so that the dogs could rest during the day in a safe place. At night, both German Shepherds slept inside the house, outside the girls’ bedroom, as part of the family’s and the ranch’s everyday protection.
During the day, at certain times, the dogs remained in that space for a practical reason: at the ranch there were other animals — horses, sheep, turkeys, cats — which at times roamed freely, and without supervision the dogs might chase them. It was not punishment or neglect, but the responsible management of animals in a rural environment.
I have worked with protection dogs for many years. I trained dogs for a large part of my life and even took part in a world championship in Boston, United States. I have always worked according to international animal welfare standards and training methods based on simulation, control and desensitisation, never punishment. The use of a crop during training, for example, formed part of that simulation and desensitisation process; it was not an instrument used to strike the animal.
None of that context appeared in court.
The images presented were interpreted outside their everyday reality, as though they showed confinement or mistreatment, when in fact they formed part of the normal life of dogs trained to protect a house and a family in the countryside.
In the same trial, however, she admitted that Antón had not died for the reasons she had written in the email, but because of his age.
Even so, the judge’s decision did not change.
There were episodes during that process that were difficult to understand. On one occasion Mary failed to appear at an important hearing and was declared in contempt. Days later we received a police notification indicating that she was “at the judge’s disposal”. Yet on that very same day she was seen shopping at the village market.
None of that altered the course of the trial.
I remember that, at one point in the proceedings, my own lawyer said to me in private:
“This judge is a disgrace.”
I did not know how to respond.
Appealing the decision was a possibility. It still is. But after two years of proceedings, expenses and exhaustion, another need also emerged: to move on.
Not every conflict is resolved in the courts.
Some things simply come to an end when one decides to stop living inside them.
After the defamation case, what remains most strongly with me is not the judge’s decision or the arguments made in court.
It is the memory of Antón.
During the proceedings, the video recorded by Mary in the dog’s final moments was presented. Seeing those images was devastating. Antón appeared in a state of extreme deterioration, reduced to skin and bone.
To this day I cannot understand why anyone would film an animal in that condition instead of seeking immediate help. There was no phone call. No request for assistance. No visible veterinary intervention.
That silence is what I find hardest to understand.
During that same period, the horses and the other animals on the ranch were being fed. There were also resources to pay a private lawyer and for the everyday use of the vehicle. That is why it is difficult to accept that there was no possibility of caring for an elderly dog who clearly needed urgent attention.
I cannot know exactly what happened in those days. I only know that I had no access to the ranch and no possibility of intervening.
Antón was my dog. And seeing him die in those conditions, without being able to do anything, is something I will never forget.
Not because of the legal proceedings.
Because of him.