Tampa Tribune reporter Todd Smith slain 20 years ago in Peru

Todd Smith's face stares out into the newsroom from a plaque in our display case. He is still 28, handsome, bright and ready to seize the day.

It is a 20-year-old photograph. Most of the people now in the newsroom never knew their colleague whose legacy was being written daily in his fresh and impatient style two decades ago.

They only vaguely know his story; one that came to a horrific end 20 years ago today somewhere in a place called the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru, where the young American was tortured, killed and his body mutilated.

The story, of course, never really ended and will not as the pursuit of justice and his killers technically continues.

The Washington and Lee University graduate had come to the newsroom as a general assignments reporter but he soon was writing opinion pieces about local politics and government. He had an enormous appetite for news and it was not confined to local county commissions.

He wanted to write on a global scale. He finagled a trip to Colombia to do a series on drug trafficking. Todd had a particular interest in Latin America and spoke pretty good Spanish. We printed both parts of his series in September 1989.

"Death begets death," he wrote in one of his pieces. "... such is the equation of the Colombian drug culture. Violence is only one aspect of a proud, democratic country with a friendly, charitable people but violence pervades every level."

A month later Todd was pushing to return to South America; this time to go to Peru and do another series, this time examining the drug trade and its connections to the increasing violence of the group known as Shining Path. The Trib wasn't eager for him to go, so he decided to make it a working vacation.

The details of what happened to Todd likely never will be known. From various sources, he last was seen alive at a small airport in the jungle town of Uchiza, where he had managed to meet with some of the cocoa growers in what was known to be a vast cocaine producing region. Apparently he was pulled out of a line of passengers waiting to board a flight to Lima. He was dragged to a car and driven to a small house on the outskirts of town.

He was beaten, tortured and finally strangled with a rope. Three days later his mutilated body was found in the town dump. A sign hung around the body accused him of being a spy. Tribune publisher Doyle Harvill and reporter Tim Collie flew to Peru to retrieve the body.

A journalism scholarship has been set up at Washington and Lee in his name.

Through the years there have been arrests. In 2003 police arrested Pedro Roberto Villacorta on the Ecuadorian border. One witness maintains he was the one who strangled Smith.

In two decades the Shining Path Movement has been cut back dramatically, although the drug trade remains strong. The links between the drug trade and worldwide terrorism remain powerful and the war on terror now is a lot closer than the jungles of Peru. Todd Smith's story remains unfinished.