The current government of Peru is determined to find out the truth behind the massacre of 1983, where several Indians were killed by military squads and buried in and around Quispillacta, a Quechua Indian hamlet. The initiative is being carried out by a special taskforce - the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - created one year after the demise of the previous autocratic regime, headed by Alberto K. Fujimori.
According to The New York Times Online, the 1980s saw the height of violence in Peru . The government was then submerged in an internal war against the Shining Path or “Sendero Luminoso”, a Maoist organization responsible for a great number of terrorist acts, undertaken with the aim of transforming Peru into a Maoist state. Ayauco was the region containing the highest levels of Shining Path infiltrations and insurgencies. Consequently, a large number of Quechua speakers within this area - mostly Indian and Peruvian natives - were taken by military forces either for leaders or simply as members of the Shining Path. Brutal policies of suppression ensured that they were tortured and executed. 30,000 people died as a result.
Pedro Nuñez, Julián Nuñez and Francisco Huamani Galindo were only three of such people assassinated, but their relatives are still seeking to extract some form of justice for their deaths, some 20 years later. Due to state-sponsored repression by Fujimori’s government, the crimes they continue to protest have never been investigated. “Now, the commision is trying to give the people of Ayacucho a voice they never had,” reported Juan Forero, a journalist.
However, a huge number of these crimes will not be disclosed, nor will all mass graves be excavated. Work of this kind is an overwhelming task for the government commissioners, who are now expected to wade through stacks of confidential, disordered and even incomprehensible papers, and to interview thousands of people, in most cases by means of interpreters able to speak the Quechua language. As a result of investigative excavation, a large number of bones have been found near Quispillacta. After being catalogued, these will be returned to select families, so they might finally dispose of them in a manner of their choosing.
Peru, like other countries in South and Central America , has an important indigenous population. As in other countries, this population has seen itself involved in conflicts that have nothing to do with their own ways of life. Less than three weeks ago, Columbian natives were threatened by a civil war fought between military organizations, neither of which represent nor support indigenous rights. The case of Peru goes beyond the issue of threat alone: a huge number of people have already been made victims. As elsewhere, they belong to the most vulnerable class of people, “People who did not know what the soldiers were saying to them,” according to Rosio Vargas, the government’s human rights ombudsman in the province of Ayacucho .
A report on the issue will be submitted next year, with three presidential administrations having come and gone since its commissioning. Two of the administrations’ luminaries, Fernando Belaúnde Terry and Alan Garcia Perez - both former presidents – will soon be interviewed.
