From shining path to darkness of memories
More than a decade after the guerilla movement in Peru largely
ceased, the rebels' attempt to move into politics has reopened a searing
national debate
During a scorched earth military campaign that threatened to topple the
Peruvian government, the Maoist guerilla group known as the Shining Path
terrorised Peru with assassinations, bombings, beheadings and
massacres. So Peruvians were rattled last year when a group of former
guerillas began collecting signatures to create a political party to
participate in the democratic process they had once sought to destroy.
Among their goals was an amnesty for crimes committed during the war,
which lasted from the early 1980s to 2000; it would allow the release of
jailed Shining Path leaders, including the group's reviled founder,
Abimael Guzmán Reynoso.
More than a decade after the struggle largely ceased, the rebels'
attempt to move into politics has stirred emotions that are still raw
and reopened a searing national debate on what the war meant and how to
move on.
“We are at this moment in a fight over what to remember and how to
remember,” said José Pablo Baraybar, executive director of the Peruvian
Team for Forensic Anthropology, which has exhumed bodies from several
mass graves from the war years.
Students in the spotlight
What alarmed many Peruvians about the Shining Path's effort to reinvent
itself was that many of the hundreds of thousands of signatures the
former guerillas collected came from college students too young to
recall the turmoil of the war. Driving home the point, a television
station broadcast interviews with young people who were unable to
identify a photograph of Mr. Guzmán, whose bearded face was once as
recognisable as that of the president.
“It showed that many young people don't know anything about what
happened,” said Fernando Carvallo, national director of the Place of
Memory, a three-story museum being built in Lima to commemorate the
conflict. In a sign of how deep the wounds remain, even a project
intended to be as even-handed as this one was initially opposed by the
previous president, Alan García, and has depended on foreign financing,
mainly from Germany and the European Union.
In January, election officials rejected the effort to create a new
Shining Path-linked party, ruling that the group adhered to
anti-democratic principles and had failed to meet some technical
requirements of the election law.
Peru has seen impressive, although uneven, economic growth in recent
years, but many of the inequities that helped set off the guerilla
conflict remain, including crushing poverty in urban slums and villages
and marginalisation of indigenous populations.
At least one faction of the Shining Path remains active in a remote
jungle in central Peru, where its activities are focused on drug
trafficking. It recently shot down a military helicopter and killed
several soldiers, giving Peruvians an uneasy feeling that the awful past
was not so distant.
Part of the difficulty here is that both sides, the Shining Path and the
government forces, were responsible for horrific abuses. That makes the
process of agreeing on what happened more complex than it was in
countries like Chile or Argentina, which have tried to come to terms
with human rights abuses committed by military dictatorships.
2003 report
Most discussions of how to memorialise the war in Peru begin with the
2003 report of a government-sponsored Truth Commission, which estimated
that more than 69,000 people had died in the conflict. The commission
concluded that close to half the deaths were caused by the Shining Path
and almost a third by government forces. The rest were attributed to
various armed groups, including paramilitary forces, another rebel group
and village self-defence patrols.
Alfredo Crespo, a lawyer for Mr. Guzmán, the Shining Path leader,
disputed the panel's conclusions, saying that the numbers were inflated
and that the government bore responsibility for most of the bloodshed.
He said Mr. Guzmán, who was arrested in 1992 and is serving a life
sentence, had paid his debt and should be freed. “There comes a moment
after the war ends when you have to suppress the pain and think about
the future of Peruvian society,” Mr. Crespo said. “You have to heal the
wounds and begin a process of national reconciliation.”
Such words are shocking to many Peruvians, coming on behalf of the man
who created the Shining Path's brutal ideology. The group was notorious
for killing villagers who did not support it and putting signs on the
corpses to warn others of the dangers of dissent.
Today, the landscape of memory in Peru is as rocky as the ground at La
Hoyada, a lot on the fringes of the city of Ayacucho, the capital of the
region of the same name that saw the fiercest fighting during the war.
In the 1980s, La Hoyada was a dumping ground for the bodies of people
detained and tortured at a nearby military barracks. The site also
contained an outdoor oven used to burn some of the bodies. A well-known
victims' rights group, Anfasep, which includes women who believe that
their husbands or other relatives may have been secretly buried or
cremated at La Hoyada, has erected a cross there and is asking the
government to preserve the site.
Adelina García, 47, stood on a recent afternoon in the shadow of the
concrete tank that once fuelled the oven. As with many people, the war
came at her from both sides. Her father-in-law was killed by the Shining
Path. In December 1983, she was beaten unconscious by government
soldiers who hauled off her husband. She never saw him again and
believes he was killed and his body dumped at La Hoyada.
“These plants here know where he is,” she said, eyeing the agave plants
and bushes that have taken over the lot. “If they had mouths, they would
tell me where he was buried.”
Truth Commission
The Truth Commission registered more than 4,000 possible mass graves.
Mr. Baraybar, the forensic anthropologist, led the exhumation of 92
bodies at Putis, an Andean hamlet in the Ayacucho region where
government troops massacred at least 123 villagers in 1984. He said his
team has located other burial sites but has been unable to receive
government permission for further exhumations.
The Ayacucho victims' rights group also wants the government to make
good on promises to pay reparations to victims' families. And it wants
the courts to move ahead with cases against the officers responsible for
the deaths.
The group created one of the country's first memory museums, in
Ayacucho, in 2005. It has a display of clothes worn by people killed in
the conflict, which in some cases made it possible for relatives to
identify their bodies. And it features a life-size model of a mass
grave.
If the museum in Ayacucho adopts the victims' point of view, the
Monument to Military Valor, on a military base in Lima, takes a
different approach. The museum is a full-size replica of the Japanese
ambassador's residence, where 72 hostages were held for 126 days by
another rebel group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The replica
was built so that army commandos could practice a raid on the building
beforehand, which they carried out in 1997 in an operation that left 2
commandos, 14 guerillas and 1 captive dead.
But witnesses, including one of the hostages, later said they had seen
up to three of the guerillas surrender, alleging they were killed
afterward. A group of military and intelligence officials has been
charged in the killings, but the case has dragged on in the courts for
years.
There is no mention of the charges in the museum, which the director,
Maj. William Meyhuay, a veteran of the raid, said were baseless. “We
want people to know the real story,” he said.
The Pro-Human Rights Association, based in Lima, has been instrumental
in pushing the case arising from the raid and has worked with the La
Hoyada families. “The fundamental thing about memory is that it has to
help us prevent the rise of projects that can bring us back down that
road of violence and terror,” said Francisco Soberón, the group's
executive director. “Memory acts like a vaccine.” (Andrea Zarate contributed reporting.) — New York Times News Service
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