They say the past is a distant land and people are different there.
But Adelina Garcia Mendoza recalls the events of Dec. 1, 1983, as if they were part of a film that’s unreeling still, as if she were the same woman she was then — a young wife and mother, just as helpless, just as afraid.
“I remember it all as if it were a moment ago,” she says.
Those were terrible times, the long, dark years of the 1980s and early ’90s, when this handsome colonial town high in the central Andes of Peru was haunted by two murderous forces — an eerie Maoist insurgency known as Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, pitted against the Peruvian police and military.
Now a woman of 50, with her long black hair streaked with filaments of grey and pulled back from her bronze, oval face, Garcia huddles at a small wooden table on the second floor of a building that houses the aptly named Museum of Memory. The structure stands on a street called Liberty in the western reaches of Ayacucho, the city where the Shining Path was born, where it thrived for more than a decade, and where it finally collapsed amid a poisoned legacy of murder, grief and enduring loss.
Just now, Garcia is recalling the night three decades ago when Peruvian soldiers in balaclavas burst into the home she shared with her husband and their two infant daughters at 282 Avenida Arenales.
“The wounds suffered by the people were very hard, very sad. Even now, the people haven’t escaped this situation. There are indelible memories.”
It was after midnight, a curfew was in force, and Garcia and her family were asleep in their beds.
The soldiers seized her spouse of four years, a self-employed welder, aged 27. His name is Jose Zosimo Prado, or at least it was. They muscled him out of the house.
“The soldiers hit me when I tried to grab him,” Garcia says. “We couldn’t follow them because of the curfew. We couldn’t go in the street.”
And so her husband joined the growing ranks of los desaparecidos.
The disappeared.
It is a defining trait of this benighted species that, when they vanish, they vanish forever, and Garcia has never seen her husband again.
She insists he took no part in subversion. She believes some neighbours must have denounced him — out of jealousy or spite — and the soldiers did the rest.
Tens of thousands of innocent people were killed during those years, in Ayacucho or the smaller towns or villages scattered across this lofty hinterland. Some of the bodies have been found and identified. Thousands more are missing still, and their fate continues to engender a special category of suffering.
Like Ayacucho itself, Garcia is trapped between an unresolved past and an uncertain future.
In the years since her husband disappeared, the population of her city has nearly doubled, and life is peaceful now, although troubles persist.
Poverty remains widespread; transportation routes are better but still inadequate; industry is non-existent; and it’s a rare foreign tourist who finds his way here.
That’s a shame, for Ayacucho is a stately city graced by more than 30 churches, where sturdy stone porticos and clay-tile roofs surround an airy plaza ornamented by jacarandas, pepper trees and palms. Steep green hills rise on all sides.
You would not guess that this was once a place of terror and bombs, of torture and death.
“The wounds suffered by the people were very hard, very sad,” says Amilcar Huancahuari Tueros, the mayor of the city. “Even now, the people haven’t escaped this situation. There are indelible memories.”
Late last month, white coffins containing the remains of 78 victims of the conflict were turned over to family members in a daylong ceremony in Ayacucho. The dead included pregnant women, children and seniors, whose remains were found in more than 50 mass or individual graves in the district of Chungui.
Established in 1971, the Shining Path was originally a faction of Peru’s Maoist-line Communist party. Its founder and leader was a 42-year-old philosophy professor named Abimael Guzman, who taught at the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho and initially trolled for acolytes among the school’s students and faculty.
Better known by his nom-de-guerre — Presidente Gonzalo — Guzman had a grandiose vision of himself and his cause, holding himself up as the fourth pillar of world revolution, in a league with Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong.
In 1975, Guzman and his followers launched the clandestine phase of their struggle, melting into the slums of Ayacucho or fanning out into the impoverished hamlets in the surrounding hills, to proselytize among the urban poor and the rural peasantry.
Five years later, just as Peru was returning to democratic rule following 12 years of military dictatorship, the Shining Path emerged from the shadows, launching an armed guerrilla struggle against the newly established authorities.
Harsh, murderous and relentlessly destructive, the rebels soon squandered whatever early sympathy they may have enjoyed. Worse, their armed campaign provoked the government into acts of equal violence.
In 1983, Lima sent in the armed forces, clamping Ayacucho and the surrounding region under martial rule.
The result was a two-sided horror story, with the senderistas on one side, the military on the other, and the mainly indigenous population caught in the middle.
“It was very hard to distinguish one side from the other,” says Humberto Hernandez Arribasplata, now rector of the university in Ayacucho. “I couldn’t say this side did more, that side did less. Both sides invaded and destroyed.”
On Jan. 26, 1983, a group of eight Peruvian journalists — most of them from newspapers in Lima — travelled from Ayacucho to an outlying village called Uchuraccay, home to roughly 400 people.
For reasons that are still fiercely debated, some of the villagers turned on the journalists, hacking and bludgeoning them to death and then burying their bodies and their equipment.
The eight were among the first fatalities of the conflict who hailed from outside this isolated region, and their deaths shocked people all over Peru and captured the attention of newspaper readers and TV audiences in other parts of the world.
Something sinister — and very deadly — was happening in Peru.
The focus of the trouble remained fixed in the central Andes, with Ayacucho at its epicentre, but the killings and sabotage, the terror and suspicion, soon spread to other parts of the country.
Here in Ayacucho, death became an intimate affair.
At the military garrison by the airport at the edge of town — a facility then known as Cuartel los Cabitos — soldiers installed four large ovens, which they used to cremate the bodies of those they’d tortured and killed, including children.
According to Hernandez, the university rector, portions of more than 500 bodies have so far been discovered buried beneath the land adjoining the garrison. Only about 50 have so far been identified, he said.
Maybe some of those bones belong to Adelina Garcia’s husband, but nobody knows.
In the weeks following his capture, Garcia made repeated forays to the garrison to plead for information. She learned nothing.
Three weeks after her husband vanished, she heard that some human cadavers had turned up in a village not far from Ayacucho. She and others hurried there.
“We found five dead, all nude,” she says now. “We couldn’t recognize the faces.”
She knew her husband had a large scar on his right leg, and she searched frantically for that.
“But I didn’t find him,” she says. “I have never found him.”
In the ensuing years, Peru has managed to put a portion of its nightmares to rest.
Guzman, the Shining Path founder, has been behind bars since 1992 — an old and bilious man now, cursed with chronic psoriasis.
In 2003, a government-appointed tribunal called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented its final report — 12 volumes in all — confirming that at least 69,280 lives were lost in what commission chairman Salomon Lerner called a time “of horror and disgrace for Peruvian society and the state.”
Nowadays, memorials to the dead abound, including innumerable plaques, as well as the modest gallery — the Museum of Memory — in Ayacucho.
In Lima, the Peruvian government constructed a more ambitious museum devoted to those times. The finished project, occupying the sixth floor of the Ministry of Culture headquarters, is both chilling and unnerving.
Despite these efforts, the pain and suffering of people such as Adelina Garcia persist.
Like thousands of others, she wants to ensure that what happened years ago in these remote mountains will never be forgotten. As president of a national organization that represents the families of the dead and disappeared, Garcia is also pressing for what she calls a “dignified indemnity” to compensate the families of those who died or disappeared.
The money would undoubtedly help, but it would not drain the sorrows that still haunt these lands. It would not remake the future. It would not erase the past.
“We are always going to have this pain,” Garcia says, “especially the families of the disappeared.”
Sunday 10 February 2013
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/02/10/peruvian_city_of_ayacucho_remains_a_museum_of_memory_and_sorrow.html
