On 25 January 1983, a group of journalists met in the city of Ayacucho, situated in the Andes in Peru. They wanted to travel to Huaychao, a village in the mountains of the Huanta Province, 12,000 feet high, and had booked a taxi for the following morning. The driver, Salvador Luna Ramos, had agreed to take them to Yanorco an hour from Ayacucho on the Tambo highway – for 30,000 soles.
The group consisted of reporters from Lima as well as a number from Ayacucho itself: Félix Gavilán, the local correspondent for Diario de Marka, and Octavio Infante, the managing editor of Ayacucho’s daily newspaper Noticias. Infante’s mother lived in Chacabamba – a small village down the mountain from Huaychao and a short distance from the place at which their taxi would leave them. Infante suggested that they should stop first at his mother’s house, where they could ask his half-brother to be their guide. Nevertheless, the way to Huaychao would be dangerous: the mountain slopes were steep and the paths were narrow, and there was always the possibility of meeting either members of the guerrillas who dominated the region or the sinchis, the anti-subversive police force who sought to protect it. But among the group of journalists – the first journalists to have ventured into the region since the troubles had begun – only Félix Gavilán appeared to appreciate the extent of the danger they faced: while the others bought shoes, pullovers and plastic ponchos for the rain, Gavilán packed a white sheet to be used as a flag in case of difficulties.
What was the attraction of a village so small that it does not even appear on any map? And how had the name Huaychao become so important that everyone in Peru appeared to be talking about it? Because of an unprecedented announcement made in Ayacucho three days before by General Clemente Noel, Chief of the Political Military Command in the Emergency Zone: that the Huaychao comuneros, peasants from the Indian community, had captured seven guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso, the ‘Shining Path’, and, after taking their weapons, their ammunition, their red flags, and their propaganda, had killed them.
The General’s evident delight in his announcement was largely because it was the first good news that he was able to offer since assuming command of the campaign against the Sendero Luminoso five weeks before. Although he had, until then, spoken of various skirmishes with the senderistas, he had been unable to diffuse the sense that the guerrillas had succeeded in eluding the military’s attempts to stop them. The guerrillas’ success was evident in the fact that they had continued, apparently without inhibition, to blow up bridges and power pylons, blockade roads, and occupy villages where they were known to beat or execute thieves and spies or the officials who had taken office in the municipal elections of 1980. The seven dead men in Huaychao were, in a sense, the General’s first success, even though it was a success for which he could not claim responsibility. It was also the first incident, since the insurrection had begun two years ago, that suggested that the Sendero Luminoso was not able to rely entirely on the support – or at least the tolerance – of the peasant community.
Nevertheless, the General was evasive when pressed for details. He knew – or seemed to know – only that a number of peasants had shown up at the police station in Huanta to report the incident and that a patrol, led by a lieutenant from the Civil Guard, had made the twenty-hour climb to Huaychao to confirm the killings.
Many felt that General Noel knew much more than he was saying and that his evasiveness merely confirmed what was already suspected: that the General was afraid of the free press and that he, like so many from the military, had come to resent the newspapers and television and radio stations that had been expropriated by the dictatorship but had been returned to their former owners when the Belaúnde government came to power. Moreover, many of the newer papers – like the leftist El Diario de Marka and the right-wing La República which was founded by many of the officials from the dictatorship itself – were especially critical of the military, and the General did not know how to deal with their questions and their scepticism. After twelve years of military dictatorship, the General was simply not trained for democracy.
In fact the General was being reasonably straightforward: he had to speak in generalities because generalities were all he knew. Not even the lieutenant in charge of the patrol really understood what had happened; he, like the Civil Guards under his command, was from another region: only one of them spoke Quechua.
On the way to Huaychao the lieutenant reported that they saw great masses of Indians assembled on the mountain tops, carrying white flags. The peasants, obviously agitated, alarmed them, but there were no incidents. In Huaychao they came upon the corpses of the seven guerrillas. The comuneros there wanted to retain the weapons, but General Noel had ordered that none be left behind as, according to him, they would attract the return of the ‘subversive delinquents’ even more than the desire for revenge which the peasants obviously feared. The community leaders, the varayocs, stated, through an interpreter, that they had used trickery to kill the terrucos: as they approached Huaychao the people came out to greet them, waving red flags and cheering for the Communist Party and its armed struggle. Chanting the slogans and songs of ‘the militia’, they escorted the guerrillas to the community meeting hall, where, once they had surrounded them completely, they attacked and killed them in a few seconds with the axes, knives and stones that they carried under their ponchos. Only one senderista managed to escape, badly wounded. That was all General Clemente Noel knew at his jubilant press conference on 21 January. He did not even know that three of the seven murdered guerrillas were boys of fourteen and fifteen, students at the Colegio Nacional in Huanta, who had run away from home several months earlier. Nor did he realize that the Huaychao incident was only one very small representation of what was taking place in the Peruvian highlands.
Throughout Peru, news of the murders in Huaychao was largely received with a sense of relief: it suggested that the peasants were starting to fight not with but against the terrorists. Perhaps it marked the end – or at least the decline – of Sendero Luminoso. But the left was sceptical, and many of its representatives declared, in both Parliament and El Diario de Marka, that the real killers had to be the sinchis or possibly even paramilitary troops disguised as peasants. But in one respect, the left and the right were agreed: everyone was united in their dissatisfaction with information that was so obviously inadequate. They wanted to know more. And so dozens of reporters travelled to Ayacucho. And, on the morning of 26 January, eight of them found themselves squeezed together in the taxi of Salvador Luna Ramos.
Who were the reporters? Except for Amador García – the photographer for Oiga, a pro-government weekly – the other seven journalists worked for opposition papers. Two of them – Willy Retto and Jorge Luis Mendívil – were with El Observador, which was moderate to left-of-centre. Willy Retto was twenty-seven and the son of a well-known photographer; Jorge Luis Mendívil was only twenty-two. Both were from Lima: for them, the Indians they passed – dressed in sandals and coloured ponchos and herding flocks of llamas – were as exotic as they would be to any tourist. Willy Retto had spent only a few days in Ayacucho, during which time the police had already confiscated a roll of his film. The night before the trip he scribbled a few lines to a girl in Lima:
Things happen here that I never thought I would see and to which I never believed I would come so close. I’ve seen the poverty of the people, the fear of the peasants, and the tension that exists among the PIP [investigative police], the GC [Civil Guard], the army, as well as among the Senderos and the innocent people.
Retto was not a political activist, but Mendívil belonged to the UDP, an organization of the left, and he was in Ayacucho because he had insisted that his paper send him there. He had just been transferred from the international section of El Observador to the Sunday supplement: his report on Ayacucho was meant to be his debut.
Jorge Sedano was also from Lima and a stranger to the world of the Sierra. He was the oldest of the group, fifty-one, and the heaviest, weighing almost seventeen stone. He was the distinguished photographer for La República and a popular journalist famous for his pictures of car races, his overwhelming good humour, and his Rabelaisian appetite. He was also an excellent cook, and claimed to have invented an irresistible feline stew – the meat was from the cats he raised – called seco.
Eduardo de la Piniella, Pedro Sánchez and Félix Gavilán were from El Diario de Marka, a paper published cooperatively by the various branches of Peruvian Marxism. De la Piniella, the most militant of the three, was thirty-three, tall, fair, athletic, and was active in the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party. Pedro Sánchez spent much of his time in Ayacucho photographing the homeless children of the city. Unlike the other two, Félix Gavilán, a member of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), was familiar with the Andes. He was from Ayacucho, had been a student at the School of Agriculture, and had a radio programme in which he broadcast to the peasants in Quechua. He had spent a good part of his life working with the Indian communities as a journalist and as a specialist in stockbreeding. Octavio Infante, editor of the Ayacucho daily paper, was also from the region; before working on Noticias he had been a labourer, a rural school teacher, and a government employee. He was also of the left, but seems to have been the least enthusiastic about the expedition. It is not impossible that he joined it only to be with his friends.
Regardless of their respective backgrounds and aims all of the reporters disbelieved – or else dismissed completely – the military’s claim that the peasants had executed the seven senderistas. They assumed that the sinchis were responsible or possibly that the seven dead men were not guerrillas at all but innocent peasants murdered by drunken or overbearing Guards. Such cases were not uncommon. The journalists, that is, were going to Huaychao to confirm beliefs that, while varying from individual to individual according to his particular political prejudice, nevertheless seemed to be self-evident truths: that the police and the military were committing atrocities in the Andes, and the government was lying to cover up what had happened in the country near Ayacucho.
But according to the taxi-driver, Salvador Luna Ramos, the burden of their journey was not evident in the way they conducted it. He recalls that the journalists were constantly laughing and joking, and that although they were very uncomfortable – with five in the back and four in the front – they were so amusing that Luna Ramos enjoyed what would otherwise have been a very long and hard drive. They took the Tambo road, climbing to an altitude of 12,000 feet along a narrow edge that overlooks a sheer drop. As they drove, the trees grew sparse; the land around them consisted of black rocks and cactus. They began to see the red flags with the hammer and sickle that were placed on the hilltops or suspended by long cords over the ravines. The small farmers along this road had been attacked by Sendero Luminoso, and their detachments often stopped vehicles whose drivers were asked to pay their ‘revolutionary share’. There was very little traffic.
An hour from Ayacucho they stopped for something to eat in Paella – a half dozen huts scattered between the highway and the stream – and then drove on past the Tocto Lagoon. There they told the taxi driver to stop. Luna Ramos was paid and turned the car around and headed back toward Ayacucho. The last time he saw the journalists, they were carrying their cameras and bags and had begun to climb the mountain in single file. He wished them good luck; the area into which they were going had been declared a ‘liberated zone’ by Sendero Luminoso.
Most Peruvians first heard of Sendero Luminoso in 1980, during the last days of the dictatorship, when its members suspended dogs from the street lamps in Lima. The animals were all wearing placards that accused Deng Tsiao Ping of having betrayed the Revolution. Sendero Luminoso had arrived.
At the time Sendero Luminoso was merely a small group of political fanatics. It had few followers in either Lima or any of the other sections of Peru, with the exception of one place in the southeastern Andes: Ayacucho. Ayacucho is a city of 80,000 inhabitants, and is the capital of the region with the fewest resources, the greatest unemployment, and the highest rates of illiteracy and infant mortality in the country. It is also the area in which Sendero Luminoso is best established. Part of its success there can be attributed to the economic conditions of the region of its origins. But part of its success is also in the charismatic leader who was born in Arequipa in 1934, and who graduated from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Ayacucho with a thesis on ‘The Theory of Space in Kant’, and became a full professor by 1963. His name, Abimael Guzmán, with its resonances in Hebrew, has suggestions of a biblical prophet.
The ideologue of Sendero Luminoso is withdrawn, plump, mysterious, and perpetually inaccessible; since the 1950s he has been a militant member of the Communist Party; in 1964, he was among the disciples of Mao who formed the Red Flag Communist Party. In 1970 he and his followers broke with Red Flag and founded the organization that would be known as Sendero Luminoso, although its members only recognize the official name, the Communist Party of Peru. The term Sendero Luminoso is taken from a statement by an earlier ideologue, José Carlos Mariátegui, who said: ‘Marxist-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution.’
Sendero Luminoso developed in Ayacucho through the labours of this professor and the middle-class Ayacuchan woman he married, Augusta La Torre, and together they turned her small house into a salon for groups of fascinated students. The professor is now difficult to find, however: no one has ever seen him give a speech or take part in the street-demonstrations organized by his followers: it is not even known if he is still in Peru. He was arrested once, in 1970, but spent only a few days in prison. He went into hiding in 1978, and has not been seen since. What is certain, however, is that Comrade Gonzalo – his nom de guerre – is the indisputable leader of Sendero. The senderistas call him the ‘Fourth Sword of Marxism’ (the first three are Marx, Lenin and Mao), arguing that he has given back to ideology the purity it lost in the revisionist betrayals of Moscow, Albania, Cuba, and now Peking. Unlike other insurrectionist groups, Sendero Luminoso avoids publicity; it holds the bourgeois media in contempt. No reporter has ever interviewed Comrade Gonzalo.
According to Guzmán, José Carlos Mariátegui’s description of Peru in the 1930s is true of Peru today: it is a ‘semifeudal and semicolonial society’. It will achieve liberation, therefore, only by following a strategy identical to that of Mao’s: a strategy of prolonged war, with the peasantry as its backbone, that will ‘assault’ the cities. Sendero’s models of socialism are Stalinist Russia, the Cultural Revolution of ‘The Gang of Four’, and the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia – models that are not only extreme and uncompromising but also, it appears, reasonably popular. In Ayacucho and especially the other Andean provinces, Sendero has attracted many followers among students, perhaps because it provides such an immediate outlet for the frustrations felt among young people who are unable to sustain any hope for the future. In the interior the young know that there will be no jobs for them in the saturated markets of their home towns; they also know that what future they do have is in emigrating to the capital, where they face the prospect of living with the other provincials stuck in the slums.
In 1978 the senderistas left the University of Ayacucho, and a few months later the sabotage and terrorism began. The first, in May 1980, was the burning of the ballot boxes in the community of Chuschi during the presidential election. Nobody paid much attention to the first explosions in the Andes: modern European Peru – in which half of the country’s eighteen million inhabitants live – was euphorically celebrating the end of the dictatorship and the re-establishment of democracy. Belaúnde Terry, deposed by the Army in 1968, returned to the presidency with a strong majority, and his Popular Action Party, in a coalition with the Popular Christian Party, won an absolute majority in the Parliament.
The new government was reluctant to recognize what was happening in Ayacucho. During his previous term (1962–1968) Belaúnde Terry had been forced to take a stand against the insurrectionist activities of MIR and ELN (Army of National Liberation); in 1965 and 1966, guerrilla bases were established in the Andes and in the jungle. The government entrusted the suppression of the rebels to the Army, and the military then crushed the rebellion with brutal efficiency, summarily executing most of the people who participated in it. But the same military commanders who directed the anti-guerrilla operations then went on to overthrow the government in the coup of 3 October 1968: the regime that emerged lasted twelve years. When Belaúnde Terry returned to office, he tried at all costs to keep the Armed Forces from assuming the responsibility of the fight against the Sendero Luminoso. He was afraid of a military campaign: its excesses and its consequences.
For the first two years of Sendero Luminoso, the government buried its head in the sand. It said that the press was exaggerating the importance of the movement; that it wasn’t a matter of ‘terrorism’ but of ‘petardism’, and, as all the incidents were confined to an area that constituted less than five per cent of the country’s territory, there was no reason to divert the Armed Forces from their primary function of national defence. The incidents were ordinary crimes, and the police could control them.
A battalion of Civil Guard sinchis – the word means valiant and daring in Quechua – was sent to Ayacucho. Their ignorance of the region and of the ways of the peasants, their inadequate training and poor equipment made their efforts ineffectual if not embarrassing. More important, the police, who had enjoyed more than a little freedom under the regime, were slow to renounce the expediencies of dictatorship: they had not really readjusted to democratic rule. The sinchis, therefore, had almost no effect on the senderistas, but at the same time committed abuses on a scale that simply could not be ignored: arbitrary arrests, torture, rape, theft, accidents involving injuries and deaths. They generated a fear and resentment among the poor that served to work in Sendero Luminoso’s favour, neutralizing the possible negative response that the violence of the senderistas might otherwise have provoked.
The tactics of the senderistas, on the other hand, demonstrated ‘technological’ efficiency and a cold, unscrupulous mentality. Besides blowing up pylons and raiding mining camps for explosives, Sendero Luminoso devastated the small farms in Ayacucho (the large ones had been redistributed in the Agrarian Reform of 1960) and killed or wounded the owners. Dozens of police stations in the rural areas were attacked. In August 1982, Sendero Luminoso boasted that it had carried out ‘2,900 successful operations’.
Many of these were murders; eighty civilians and forty-three police had been killed by 31 December 1982. In the first four months of 1983 the figure rose to more than two hundred civilians and one hundred soldiers and police. Guards and police were shot down in the streets; political officials, especially the elected mayors, were also targets. The Mayor of Ayacucho, Jorge Jáuregui, miraculously survived two bullets in the head after an attempted assassination on 11 December 1982. In the peasant communities the ‘people’s courts’ sentenced real or supposed enemies of the guerrillas to beatings or execution.
The insurrectionists’ tactics led to the collapse of civil authority in the interior of Ayacucho: mayors, subprefects, lieutenant governors, judges and other officials fled en masse. Even the priests ran away. The police stations that had been blown up were not reopened. The Civil Guard, convinced that it was too risky for squads of three or five men to be in the villages, re-grouped their forces in the cities where they could defend themselves more easily. And what would happen to the peasant settlements left to the mercy of the guerrillas? It is senseless to ask if they received senderista indoctrination willingly or unwillingly, since they had no choice but to support, or at least coexist with, those who had assumed real power.
It was, of course, through one of these areas that the eight journalists were walking – through brambles and clumps of ichu – towards Chacabamba. The region is divided into lowlands – the more prosperous and modern villages – and highlands in which some twenty scattered peasant communities are populated by a single ethnic group, the Iquichans: their lands are poor, their isolation is almost absolute, and their customs are archaic. The lowlands had been the victim of continual raids in 1980 and 1981, and all of its police stations – in San José de Secce, Mayoc, and Luricocha – had been abandoned. In mid-1982, Sendero Luminoso declared it a ‘liberated zone’.
This process had gone almost unnoticed in the Peru from which the reporters came. They knew more about the operations of Sendero Luminoso in the cities. Their papers had been primarily concerned with incidents in Lima, or, for example, the daring dawn attack on the Ayacucho Prison on March 3 1982, when Sendero liberated two hundred and forty-seven prisoners and demonstrated to the government that ‘petardism’ had grown considerably. But they were ignorant of the mountain regions where no reporter ever goes and where little news ever gets out.
Doña Rosa de Argumedo, Octavio’s mother, goes barefoot. She is a woman in her sixties with a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, and has spent her whole life in the region. Doña Rosa would have known just by looking at the men accompanying her son that most of them were not from the mountains. The fat one, Jorge Sedano, could scarcely speak because of fatigue and altitude sickness: he wore a summer shirt, and was suffering from the cold. The young one, Jorge Luis Mendívil, had torn his trousers. They were irritable and thirsty. Doña Rosa invited them in – her small house is made of mud, wood and zinc – and offered them lemons so they could fix something to drink. They were joined by her children, and while they rested the reporters talked with the family, who lent Jorge Sedano a coat and Mendívil a pair of trousers. Eduardo de la Piniella tried to find out about conditions in the village, and he asked Julia Aguilar how she got her children to school, jotting down her replies in his notebook.
Meanwhile Infante, the managing editor of Noticias, asked his half-brother, Juan Argumedo, to be their guide and to rent them animals to carry their bags, cameras, and the fat Jorge Sedano, who otherwise would obviously not make the climb to Huaychao. Juan Argumedo agreed and said he would guide them about two-thirds of the way, as far as Uchuraccay, where he would leave them and return with the horse and mule.
There are no visible trails between Chacabamba in the lowlands and Huaychao in the highlands, but the Argumedos would have known the way. They usually climbed to highland villages in October, for the Feast of the Virgen del Rosario, or in July for the Feast of the Virgen del Carmen, to sell aguardiente, clothing, medicine and coca.
Within the strange social structure of the Andes, the Argumedo family, although poor and uneducated, is privileged, even wealthy, compared to the Indians in poverty-stricken communities like Uchuraccay and Huaychao in the highlands. Valley farmers like the Argumedos, with their mestizo culture and their ability to speak Quechua with the peasants and Spanish with the city people, have been the traditional link between the Iquichans and the rest of the world. But their contacts are limited to fairs or those occasions when the highland peasants pass through Chacabamba on their way to market. In the past relations had been peaceful. But the advent of both Sendero Luminoso and the sinchis changed all that. Communications between the valley and the highlands had been destroyed: there was tension and hostility. The Argumedo family, for instance, had not gone up to sell their products at the Feasts of Rosario and Carmen for the past two years.
Perhaps this explains the enormity of our ignorance. In the Sierra information is transmitted orally, and during this period no one was speaking. It is possible that the Argumedo family would have known as little about the highlands as General Noel, the government in Lima, and the eight reporters.
Doña Rosa said that Octavio Infante had asked her to prepare some blankets in the barn and some food, because they would try to get back that same night. Amador García was the reason for their hurry: he was supposed to send his photographs back to Lima on the Thursday plane. Their plans were optimistic. It is some fifteen kilometres from Chacabamba to Uchuruccay, and another eight from there to Huaychao. It would be difficult for them to get back the same day, and Doña Rosa gave them the name of a friend in Uchuraccay. Félix Gavilán wrote her name in his notebook.
It was not yet noon when they started out on the last stage of their journey. The sun was shining and there was no threat of rain.
The Iquichans are among the most destitute inhabitants in the depressed region of Ayacucho. Without roads, medical care, or technology, without water or electricity, on the inhospitable lands where they have lived since pre-Hispanic times, they have only known the exploitation of the landowner, the demands of the tax collector and the violence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic. Although Catholicism is deeply rooted among the comuneros, it has not displaced the old beliefs. They continue, for instance, in their worship of the Apus (god-mountains) and of Rasuwillca (in whose belly a horseman with light skin and a white horse is meant to live) whose cult still dominates the entire region. Most of these men and women are illiterate and speak only Quechua. They live on a limited diet of beans and potatoes, and have become accustomed to the daily threat of starvation, disease or simple natural catastrophe.
The eight journalists, led by Juan Argumedo, were journeying towards an encounter with another time, for life in Uchuraccay and Huaychao has not changed in almost two hundred years. In the houses of Huanta, for instance, families still talk nervously about the possibility that the Iquichan Indians of Uchuraccay and Huaychao will come down out of the highlands, as they did in 1896 when they captured the city and murdered a government official in a rebellion against the salt tax. Throughout history, the Iquichan communities have never left their lands – except to fight. And there is one feature true of every outbreak of violence: it is the fear that their way of life will be disturbed; they fight the threat of change. During the Colonial period, they fought not with the Indians but with the royalists. Their complete independence from the other ethnic groups in the Andes has always been evident but especially in their resistance to Independence: between 1826 and 1839, for instance, they actively opposed the Republic and fought for the King of Spain. In every uprising during the nineteenth century, the Iquichans fought for their regional sovereignty. The Iquichans, that is, are zealous defenders of the customs and mores which, although archaic, are all they have.
Relations between the Iquichans and the more modern, westernized villages in the valley have always been strained. This is common in the Andes. The mestizo settlers in the lowlands are contemptuous of the upland Indians, calling them chutos (savages), and the Indians, in turn, despise the mestizos.
This was the situation when Sendero Luminoso began its operations in the region. In 1981 and 1982 the guerrillas were strong throughout the lowlands, but they apparently made no effort to win over the Iquichans. And no one understands why. For two years the highlands served as only a passage that permitted the guerrillas to move from one end of the province to the other.
The Iquichans would usually hear the Sendero ‘militias’ passing through their highland villages at night. And when the comuneros talk about those strange, disturbing apparitions, they seem to take on for them a phantasmagoric quality, suggestive of unconscious terrors. The fact that their rivals in the lowlands help Sendero Luminoso, willingly or unwillingly, is cause enough to prejudice the Iquichans against them. But there are other reasons as well. The guerrillas hunt for shelter and food on their marches, and when the comuneros try to protect their animals there is violence. Invariably, the theft of animals among communities with minimal resources causes resentment; when the comuneros of Uchuraccay talk of Sendero, for instance, they call them terrorista-sua: terrorist-thief. In Uchuraccay, just a few weeks earlier, a Sendero detachment had killed two shepherds.
But the final break between the Iquichans and Sendero Luminoso was precipitated by the revolutionaries’ attempt to apply a policy of ‘economic self-sufficiency’ and controlled production in the ‘liberated zones’. The objective was simple: to cut off all supplies to the cities and to inculcate in the peasants a mode of production that conformed to Sendero’s ideological model. The communities were ordered to plant only enough for their own needs, to avoid surpluses, and to stop all urban trade. Each community was meant to be self-sufficient so that the money economy would disappear. Sendero Luminoso imposed this policy, however, by violent means. In the beginning of January its members closed the Lirio Fair at gunpoint, dynamited the highway, and then cut off all traffic between the two main towns of the region, Huanta and Lirio. The Iquichan comuneros who come down to Lirio to sell their surplus and to buy provisions of coca, macaroni and corn, discovered that all trade had ceased – and, perhaps most important, had ceased for reasons that seemed incomprehensible: their regional sovereignty was being threatened.
In mid-January the leaders, the varayocs, of the Iquichan communities held meetings in Uchuraccay and Carhuaurén – the same villages at which they had gathered one hundred and fifty years before to declare war on the new Republic. They agreed to oppose Sendero Luminoso.
The government, the police and the military knew nothing of these events. Belaúnde Terry had ordered the army to take charge of operations only at the end of December 1982, and General Clemente Noel was just beginning to realize how complicated his job was going to be. A company of marines, a battalion of infantry and a group of Army commandoes had just arrived in Ayacucho to back up the Civil Guard, but so far only the sinchis had been up to Uchuraccay in the highlands.
Alejandrina de la Cruz, a school teacher, saw the first patrol of sinchis arrive in May 1981. In Uchuraccay there were no incidents between the Guards and the comuneros, although in one of the nearby highland villages the troops had abused one of the peasants. In 1981 the sinchis came through Uchuraccay about every two months in their unsuccessful search for senderistas. But Alejandrina de la Cruz, the school teacher, saw no patrols in 1982; she left Uchuraccay on 18 December. The villagers, however, insist that after she left the sinchis came one more time in helicopters. When the peasants asked them to stay to protect the village, they said they couldn’t; they told the comuneros that if the terrucos appeared they should ‘defend themselves and kill them.’
This was, in any case, precisely what the Iquichans had decided to do at their meetings. And their decision was implemented almost immediately – and in several villages at the same time. Detachments of senderistas and their real or presumptive accomplices were hunted down, tortured and executed throughout the Iquicha district. The seven deaths at Huaychao which General Noel announced at his press conference represented only a small part of the massacres that the Iquichans had carried out. But unlike the dead at Huaychao, the other victims were not shown to the authorities. It is difficult to learn of the actual extent of the slaughter. Some of the massacres are known. Five senderistas, for instance, had been killed in Uchuraccay on 22 January, and at least twenty-four terrucos had been murdered in the other nearby villages – although the real number of victims may be significantly higher.
The journalists knew none of this; neither, apparently, did their guide: but the district they approached was in turmoil. The comuneros were in a state of extraordinary hysteria, a state for which they have their own word: chaqwa, a state of disorder and chaos. They were convinced that at any moment the senderistas would return to avenge their dead. And they felt threatened: they had no firearms and had no longer the element of surprise that had permitted the earlier killings. This was the mood in Uchuraccay, where some three hundred comuneros were holding a council meeting, when the shepherds, or sentinels, came to warn them that a group of strangers was approaching the community meeting hall.
In Chacabamba that night the journalists’ guide, Juan Argumedo, was expected by his mother Doña Rosa, his sister Juana Lidia and his wife Julia Aguilar. But he did not return. Doña Rosa had prepared food and blankets for Octavio Infante and the other journalists. They were not particularly surprised that the reporters did not turn up, but that Juan should not return was a mystery.
The next morning – Thursday, 27 January – a boy, Pastor Ramos Romero came into Chacabamba shouting that something terrible had happened, that in Uchuraccay they’d killed the men who had left with Juan. Doña Rosa and her daughter left in terror for Uchuraccay, grabbing on their way out a small sack of potatoes and coca leaves. Juan’s wife was ahead of them.
Juan’s wife reached the outskirts of Uchuraccay around noon. As soon as she saw the outlying huts with their straw roofs and their little stone corrals, she knew that something was wrong. Large numbers of Indians were standing on the hills; they were armed with slingshots, sticks and axes, and among them were comuneros from all the nearby villages: Huaychao, Cunya, Pampalca, Jarhuachuray and Paria. Some were waving white flags. A group surrounded her, and, without giving her a chance to ask about her husband, its members began accusing her of collaborating with the terrucos. They said they would kill her just like they had killed them. They were excited, frightened, violent. Julia tried to talk to them, to explain that the strangers weren’t terrorists and neither was her husband, but the peasants, growing increasingly hostile, called her a liar. They listened to her inasmuch as they did not kill her, but they did take her prisoner and brought her to the community hall of Uchuraccay. As they entered the village she saw the community in a ‘frantic state’, and it seemed to her that there were ‘several thousand’ peasants from other villages.
Her sister-in-law and mother-in-law were also prisoners in the community hall. Their experience had been similar to hers, but they had been able to find out something about what had happened the night before. On the outskirts of the village they had talked for a moment to Roberta Huicho, a comunera. She told them that the peasants had killed some terrorists, but that Juan Argumedo was not with them at the time. He had fled Huachhuaccasa Hill with his animals. Comuneros had chased him on horseback, caught up with him in a village called Yuracyaco, and taken him prisoner. Doña Rosa and Juana Lidia had seen Juan’s dead horse and mule on the road to Uchuraccay. But they couldn’t ask any more because they were suddenly surrounded by furious comuneros who called them terrucas. On their knees, the women swore that they weren’t terrorists. In an effort to pacify the Indians they gave them some of the potatoes and coca they had brought with them.
They were held prisoner until the following afternoon. Thirteen other prisoners, all badly beaten, were in the dark hall that served as their jail: all charged with collaborating with Sendero Luminoso. One of them was Julian Huayta, the Lieutenant Governor of the region, who was bleeding from head wounds. They had tied a red flag around his neck and accused him of having raised that flag in Iquicha. That afternoon, that evening, and the following morning, Doña Rosa, her daughter and her daughter-in-law watched the comuneros from Uchuraccay and other communities – they say there were ‘four or five thousand’, but the number seems exaggerated – try the thirteen prisoners in an open Council meeting, in accordance with ancient custom. Nine were found innocent of the charge of helping the terrucos. Were the four others sentenced to death? The Argumedos don’t know; they only know that the Uchuraccayans turned the prisoners over to people from another community, who took them away. But it seems likely that the previous night’s killing would continue after the Council meeting.
The Argumedos were tried on Friday afternoon. Over and oyer again they heard that the comuneros had killed some terrorists, and nobody listened when they explained that the victims were not terrorists but reporters on their way to Huaychao. Do the Iquichan comuneros know what a ‘reporter’ is? If a few of them do, it is with dim understanding at best.
Why this insistence on treating the women as if they were accomplices of the terrucos? Didn’t many of the comuneros know the Argumedo family from Chacabamba? A persistent but unverified rumour accused Juan Argumedo of being a protector and friend of the senderistas. His family denies it. But they do in fact live in an area controlled by Sendero, where the villagers, in solidarity or in fear, collaborate with the guerrillas. Perhaps Juan Argumedo didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. For the highland peasants he might very well have appeared as the leader of the senderist detachment that the village had been expecting. Was Juan Argumedo the determining factor in the misunderstanding that provoked the killing? No one will ever know: to this day the comuneros of Uchuraccay claim that they didn’t know him, that they never saw him, and, despite all the searching, his body has not been found. The three women were luckier. The varayocs finally succumbed to their pleading. Before letting them go, the Council made them solemnly swear on a staff with a crucifix (it belonged to the leader) that they would remain absolutely silent about what they had seen and heard since the moment they entered Uchuraccay.
When the women returned to Chacabamba Friday night, two military patrols were combing the area searching for the reporters. After a ten-hour march, in a torrential rainstorm, one of the patrols finally reached the village. The comuneros were in their houses, and wouldn’t speak until the following day, when they told the patrol through an interpreter that they had killed ‘eight terrorists who came into Uchuraccay waving a red flag and shouting death to the sinchis.’ They showed the patrol the graves and handed over a red flag, a telephoto lens, twelve rolls of unused film and some identity cards. ‘And their weapons?’ asked one of the officers. ‘They didn’t have any.’
And on Saturday night the authorities in Ayacucho and Lima learned of the deaths of the reporters. On Sunday all of Peru watched on television as the corpses were exhumed, saw the gruesome sight of the eight bodies mutilated by sticks, slingshots, stones and knives. There were no bullet wounds.
The government appointed a commission to investigate the massacre; I was one of the members. It was not difficult, after on-site visits and the review of official documents and the interrogation of dozens of people, to reconstruct the essential facts, although some details were not clarified. It was not difficult to conclude that the reporters, exhausted after their five-hour climb, were murdered in Uchuraccay by a mob of men and women whom fear and anger had armed with a ferocious brutality. And there was no doubt that the Iquichans had killed them because they thought they were senderistas.
The peasants of Uchuraccay spoke to us at a hearing we held there on 14 March. They spoke naturally – without any sense of guilt – and were intrigued and surprised that people had come from so far away, and that there was so much excitement, because of one little incident. Yes, they had killed them. Why? Because they had made a mistake. Isn’t life full of errors and deaths? They were ‘ignorant’. They were concerned not about the past but about the future – that is, the senderistas. Could we ask the sinchis to come and protect them? Could we ask the ‘Honourable Mr Government’ to send them at least three rifles? At the start of the hearing, instructed by the anthropologists who were advisers to the commission, I had spilled aguardiente on the ground and drunk in homage to the tutelary god-mountain Rasuwillca; after then scattering coca leaves on the ground I tried, through an interpreter, to explain to the dozens and dozens of comuneros gathered around us that the laws of Peru prohibit murder, that we have judges to try cases and sentence the guilty, that we have police to make sure that everyone obeys the law. And while I was saying these things and looking at their faces, I felt as absurd and unreal as if I were teaching them the authentic revolutionary philosophy of Comrade Mao, betrayed by that counter-revolutionary dog Deng Xiaoping.
The Uchuraccayans refused to give us the details of the actual murder. We assumed that they had come down from the hills and had attacked the journalists suddenly, before anyone could speak. We supposed that they used huaracas (slingshots). We thought that there was no dialogue because the Iquichans believed that the senderistas were armed and because, if given the chance, the Quechua-speaking reporters – Octavio Infante, Félix Gavilán and Amador García – could have tempered the hostility of their attackers.
But the facts were different. They came to light four months later when a patrol, escorting the judge in charge of the investigation, found Willy Retto’s camera in a cave on the hilltop near Uchuraccay. It had been uncovered by vizcachas digging in the earth where the comuneros had hidden it. The young photographer for El Observador had the presence of mind to take pictures in the moments just before the massacre, perhaps when the lives of some of his friends had already been taken. The photographs show the reporters surrounded by comuneros. In one of them Jorge Sedano is on his knees next to the bags and cameras that someone, possibly Octavio Infante, has just placed on the ground. In another Eduardo de la Piniella is raising his arms, and in another young Mendívil is gesturing with his hands as if he were asking everybody to calm down. In the last picture Willy Retto, who had fallen down, photographed the Iquichan who was attacking him. The horrifying document proves that talk did no good, that although the Iquichans saw they were unarmed, they attacked the strangers convinced they were their enemies.
The massacre had magical and religious overtones as well. The hideous wounds on the corpses were arranged in such a way as to suggest ritualistic killing. The eight bodies were buried in pairs, face down – the form of burial used for those whom the comuneros consider ‘devils’, or for those who are believed to make pacts with the Devil. They were buried outside the community boundaries to emphasize the fact that they were strangers: in the Andes the image of the Devil is assimilated within the image of the stranger. The bodies were conspicuously mutilated around the mouth and eyes, expressing the belief that the victim, deprived of sight, will not then be able to recognize his killers, and, deprived of his tongue, will not be able to denounce them. Their ankles were broken so they could not return for revenge. And finally the comuneros stripped the bodies, washed the clothes and then burned them in a ceremony of purification known as pichja.
The crime at Uchuraccay was horrifying; knowing the circumstances does not excuse the crime, but they do make it more comprehensible. The violence, extraordinary in our lives, stuns us. For the Iquichans, that violence is present in their lives from the time they are born until the time they die. Scarcely a month after we had been in Ayacucho, another tragedy confirmed that the Iquichans’ terror of reprisals by Sendero Luminoso was justified. In Lucanamarca, a village about two hundred kilometres from Uchuraccay, the comuneros had cooperated with Sendero Luminoso but later disputes emerged concerning food supplies. On 23 April detachments of Sendero Luminoso, leading hundreds of peasants from a rival community, attacked Lucanamarca in a retaliatory raid. Seventy-seven people were murdered on the village square, some with bullets but most with axes, machetes and stones. There were four children among the decapitated, mutilated bodies.
When the hearing had ended and, overwhelmed by what we had seen and heard – the graves of the reporters were still open – we prepared to return to Ayacucho, a tiny woman from the community suddenly began to dance. She was singing quietly a song whose words we couldn’t understand. She was an Indian as tiny as a child, but she had the wrinkled face of a very old woman and the scarred cheeks and swollen lips of those who live exposed to the cold of the highlands. She was barefoot and wore several brightly-coloured skirts and a hat with ribbons, and as she sang and danced she tapped us gently on the legs with brambles. Was she saying goodbye to us in an ancient ritual? Was she cursing us because we belonged to the strangers –senderistas, ‘reporters’, sinchis –who had brought new fears to their lives? Was she exorcizing us? For the past few weeks I had been living in a state of extraordinary tension as I interviewed soldiers, politicians, policemen, peasants, and reporters, and reviewed dispatches, evidence and legal testimony, trying to establish what had happened. At night I lay awake, attempting to determine the truth of the testimony and the hypotheses, or I had nightmares in which the certainties of the day became enigmas again. And as the story of the eight journalists unfolded – I had known two of them, and had been with Amador García just two days before his trip to Ayacucho – it seemed that another more terrible story about my own country was being revealed. But at no time had I felt as much sorrow as in Uchuraccay on that late afternoon with its threatening clouds, watching the tiny woman who danced and tapped us with brambles and who seemed to come from a Peru different from the one in which I live, an ancient archaic Peru that has survived in these sacred mountains despite centuries of isolation and adversity. That frail little woman had undoubtedly been one of the mob who threw rocks and swung sticks. The Iquichan women are no less warlike than the men. In the posthumous photographs of Willy Retto you can see them at the front of the crowd. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that community transformed by fear and rage. We had a presentiment of it at the hearing when, after too many disturbing questions, the passive assembly, led by the women, suddenly began to roar ‘chaqwa, chaqwa, and the air was filled with evil omens.
The peasants killed some strangers because they thought the strangers were coming to kill them. The reporters believed that the sinchis and not the peasants had murdered the senderistas. It is possible that the journalists never knew why they were attacked. A wall of disinformation, prejudice and ideology separated one group from the other and made communication impossible.
The guerrilla movements in Latin America are not ‘peasant movements’. They are born in the cities, among intellectuals and middle-class militants who, with their schematic rhetoric, are often as foreign and incomprehensible to the peasant masses as Sendero Luminoso is to the men and women of Uchuraccay. The outrages committed by those other strangers – the forces of counter-insurgency – tend to win peasant support for the guerrillas. Put simply, the peasants are coerced by those who think they are the masters of history and absolute truth. The fact is that the struggle between the guerrillas and the armed forces is really a settling of accounts between ‘privileged’ sectors of society, and the peasant masses are used cynically and brutally by those who say they want to ‘liberate’ them. And it is the peasants who always suffer the most: in the first six months of 1983, seven hundred and fifty of them have been killed in Peru.
The story of the eight journalists reveals how vulnerable democracy is in Latin America and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and the left. Democracy will never be strong in our countries as long as it is a privilege for one sector of society and an incomprehensible abstraction for the others. The double threat – the Pinochet model or the Fidel Castro model – continues to haunt our few democratic governments.
