Peru excavates mass grave of villagers

[Judi Lynn]

Peru excavates mass grave of villagers
Posted on Sun, May. 25, 2008
By TAMY HIGA
Associated Press Writer

LIMA, Peru -- A Peruvian forensics team has begun excavating a mass grave containing the remains of 123 men, women and children killed by the military 24 years ago, a human rights representative said Saturday.

Investigators in the highland village of Putis, in the southern province of Ayacucho, have exhumed 25 skeletons piled on top of each other among bullet and clothing fragments, said German Vargas, head of a group representing victims' families.

Ayacucho was the epicenter of violence by Maoist Shining Path guerrillas as well as a brutal, state-sponsored counterinsurgency campaign in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1984, according to a government-appointed truth commission, the military offered Putis as a safe haven for people fleeing Shining Path rebels in the region. Soldiers then tricked villagers into digging their own grave and killed them on suspicion of ties to the guerrillas.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/915/story/546033.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. More on the massacre: Forensic Team Seeks to Exhume 120 Victims of Peru's Dirty War

Forensic Team Seeks to Exhume 120 Victims of Peru's Dirty War

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AdvocacyNet
News Bulletin 138
May 21, 2008
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"We hope that this will attract more intervention...pushing the state, in a way, to fulfill its obligation to the victims," said Mr Baraybar. "They have been dragging their feet for a very long time. There's no strategy in the search for the missing."

An estimated 69,000 Peruvians lost their lives during the long and violent struggle between two insurgent groups (the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Army) and the Peruvian government. More than 15,000 of the victims disappeared, and of these many were targeted by the police and armed forces. Former Peruvian President Alberto K Fujimori is currently on trial in Peru for authorizing two massacres in the early 1990s.

In the four years since the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, the government has recovered only 505 bodies and identified 269, according to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, a division of the prosecutor's office. The Commission estimated that there are more than 4,000 clandestine burial sites in Peru.

Almost half of the deaths and disappearances reported to the Commission took place in the Andean Department of Ayacucho and one of the worst incidents took place at Putis. The Commission found that in December 1984, 123 men, women and children from the communities of Cayramayo, Vizcatampata, Orccohuasi and Putis were executed by units of the Peruvian Army.

According to testimony given to the Commission, soldiers from the military base of Putis gathered the villagers, many of whom had hidden in the mountains for fear of rebel attacks, and convinced them to move to Putis, where they could create a new settlement.

The soldiers gathered the men at gunpoint and ordered them to dig a hole behind the church, telling them it would become a trout farm. Eighty villagers were shot without explanation and interred in the hole. The rest were gathered into small groups, killed and buried in five graves. The villagers were apparently suspected of involvement with the Shining Path, but the soldiers were also motivated by profit because they sold cattle belonging to their victims.

The Putis site was brought to the attention of prosecutors again last year after a pig farmer in the area found his animals digging up human remains. EPAF offered its services after government officials proved reluctant to investigate the site because of poor security.

More:
http://www.advocacynet.org/resource/1160

[Judi Lynn]

2. Murdered children found in Peru's largest mass grave

Murdered children found in Peru's largest mass grave
AFP
Published: Friday, May 30

PUTIS, Peru - A team of forensic anthropologists working in this Andean ghost town uncovered Friday the remains of children shot and buried in a mass grave of victims of Peru's 1980-2000 internal war.

More than 100 bodies are feared buried at this remote hamlet in Ayacucho province, the largest known grave of its type in Peru, according to government prosecutors.

The grave is located in Putis, a hamlet 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level and some 650 kilometers (400 miles) south-east of Lima. The site was abandoned soon after 123 people - men, women and children - from area farming communities were slaughtered there on December 13, 1984.

According to Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), army soldiers suspected the farmers supported guerrillas with the Shining Path. Ayacucho is one of Peru's poorest provinces and the birthplace of the Maoist insurgency.

Today all that remains is a church with a collapsed wall and rows of empty and dilapidated houses. One house had to be rebuilt to serve as a headquarters for the scientists who have been working at the site for the past two weeks.

Peruvians are still coming to terms with the abuses committed during the bitter 1980-2000 war against the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) insurgencies. Nearly 70,000 people were either killed or went missing during that period, according to government figures.

"The most difficult thing is to discover in this mass grave the remains of so many children who were shot dead," said prosecutor Cristina Olazabal, who is overseeing the work at Putis.

More:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=41ccb81a-7e8c-4dbb-88ba-9a82bfac945d

[Judi Lynn]

3. Unburying the Evidence of Biggest ‘Dirty War’ Massacre

Unburying the Evidence of Biggest ‘Dirty War’ Massacre
Angel Paez
June 2, 2008


Lima, May 30 (IPS) - It was not hard to find the remains of the victims, some of whose bones were actually exposed to the elements. But it took 24 years for the people of the highlands village of Putis in southern Peru to get a response to their insistent requests for exhumation and identification of the remains.

In 1984, 125 men, women and children were shot to death by army troops after being tricked into digging their own mass grave.

The biggest single massacre of civilians in Peru’s 1980-2000 civil war is just now coming to light, thanks to the unflagging efforts of the victims’ families.

Since May 17, 60 bodies have been found, including those of 10 children between the ages of six and 10.

On a visit to the area in November 2006, this reporter found that the relatives were going from one public agency to another, asking them to exhume the victims of the massacre of Putis, located in the district of Santillana in the southern province of Ayacucho.

The death toll for Peru’s two decade armed conflict was put at 70,000 by the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR). But in order to qualify for the reparations provided for by law, victims’ families must prove that their loved ones were murdered by the guerrillas, the army or paramilitary groups.

More:
http://www.streetnewsservice.org/index.php?page=archive_detail&articleID=2797