Unearthing a Massacre in Peru
By David Gonzalez Oct. 19, 2017
Silent clues to a violent past are buried among the scores of mass graves that dot Chungui district in the mountainous Ayacucho region of Peru. There, above layers of earth that mark geological time, lie relatively new remnants attesting to the massacres carried out by both the Shining Path guerrillas and the military and police forces that hunted them.
A soggy, wrinkled skirt. A skull. Fragments of a spinal column. All that remains of the many men, women and children caught in the crossfire of a war they never wanted. When these remains are lifted from their unmarked graves, they bring with them the chance to be identified, to give their survivors an idea of what happened. To give them something they can bury, and mourn.
Max Cabello Orcasitas, a Peruvian photojournalist, had been intrigued by the exhumations taking place in the region, which was among the hardest-hit by the political violence 30 years ago. He had read about it in a report by the country’s truth commission that offered an accounting of the crimes and killings that were carried out during these dirty wars.
“It struck me as a little-known tragedy,” Mr. Cabello Orcasitas said. “It was like that place in Yugoslavia where there were massacres, Srebrenica. This was like a Peruvian Srebrenica.”
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