Mass grave found in Peru

2008-06-02 21:15

Putis - A team of forensic anthropologists working in this Andean ghost town uncovered on 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 500m above sea level and about 650km 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.

'Just bones'

"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.

Relatives of the victims stood by, silently observing as the team of 15 forensic anthropologists carefully removed human remains. Some shed tears.

"My parents and uncles are here," said Teresa Quispe, pointing to the grave site. "They came and the soldiers killed them. Now they are just bones."

Aurelio Condoray is certain that the remains of his mother, Nemesia, and his brothers Mauro and Lucio, are in the grave.

The soldiers came to Putis, set up a field base and put out a call "for all the farmers (in the area) to come see them", Condoray said. "That's why my relatives came to Putis, bringing their horses, pigs and llamas."

The soldiers sold off captured livestock after the massacre, according to the CVR's massive 2003 report on abuses during the period.

"If I recognise my mother, I'll bury her next to my brothers. They deserve that peace," Condoray said.

An elderly Marina Quispe remembers how the soldiers were out looking for farm workers like her. "That's why we escaped into the mountains during the night," she said.

"My daughter Rita came to Putis and they killed her. She was my only daughter. Then they took the animals and we were left without a home, with nothing."

Myriad of challenges

The Shining Path guerrillas "later killed my husband - they took him out of my home at five in the afternoon and killed him in the countryside," she said.

The anthropologists face a myriad of challenges in their work, including dealing with bone-chilling temperatures and possible attacks from drug traffickers travelling from the coca-producing Amazon jungle to the coastal cities like Lima, prosecutor Olazabal said.

Jose Pablo Baraybar heads the experts from the Peruvian Forensic Anthropologist Team (EPAF), which has worked at several atrocity sites. Up to now they have retrieved the remains of 60 people.

- AFP