I am sitting snuggled up in my hotel room in the very beautiful, sometimes very cold city of Cusco. We arrived here yesterday morning at 7am (you don't even want to know what time we woke up) and after napping/acclimitizing to 3,400 meters, spent the past 2 days touring the city as well as a couple of Incan temples. Tomorrow, we'll be visiting that oh-so-famous World Heritage site, Machu Picchu!
But before I start babbling on about Cusco, I want to write about what I learned in my Political Science class in Ayacucho, as well as some stories that my host family was kind enough to share with me.
Between 1980 and the late 90s, there was an armed internal conflict in Peru now known as the years of terrorismo. During this conflict, the radical Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, and the Peruvian Armed Forces fought a brutal war that resulted in an estimated 69 thousand deaths and disappearances. Most of the conflict's victims were not members of these two groups, however - 3 out of every 4 victims were campesinos, farmers, whose first language was Quechua. The horrifying mistreatment of civilians, both in the country and eventually even major cities like Lima, by terrorists and military alike, made Peru one of the greatest violators of human rights during this time period. The majority of the violence took place in the nation's poor, remote mountain and jungle regions, where the government's negligence lead to a feeling of abandonment and resentment which Sendero Luminoso used to build up a strong support group for their "People's Revolution". Their headquarters was located in Peru's poorest region of all: Ayacucho.
During the 1970s, the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho was considered one of the intellectual hotspots of the nation. Professors came from all over the world to teach and do research, and students were flooding in from the campo outside of the city so they could escape the cycle of poverty that had trapped their families in the past. One of the professors at UNSCH was a man named Abimael Guzmán, who like many other professors belonged to the Partido Comunista Peruano and had been greatly influenced by his trips to Maoist China. Guzmán began to gain a following at the university, and soon Sendero Luminoso was born, with UNSCH acting as a training ground in Guzmán's revolutionary, violence-based doctrine. Ironically, despite the group's focus on the "masses", Sendero worked under the same hierarchical, racism-based system as the government against which they preached.
In 1980, Sendero launched its first attack on a rural community in Ayacucho, and within two years, the Peruvian government had declared a state of emergency in multiple departments of the country and sent the military to resolve the conflict. However, with almost no information about Guzmán's organization (or, as he was now known by his followers, Presidente Gonzalo) nor any orders for intelligence missions, the Armed Forces began a campaign just as terrible as that of the terrorists they were fighting. As the conflict spread throughout Peru, citizens lived in constant fear of both sides - at any moment, they could be accused of being a senderista or for sympathizing with the armed forces and punished by the opposing force. The "punishments" doled out for these actions were often incredibly gratuitous and vicious, leaving thousands of civilians dead or disappeared, with countless more scarred by the atrocities that they were forced to witness.
For my final essay, I wrote about "La Guerra Cotidiana", or daily life during this wartime. I was lucky enough that my entire host family allowed me to interview them about their experiences during the 80s and 90s - everyone was affected by the terrorism, no matter their social situation or where they were living. My "papá", Jorge Pazo Palomino, talked to me for almost 2 hours about his experience as a 22 year-old working in a bank in la selva, or jungle, on the Eastern side of the country where Sendero's activities were mixed with drug production. He very kindly allowed me to share some of his stories (translated/adapted/shortened for this blog):
"In 1980 I moved to the jungle town of San Francisco, and had two years in Paradise, taking boats up the Apurimac river, playing soccer with my friends from the bank, and going to parties with our neighbors at the police station. Then one day, a friend and I were walking up the hill to work when we saw a commotion on the bridge which crossed the river to the department of Cusco. I recognized a policeman from the station, a 44 year-old, who was talking to a group of youths. All of a sudden, I heard a shot, and the policeman staggered a few steps before falling to the ground. We ran to the station to tell the police, but by then it was too late - the senderistas who had shot him ran across the bridge to Cusco, where the police had no jurisdiction. That was the first death of many in San Francisco, and it was that day, after my two years in Paradise, that they turned off the light, and my life became darkness.
Travelling was the most dangerous part of that time... you never knew when you would be stopped, either by the Armed Forces or by Senderistas. I was detained 4 times, kicked by guards and held in prison overnight. One day, we were travelling in our company car, and were stopped by young boys, senderistas of no more than 10 or 12 years of age. They had guns, and in their hands were bombs, made of dynamite stuck into old Coca Cola cans. They asked us for our papers, and when they saw the car registration card, which read "Ministry of Vehicles", they began shouting at us, saying we were spies for the government. I tried to explain that every car had this registration card, but they were already filling our trunk with bombs. Just at that moment, an ambulance drove by, with the words "Ministry of Health" painted on the side. With this as proof, we were able to convince the boys that our car didn't belong to the government. They ran off into the woods, and we had to quickly take the bombs out of our car and drive away. About 10 minutes later, I heard an explosion, and I knew that they had blown up another car on the road. Every trip was another story like this."
Jorge had so much to share - his detention in prison, just for having the same name as someone on the army's "black list", the time every citizen of his town was forced to parade before a tribunal while a captured senderista identified fellow terrorists, and the deaths of several of his friends from the bank, who were shot by soldiers not over terrorism, but over jealousy about a woman. It was incredible to hear him talk about the things he witnessed and experienced, especially knowing him to be such a tranquil, sweet, and stable person now.
After 10 years of this horror, the citizens of Peru elected a new president - Alberto Fujimori, of Japanese heritage. One of the first candidates to run without the backing of a political party, Fujimori promised to erradicate "Presidente Gonzalo's" followers from the country. During his subsequent two terms as president, he did just that, as well as raising the Peruvian economy from its desparate situation, bettering education programs, and gaining the adoration of many previously estranged departments. However, Fujimori's methods for obtaining these goals were far from the "democracy" he had promised. The 10 years of fujimorismo were characterized by authoritarianism, severe anti-terrorist laws which allowed for virtually anyone to be detained and tortured, and a violent under-the-radar contrasubversive program headed by Fujimori's right hand, the infamous Vladimiro Montesinos.
Despite the illegal methods by which Fujimori operated - for which he is now in prison after years of being on INTERPOL's most wanted list - his anti-terrorism campaign was ultimately successful, seeing the capture of Guzmán in October 1992 (just to show you how warped Fujimori's mind was, check out this picture of Guzmán, who was forced to wear a costume of a Hollywood movie criminal for dramatic effect) and from there, the ultimate fall of Sendero Luminoso. Once Fujimori's human rights violations were revealed and he fled the country in 2000, a transitional government was put into place, including a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who interviewed thousands of victims of the conflict so that their story might be told, and justice served to those responsible.
Although 12 years have passed since Peru's time of terror ended, the country is still trying to pick up the pieces, and the inequalities which fueled Sendero's movement still exist today. Although it is the only South American nation which has had consistant economic growth over the past decade, 80% of this wealth belongs to only 10% of the nation, while the percentage of extreme poverty in rural areas is still enormous. The perception of the mountains as an "obstacle to progress" still remains prevalent, a mentality fueled in part by racism against the indiginous and poor mestizo people who live there. This inequality spurs hundreds of protests annually, and in fact, Sendero has recently begun to regain strength in the form of a political party, MOVADEF, which is once again championing the causes of the dissatisfied poor.
One of the things that I find most disturbing about the internal armed conflict in Peru (I prefer this term to "terrorism", because the Armed Forces were responsible for nearly as many deaths as Sendero itself) is the fact that, before this trip, I knew literally nothing about it. We in the United States are taught so little about Latin American history, and yet here we have an example of a conflict which lasted 20 years, and was responsible for the death/disappearence of about 70 thousand people. If anything's worth teaching, I think that is. Unfortunately, even in Peru itself the topic is seldom discussed. When I interviewed my "host sister", a 16 year-old named Romina, she explained to me that she has been taught almost nothing about the 80s and 90s in her years of schooling. "It's uncomfortable and sad", she told me, "We don't ask questions because the adults don't want to talk about it". I think this is part of the reason that MOVADEF is gaining so many student followers - stories about the radical terrorism of Sendero Luminoso are rarely shared here, so students have no background knowledge when learning about the political party that has sprung from it. Memory is short in this country - and yet, there are still some who refuse to let their stories go unheard. When we visited the museum of ANFASEP, an organization dedicated to the support of families of the conflict's victims, there was a huge sign on the wall which said simply: Para que no se repita, or "So that it doesn't repeat itself". I think that this is the most important goal for Peru over the next few years - for people, like the women of ANFASEP and my host father and anyone else who is able, to tell their stories so that the country, and the world, doesn't let history repeat itself again.
If this history interests you, I suggest you check out the documentary The Fall of Fujimori (which I believe is on Netflix Instant). It's certainly not pretty, but does an excellent job showing the complexity of the conflict, its two sides, and the man who helped bring it to an end.
Ok, it's late and I have some Machu Picchu-ing to do tomorrow. Buenas noches a todos! I'll try to get some pictures up with my next post - only a week until I'm home and have a computer available again!
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