August 27, 2003, 15:15
With huts still smoking and the smell of burned flesh permeating the Andean mountainside, Primitivo Quispe emerged, his pants soaked with urine, after three days in hiding and ran to confirm the horror.
Quispe told how 24 soldiers entered his town of Accomarca in August 1985, raped the women, then separated them and 23 children from the men and herded them into two huts. After shooting them, the soldiers set fire to the huts.
In all, 69 people, including six of Quispe's relatives, were killed. "I saw everything, I know the truth, but there is no justice for the poor," Quispe said in a telephone interview.
But tomorrow justice may be a step closer when a government truth commission presents its final report on such massacres two decades ago.
Mixed feelings
Quispe (51) only returned to Accomarca in 2001 when the government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to probe 20 years of state-sponsored and rebel violence between 1980 and 2000 and make recommendations to ensure similar atrocities never happen again.
After gathering 16 885 testimonies from 532 towns in remote areas of Peru and holding painful public hearings in seven regions, the commission's final report is awaited with mixed feelings.
Supporters say it will help to bring justice, while critics assert the commissioners are too sympathetic to the rebel cause to be objective.
No one has gone to jail for the Accomarca massacre, one of the most brutal in two decades of war waged by leftwing guerrillas against the government. Two years earlier, Quispe lost 10 other family members - including his mother, wife and brother - in a military siege of his town in the region of Ayacucho where in 1980 the Shining Path launched its war aimed at imposing a Maoist state.
Entire family killed
Reina Quishua was 14 years old when a column of Shining Path guerrillas entered Lucanamarca, also in Ayacucho, on April 3, 1983. They killed 69 people, including 18 children, to avenge the deaths of rebels killed in a clash after town residents refused to submit to their rule.
"I escaped by running into the hills, I left everyone screaming and when I returned I found my mother, my father and my four brothers and sisters hacked up. The terrorists killed them like pigs, by whacking them with machetes," she said, sobbing.
According to official figures, some 30 000 people died in the wars but the commission has said the toll may be as high as 60 000. The panel attributes half of the deaths to the Shining Path and the rest to the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, police and members of the military.
Reparations proposal
"We will propose an integral plan of collective reparations for the zones most affected by the violence," Carlos Ivan Degregori, one of the 12 members of the commission, said. "Providing evidence, we will recommend that several cases be tried in the courts," he added.
Preliminary figures provided by the commission showed that 48% of the victims of violence were from Ayacucho.
The guerrilla violence, now virtually eliminated, took place during the governments of former presidents Fernando Belaunde, Alan Garcia and Alberto Fujimori. Abject poverty, especially in the Andes and the Amazon jungle, made conditions ripe for the insurgency to spread in the 1980s. Car bombs, power blackouts and massacres were everyday occurrences.
Travesties of justice
In May 1992, after closing Congress and the courts, Fujimori imposed draconian anti-terrorist legislation that included trials by hooded military judges - a practise that led to many travesties of justice, rights workers say.
Later that year, once-legendary Shining Path chief Abimael Guzman and other top rebels were captured, leading to a gradual decline in the group's hold over Peruvian society.
Even before the Truth Commission issues its report, debate has raged about the validity of the panel's version of events.
"My conscience is clear, I acted according to the truth, which only God knows and not this commission," retired general Clemente Noel, military chief of Ayacucho and other zones under a state of emergency in 1983, said.
The commission's critics not only accuse its members of being left-leaning but also allege that it whitewashed guerrilla crimes by showing videos in which rebel leaders said they repented for their actions.
A civilian group called "So this will not happen again" last week handed the government 22 000 signatures of support of the commission's work. - Reuters
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