AP PHOTOS: Survivor of Peru massacre guides team
AP PHOTOS: Survivor of Peru massacre guides team
By RODRIGO ABD and FRANKLIN BRICENO, Associated Press | September 17, 2014 | Updated: September 17, 2014 11:16pm
PACCHA, Peru (AP) — This remote hamlet on fertile Andean slopes beside the Apurimac river has been a ghost town for three decades, inhabited only by the buried bodies of villagers slain by security forces who considered them rebel sympathizers.
Earlier this month, forensic investigators began unearthing the remains of the nearly two dozen victims of the July 14, 1984, massacre in this region where government forces regularly hunted alleged collaborators of the Shining Path guerrillas.
Dolores Guzman, the sole survivor, set aside the street stand where she sells hard-boiled eggs in the capital of Lima and journeyed last week to Paccha to help forensic experts find the common graves.
Arriving was not easy. This rugged southeastern region known as "Oreja de Perro," or Dog's Ear, lacks telephones and good roads. Cocaine-trafficking remnants of the otherwise conquered Shining Path movement coexist here with young Quechua men who ferry coca paste over the Andes in backpacks.
In all, 21 sets of human remains were recovered, including those of eight children and a fetus, said Luis Rueda, the forensic archaeologist overseeing the dig. Some 70,000 people were killed in the 1980-2000 internal conflict, most of them civilians, a truth commission found.
More:
http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/AP-PHOTOS-Survivor-of-Peru-massacre-guides-team-5763353.php
