“The peasants could only choose which side they were going to die on.”
This is how the Peruvian journalist and writer Santiago Roncagliolo describes the tragedy of a forgotten community in Peru that in the 1980s became the epicenter of an alien and bloody armed conflict.
Located at the eastern end of Ayacucho, where the mountains begin to give way to the jungle, the Oronccoy district is made up of 16 towns.
According to the last census, 1,027 people live there, most of them without access to electricity or running water.
They are less than a quarter of the more than 4,000 inhabitants, according to estimates from various sources, who populated this region around 1980.
It was then that the Peruvian army and the Shining Path organization began a long and brutal war that decimated the community.
Almost four decades later, dozens of families have found peace by recovering the remains of their missing people, but many wounds remain open.
This is the tragic story of Oronccoy.
Luminous Path
Founded in the late 1960s by university professor Abimael Guzmán as a split from the Communist Party of Peru, Sendero Luminoso gradually expanded its tentacles throughout the most rural and remote regions of Ayacucho.
“The State did not reach those parts of the country. Sendero took advantage of that void,” Roncagliolo, author of the book “The Fourth Sword” about Guzmán and his particular Maoist crusade, tells BBC Mundo.
At that time, Oronccoy belonged to the Chungui district.
It was a practically isolated community: access took hours through rivers or wooded paths since there were no roads; Its inhabitants were dedicated to shepherding or subsistence agriculture, they only spoke Quechua and most of them did not know how to read or write.
As it did in other rural areas of Peru, Sendero Luminoso sent teachers who, while teaching the population to read and write, recruited young people into their cadres to instill the ideas of the party inspired by the radical Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Mao Zedong: from eliminate private property until imposing a communist regime through armed insurgency.
After completing a first phase of indoctrination, “they began to send the judge, the political leader, the army, to demand more and more from them and act as the State of those people,” explains Roncagliolo.
Some inhabitants looked favorably on their new leaders who, in addition to teaching literacy, harshly punished petty criminals, cattle thieves or abusive lenders.
Thus, Oronccoy became a “red zone” or “puka llacta” in Quechua, the native language of the region’s inhabitants.
Among other measures, Sendero Luminoso expropriated land, prohibited or restricted trade, imposed new taxes and tried to eradicate “non-revolutionary” customs such as traditional festivals.
And at the beginning of the 1980s, when they already controlled extensive rural areas throughout central Peru, the senderistas began the armed struggle not only against the State but also everything they considered counterrevolutionary, capitalist or bourgeois in their territories.
“First they massacred the local authorities, and then they did a ‘cleansing’ in each town,” Ayacucho anthropologist Edilberto Jiménez Quispe tells BBC Mundo.
After destroying the former local leaders and landowners, they set their sights on small livestock farmers: “anyone could die for having a chicken in some areas,” Roncagliolo illustrates.
The unrest of many residents due to the fierce repression, exemplified in the frequent popular trials and public executions, was also contributed by the constant famines as a product of agrarian collectivization and the restriction of trade.
Many farmers fled to other regions and others decided to rebel, among them the grandfather of Zoraida Rimachi, a 33-year-old girl who was born after the conflict and wanted to share her family’s tragic story with BBC Mundo.
“My grandfather was a kind of representative of the peasant community. They did not agree with Sendero Luminoso and organized themselves as self-defense,” he explains.
One afternoon in 1984, the hikers went to look for him at his house, but he had left.
“My grandmother was there with a baby in her arms and another 3-year-old child, who were my uncles. “They raped her, murdered everyone and burned the house,” she says.
A week later they killed Zoraida’s grandfather and another of her uncles. Throughout the conflict, eight immediate family members were murdered, whom the young woman never met.
The military
“In 1984 I was 10 years old. One morning my brother and I were playing with a rag ball when suddenly a helicopter appeared. I had never seen that in my life, we thought it was a bird.”
Félix Oscco, former mayor of Oronccoy, thus remembers his first meeting with the military who arrived at the place to fight the communist guerrillas.
At the height of the Shining Path terror, the government sent detachments of the armed forces and “sinchis” – police specialized in rural counterinsurgency – who joined the peasant patrols to combat the guerrillas of Abimael Guzmán.
But the Peruvian troops generally did not make distinctions: any inhabitant of the mountains was a potential senderista.
“We hid among straws and saw that armed soldiers came out of the helicopter. They went around the community shooting everything they found, whether they were animals or people. They went up to the highest houses and from there they began to come down burning, setting everything on fire. It was like a earthquake,” Oscco recalls.
When the conflict broke out he was part of a family of 9 siblings, only two of whom are still alive today. “The others were murdered by the military,” he laments.
On the map of the armed forces, Oronccoy appeared as one of the main subversive centers in eastern Ayacucho, so they established a base in the nearby town of Chungui and, together with the rebellious peasants, perpetrated real massacres in the area.
“Here people traditionally dressed in red colors, and that alone served the army to identify them as terrorists and execute them. They also killed to steal the cattle from the community members,” says anthropologist Jiménez Quispe, who attributes most of the crimes to the military. murders committed during the conflict.
The journalist Santiago Roncagliolo, for his part, thus compares the two sides involved.
“Sendero imposed absurd rules, but they were rules. You knew why they were going to kill you and why not. There were savages, but in the army everyone was quite wild, it was much more unpredictable. They were corrupt, they were sent there for punishment, so generally the worst ones arrived, and at any moment they could get drunk and lose control.”
The terrified population remaining in Oronccoy had two options.
The first was to obey the orders of the Shining Path and hide in camps in remote areas of the mountains where the guerrillas retreated when they were overwhelmed by the army in the second half of the 1980s.
“There they worked hidden and lived like wild animals. The senderistas forced parents to murder their own babies so that they would not cry because of hunger, since the noise could give them away,” says former mayor Félix Oscco.
The second was to undertake a journey of several days through mountains and forests until reaching a city like Andahuaylas or Ayacucho, but this, paradoxically, was the most dangerous option.
“If you didn’t want to go or couldn’t stand the hardships of the camp and tried to escape, they executed you,” Oscco declares.
The victims
The victims of the massacres perpetrated by guerrillas and soldiers in the mountains of Peru generally had the same fate: mass graves.
In Ayacucho alone there are 4,112 burial sites registered, 82% of the total in the country, according to the national registry of missing persons.
Ayacucho is also the department with the most missing people in the conflict: 9,205 of the total of 21,918 in all of Peru.
The majority remain unaccounted for and so far only 2,718 cases have been closed.
For years, several institutions have recovered the remains of victims, identified them and returned them to their surviving relatives.
“They gave us eight bodies, eight bones in eight little boxes, which were my grandfather, my grandmother, my uncle, my aunt and my cousins,” says Zoraida Rimachi.
Félix Oscco was less lucky.
“My little brothers are still there unidentified,” he laments.
After several rounds in recent years, last July a new delivery was made that highlighted the cruelty of the conflict: of the 31 remnants returned to the families, 22 corresponded to children murdered by Shining Path members or the military.
“Our mission is to give people the opportunity to have a dignified burial for their loved ones,” Ángel Porras, representative of missing persons for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Ayacucho, explains to BBC Mundo.
The program also includes psychological assistance, advice in the process, translations into Quechua and trips.
In some cases it is impossible to find the remains and they are closed symbolically, which is helped by a peculiar initiative by local cartoonist Jesús Cossio, who gives family members portraits based on descriptions of their loved ones.
In Oronccoy, 120 cases have been closed with the delivery – real or symbolic – of remains to relatives of victims, and 60 remain pending.
The consequences
The capture of Abimael Guzmán in 1992 dealt a crucial blow to Sendero Luminoso, which began a progressive decline until it became a practically marginal movement today.
The organization, in any case, had already lost control of a large part of the Ayacucho mountain range in the early 1990s, when it shifted its focus to sowing terror with attacks in Lima and other cities.
Oronccoy regained peace, although things were never the same again for its decimated and traumatized population.
“Families have been left unstructured and that prevents development conditions from being generated in the town,” its current mayor, Efraín Calle, assures BBC Mundo.
First, the psychological consequences among those who stayed are still present, as is the case of Zoraida Rimachi’s family.
“My father was saved, but both he and my aunt and my other uncles were traumatized, they fell ill, and we have asked the State for help, but they barely come,” he cries.
Additionally, among the survivors still residing in Oronccoy are former enemies.
It is not unusual for a former combatant from the peasant self-defense patrols to cross paths, in a business or a tavern, with another neighbor who four decades ago took up arms with the Shining Path. And neither is it that one of them murdered or betrayed the other’s relatives four decades ago.
Thus, the hatreds of the past are constantly revived in the community, to the point of unleashing verbal and physical conflicts.
“Sometimes at some patron saint’s party they get dizzy, they remember and end up in fights, or they get into the topic of threats. It is difficult to deal with a town that has experienced violence in depth,” says the mayor.
In Zoraida Rimachi’s family we find an example that the wounds are far from being closed.
“My uncle always tells me: ‘Look at that man, who made an agreement with the terrorists who killed my parents, your grandparents, he is still alive and has a house and a car,’” he says.
And he adds: “I hope he pays dearly.”
Many young people, like Zoraida, did not directly experience the conflict but carry the weight of its legacy, which perpetuates a spiral of resentment and mistrust and undermines efforts to repair the social fabric of a traumatized people.
Meanwhile, each set of remains recovered and delivered is one more step toward closing the wounds in Oronccoy, the community that lost three-quarters of its population in a conflict as absurd as it was alien.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cp05d22ygqdo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-04 13:00:07
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