Unearthing Victims of the Christmas Massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Unearthing Victims of the Christmas Massacre
By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Aug 12, 2010 (IPS) - The families of 40 villagers murdered in Peru on Christmas Day in 1984 are camping out next to the eight graves in which their loved ones were buried, to keep watch over the slow, painful process of exhuming the bodies, a task that is being carried out by the public prosecutor's office.

In one important respect, this massacre differs from other human rights crimes committed during the civil war that gripped Peru from 1980 to 2000: it was not the work of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas or the military or police forces who fought them, but of the "rondas campesinas" or peasant self-defence groups.

These groups first emerged to defend rural indigenous communities from the Shining Path insurgents, but eventually began to be armed and trained by the armed forces.

The massacre whose victims are now being unearthed began at 5:00 AM on Dec. 25, 1984 in the Quechua-speaking indigenous village of Putka in the district of Huanta in the southwestern highlands region of Ayacucho, the epicentre of the armed conflict.

So far, 25 bodies have been found, including six children, all of whom were stabbed to death, according to survivors of the killings, whose identities are being kept secret for their safety.

The survivors say the villagers were killed by members of a "ronda campesina" that supposedly had the support of the military unit active in the area.

At that time, the army and the navy were present in Huanta, where the military partially relied on the armed resistance to Shining Path mounted by several local communities.

Just a few weeks before the Christmas Day killings in Putka, troops from the army counterinsurgency base in the area slaughtered 123 local residents in the nearby village of Putis.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52467

Question for anyone who knows offhand, was this during the same time Ronald Reagan was also supporting the devastation wrought by right-wing fundamentalist lunatic Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala, destroying entire villages of Mayan citizens? I'll check myself leter in the evening when I have more time. I think it's the same time period.

Good time to bring up questions about this reeking monster prior to the next election.

[Peace Patriot]

1. It's certainly the same Republican M.O.--the U.S. arming and supporting monstrous killers,

in Guatemala in the 1980s and in Colombia today (also Honduras today, so I guess we have to say that there is a non-partisan U.S. aspect to it), whether official military or paramilitary (like the locals that the Peruvian military enlisted for this massacre, and the death squads in Colombia and Honduras, with close ties to the government and military, who have been targeting trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, peasant farmers and others). The massacres in Guatemala continued through 1984, as this portion of a riveting, detailed account of this horror points out:

----

The Guatemalan civil conflict produced the most bloody and sustained wave of repression and violence in Latin America, though its effects are less known than the dirty wars of Argentina and Chile. Unfolding over more than three decades, the war took the lives of an estimated 250,000 civilians, including 45,000 disappeared, according to the 1999 Historical Clarification Commission report. Unique to Latin America, the truth commission concluded that the Guatemalan State was guilty of genocidal acts of violence and explicitly targeted Mayan populations of El Quiché and other regions for eradication.

What made the latest hearings especially riveting was that all three witnesses brought vivid supporting evidence of the crimes charged in the case, strengthening the accounts given by dozens of survivors and eyewitnesses who have come before Judge Pedraz over the last two years.

First Fredy Peccerelli, executive director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), summarized his conclusions from a 900-page report he and a team of FAFG investigators produced based on hundreds of exhumations FAFG has done around the country since the mid-1990s to unearth the remains of the massacred and disappeared. In order to analyze the effects of the violence, the report examined in depth 363 exhumations of victims killed between 1978 and 1984 in five municipalities in Guatemala (four in the Quiché and one in Alta Verapaz). Among the devastating conclusions of the report, FAFG found that of the 1,884 victims exhumed, more than 25 percent were infants or children; 78 percent exhibited gunshot wounds to the head; and 65 percent of victims were killed in 1982 alone.

I followed Fredy with testimony about hundreds of pages of original Guatemalan Army records on “Operation Sofía,” a violent counterinsurgency offensive against of Mayan settlements in the Ixil region of El Quiché during July and August 1982. Although survivors of Operation Sofía have described in testimony before Judge Pedraz the effects of the Army’s attack—including the killing of unarmed men, women, and children; the burning of houses; destruction of crops; slaughter of animals; and indiscriminate bombing of civilians fleeing the violence—this was the first time the Guatemalan military’s own records about the operation have been made available in any judicial proceeding. Judge Pedraz paged through the fragile telegrams, planning documents, orders, hand-drawn maps, and reports from patrol units as I summarized my analysis of the documents. In particular, I focused on the proof it provided of the strict chain of command that functioned during the scorched earth operations, with orders issued by senior officers in the Army General Staff flowing down through commanders to patrol units in the field, and subsequent handwritten reports flowing back up to commanders and then the Army General Staff chronicling the killings, captures, and interrogations of unarmed Mayan residents of the Ixil region.

http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/a-personal-account-of-testifying-at-a-guatemalan-genocide-trial-by-kate-doyle/

[naaman fletcher]

2. good for them.

Always glad to see indigenous peoples stand up against marxist terrorists. Also glad to see government policies that support them.

" this massacre differs from other human rights crimes committed during the civil war that gripped Peru from 1980 to 2000: it was not the work of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas or the military or police forces who fought them, but of the "rondas campesinas" or peasant self-defence groups.

These groups first emerged to defend rural indigenous communities from the Shining Path insurgents, but eventually began to be armed and trained by the armed forces. "