Truth commission visits insurgency's birthplace

AYACUCHO, Peru -- Twenty years ago, police promised Maximilia Peralta that they would return her two teenage sons after a night of questioning. But like so many others, they never came home.

"I've been searching for my sons since," the 65-year-old highland Indian said Friday as she stood in this Andean city's main plaza, awaiting a ceremony by Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In her small, weathered hands she held photos of her missing sons.

A day after delivering a scathing report on two decades of political violence that took nearly 70,000 lives, the commission traveled to Ayacucho for a ceremony honoring the victims, 75 percent of whom were Indians who, like Peralta, spoke Spanish as a second language.

"It was here that the greatest loss of human life was suffered," commission president Salomon Lerner said in an address that was translated into the Quechua language.

"And it is for that reason that today Ayacucho should be the place where that spiritual health we call peace should begin and extend throughout the nation," he said.

Ayacucho, some 210 miles southeast of Lima, was the birthplace of the Shining Path guerrillas, who launched their insurgency to overthrow Peru's elected governments in 1980 after a decade of planning.

The region also bore the brunt of fighting between guerrillas and the government security forces sent to stamp them out. According to the truth commission's report, Ayacucho accounted for 40 percent of those killed.

By the time of Lerner's afternoon speech, the plaza had filled with hundreds of people, mostly highland Indians, who carried placards and photographs of long-lost loved ones.

About 50 people, who said they were not heard by the commission, jeered Lerner from the edge of the plaza as he spoke.

"There will be no justice, peace, while there is inequality, discrimination and corruption," read one placard of discontent.

Besides trying to heal wounds by cataloguing what happened between 1980 and 2000, the commission has called for reparations to individuals and communities affected by the violence. The report recommends that the funding come from the state, Peruvian society and international benefactors.

Leandro Tito, an 83-year-old survivor of a 1984 Shining Path attack 90 miles south of Ayacucho in the town of Andamarca, said the government should rebuild areas torn apart by the violence instead of dwell on the past.

Tito was the town's representative for the central government when Shining Path guerrillas rounded him up with 10 other local officials for public execution -- a technique the Maoist-inspired rebels used frequently to create power vacuums in rural Peru.

After stabbing him in the head and the ribs, he was left for dead on a pile of corpses. Nearly two decades later, Tito has returned to Andamarca from Lima, where he recovered from his wounds and lived in a self-imposed internal exile.

Now he said he would like to see economic aid come into the town of 3,500 people, which is walled in by Inca agricultural terraces still in use today.

"What has the Truth Commission, with its human rights people, done until now for the poor?" he asked recently inside his adobe house in Andamarca.