Murder in the mountains

LIMA, Peru – Let me tell you the story of what happened to a group of people in a small, Peruvian village.

In December 1984, the community members of Putis, a village high in the Andes Mountains, began to worry about the increasing number of terrorist attacks in the region. Because of the growing threat of the violent, Maoist revolutionary group the Shining Path, the people of this community decided to seek refuge near a newly constructed military base in the region.

The 123 people from the village arrived at the military base on the morning of December 13.

Upon the group’s arrival, the guards at the base divided the members of the village into men and women and told the men to start digging a hole for a fish farm they were going to construct on the base. While the men were occupied, the guards sexually assaulted the women and then gathered up and shot the members of the village, throwing their bodies into the freshly dug holes.

In a time of relative peace and security, violence of this sort is unimaginable for us.

Yet one explanation that is often given for such extreme actions is fear. The armed forces suspected the people of Putis might have been sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. So, when the soldiers shot the innocent people, they were under some delusion that their actions would make their country safer.

Still, what they did was unacceptable. Regardless of fear, we have to be held responsible for our actions.

Last week I visited the village of Putis with coworkers from the human rights organization I am working for. We sat in on a town hall meeting and visited the site of the murder, which remains the largest mass grave ever to have been discovered in Peru.

Going to bed that night, my thoughts wandered back to the government men who had perpetrated this horrible crime.

I imagined what it must have been like to live in a time and place of such pervasive fear and terrorism. I thought about how afraid I was on Sept. 11, and of how relieved I felt when our president told the world, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” – the same sort of philosophy that the armed forces employed on the people of Putis.

My mind flashed to the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and suddenly the actions of those Peruvian soldiers didn’t seem quite as foreign.

Of course, the circumstances of Putis and the War on Terror are certainly different. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that maybe in some small way by not fighting harder against the abuses that occurred during my lifetime, I had been complacent toward the kind of crimes that I had traveled to a foreign place to fight.  

As we were driving home from Putis, I realized that human rights violations are much easier to condemn looking backward – which is unfortunate, because the only thing that will be able to stop incidents like the one in Putis is more vigilance by those of us who live through or at least relate to them.