A relative of one of the victims of the Accomarca massacre (1985) looks at the graves prepared to bury those who died in the massacre 37 years later, on May 19, 2022 AFP
The remains of dozens of victims of the “Butcher of the Andes” will be buried in a small cemetery in a remote village in Peru this Friday (20), 37 years after a massacre emblematic of the internal war (19802000).
In the People’s Square of Accomarca in the Andean region of Ayacucho (southeast), the victims of the massacre by an army patrol on August 14, 1985, including twenty children, are given a last farewell.
Dozens of small white coffins containing the remains of the victims, with silver crucifixes on top, were buried by their relatives in the city’s church for two days.
“I lost my mother and my five brothers,” Teófila Ochoa, who was 11 and saved herself by running onto the field that fateful day, told AFP.
Soldiers under the command of SubLieutenant Telmo Hurtado killed and burned almost all of Accomarca’s residents, claiming they were members of the Maoist guerrilla Sendero Luminoso.
Hurtado, “the butcher of the Andes,” is serving a 23year sentence for the massacre following his extradition from the United States. Of the 10 soldiers convicted of the crime, five are on the run.
“They lined them up, they put them in three houses with gunshots, bombs and then it started bursting into flames. Everyone was screaming, it was a horrible moment,” said Ochoa, 49, who carries a blackandwhite photo of her mother.
Mass and Ceremony
In the morning, a mass will be celebrated in the church where the victims were buried on Wednesday and Thursday.
The small coffins are then brought to the square in front of the temple, where a whitebacked stage has been set up with images of the exhumations of the victims in a mass grave.
A dozen residents swept across the square in the morning, where the head of the Cabinet of Ministers, Aníbal Torres, and the Justice Chief, Félix Chero, are expected to attend a ceremony. After that, the coffins are taken to the small cemetery on San Cristóbal hill, from the top of which a fertile valley can be seen.
The square was guarded by uniformed agents and civilians from dawn.
Under the motto “Never again”, around 25 students between the ages of 7 and 14 from the public school “Fe y Alegría” staged the massacre on the square on Thursday evening.
The performance, which included a bonfire, drew applause and tears from the 150 in attendance. Then a choir of 10 girls, dressed in typical Andean costumes and hats, performed a song in Quechua.
Over time, the relatives received assistance from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in tracing their relatives and burying them.
In January, prosecutors reported that they “identified 42 victims among the more than 69 residents executed in Accomarca, whose remains of bones and clothing were buried in a mass grave in 2007.
“Many children will be able to give their parents a Christian funeral, but there are children who will continue to wait because there are parts [ossos] who have not yet been identified,” Accomarca Mayor Fernando Ochoa told AFP.
The 37yearold community leader lost his grandmother in the massacre.
According to a report released in 2003 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there were about 4,000 mass graves in Peru containing victims of the conflict.
According to official figures, the clash left around 70,000 dead and 21,000 missing, 40% of them in Ayacucho.