This Owl receives mail from its young readers. ‘Owl, you’re right, many of us weren’t born and others were very young, that’s why we don’t remember how Peruvians lived at the time of Sendero Luminoso’s terrorism. Continue writing about that terrible time that the country suffered.’ Honestly, I’m outraged that hiking has reappeared to infiltrate protest marches and deceive unsuspecting young people who don’t know their sinister past. As I owe to my readers, I enter the tunnel of time: 1980.
SIGHT: Pico TV: The Terror of Sendero Luminoso
This columnist from Chibolo was in the San Marcos dining room, the so-called ‘Slow Death’, next to the morgue, in the Cangallo street, in February of that year, when a mob of fifty senderistas improvised a rally and there they announced that by May they ‘started their armed struggle’. Indeed, from that date they unleashed a bloodbath. They were very savage in the Ayacuchan communities that opposed their violent preaching. In Lucanamarca, in 1983, Sendero executed a terrible revenge.
The community had agreed to oppose the seizure of animals and grains committed by the columns that passed through the area. One afternoon they arrived armed with axes, machetes, and picks. They gathered the residents and proceeded to kill them in groups. “We won’t waste bullets with you,” they said, and killed them with those sharp weapons. Eighteen children were also killed. They declared themselves Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, Gonzalo Thought and sought to establish the People’s Republic of Peru. ‘Except for power, everything is illusion, assault the skies with the force of the rifle’, they sang.
In 1990, already in my work as a journalist, I saw a Senderista column flee at dusk in the city of Palpa, Ica, which they had taken hours before, unleashing terror. A call that we intercepted from the town’s policemen, before they fled for their lives, made us arrive just as the ‘terrucos’ were leaving in two trucks. We saw the bodies of the mayor and the governor, still alive, bleeding to death, and within minutes they ceased to exist.
The municipality and police station dynamited
The incredible thing was what the terrified owner of the bazaar store revealed to us: ‘They arrived and the first thing they loaded onto the truck were the boxes of beer, groceries; women, dresses, panties, nylon stockings, cosmetics; and the youngsters, chocolates and caramels’. The worst of the attacks in the capital took place in Tarata street, in Miraflores, on July 16, 1992, when a car-bomb with 400 kilos of anfo and dynamite destroyed several buildings, killing 25 people, injuring 155, many of them of them due to loss of limbs or blindness, in addition to affecting 360 homes.
These are just some of the insane acts of the Shining Path terrorists, who never repented of their acts and crimes and, upon leaving prison, continue to be more enraged and Maoist than ever. Today they infiltrate the protests and try to poison the mentality of our youth. Sendero is alive and those who do not denounce them and label those who unmask them as “terruqueadores” are simply “useful idiots” of subversion. I turn off the TV.
