Ghosts of Uchuraccay: on to a place of dark secrets and many changes —

New Internationalist, March, 2000

IT's a study in charcoal, yellow and indigo. Black hills, blazing swathes of golden yellow grass, sky an unbelievably deep hue. We are nearly 4,000 metres high, way above the tree-line. The altitude sharpens all the contours, deepens all colours. The air is somehow both hot and cold at once.

This is a vibrant, hard terrain of craggy mountains and sudden gullies holding the odd narrow winding thread of silver, a river, way down below. As we keep climbing I'm thinking: how much further, how much higher -- and why? What on earth induced people ever to think of settling in a place so remote, harsh and inhospitable? What strange beauty, what perversion! There is nothing giving, no soft little margin of natural generosity in this landscape. No leeway for error of any kind in the ferocious struggle for survival.

One version of history relates that the people of this area, known as Iquicha, are descendants of the ancient Pocras and Chancas, who resisted the empire-building Incas. Most were massacred in a genocidal campaign, but those who escaped retreated to extreme highlands like these where no-one would want to follow them. And that is where they have lived ever since, with no visitors -- at least until the events of 1983.

We are driving in a small, temperamental Toyota truck, hired from a man called Tarzan in the cold mountain town of Tambo. For hours we have been clinging to the very edge of the mountainside, on a road so half-hearted it barely deserves to be called a track.

Suddenly, against the dark crags, a woman appears. Her skirt is scarlet red, her feet bare, and on her head a wide-brimmed dark grey hat -- the typical garb and colours of Uchuraccay. She quickly scuttles down the mountainside and out of view. We drive on.

Then up in the distance, on the top of the hill, appears the most incongruous sight: a cluster of white buildings with red-tiled roofs. They are like villas, town houses, regimented to look like a housing estate. Is this some mirage? Some trick of the light? But no, the vision appears to hold.

And we wind our way towards it, past churned-up dark earth, the rich source of all life and pretty much all food. We may be above the maize line, above the barley line -- but we are not above the potato line. The earth bears its rich yellow fruit, like gold; the indigenous crop of the Andes, with 240 different varieties.

Peasants are kneeling down, digging in with their hands, extracting from the earth its secrets. And the women carry them away in their strong, wide skirts.

Dark secrets

Uchuraccay is a place of dark secrets. Just the name can still send shivers down the spines of Peruvian journalists. It was here in 1983 that eight reporters -- seven from Lima -- were stoned to death and their bodies grotesquely mutilated in a bizarre killing that sent shock-waves through Peruvian society.

It all began when an Army spokesperson announced that peasants in Huaychao, a community near Uchuraccay, had killed young Sendero Luminoso cadres who had previously executed local community leaders for refusing to co-operate with them. The peasants were at last turning against the subversives, said the Army.

The journalists, from leading centre and left papers, had their doubts and, unusually, set out to this remote area to try to establish the truth. It was risky, but they assumed there was safety in numbers.

They were wrong. The story put out by the authorities was that the reporters had been killed by peasants who mistook them for terrorists. An inquiry into the killings was launched, headed by internationally best-selling writer Mario Vargas Llosa. His conclusions basically supported the official line. The Army had told peasant communities that they could, and indeed should, kill anyone they suspected of being a Senderista.

But Vargas Llosa went further in trying to understand the culture of the place, of this community so remote and removed from the Peru he knew, the metropolitan, modern, reality of Lima. The state of the journalists' bodies attracted morbid fascination: eyes gouged, bodies mutilated and buried face downwards `so that their souls could go straight to hell'. In this was seen evidence of the harsh nature of Andean culture, which Vargas Llosa dubbed `feudal' and `archaic'. His conclusion was that all Peruvians should bear responsibility for what happened at Uchuraccay, for knowing so little of this other Peru, and for neglecting its development so badly.

His analysis was lyrical, thoughtful and persuasive. But not all were convinced by it. It did not convince those on the traditional left -- nor most Ayacuchans. To them the killing had the hallmark of the Sinchis, an anti-terrorist police unit that had been in the area at around that time. The grotesque, exotic elements -- the mutilations -- were intended to point the finger at `superstitious' peasants. Others thought that perhaps the peasants did do the killing, but under the orders of the Army.

What is certain is that, though two campesinos were eventually tried, convicted and imprisoned, no-one in the community has ever talked about what happened. The exact events of 26 January 1983 remain a mystery. But Uchuraccay was engraved on the map of Peruvian consciousness. It became a byword for the archaic and incomprehensible. A diabolical place, so `backward', it was suggested, that the peasants would have mistaken cameras for guns.