1983 Lucanamarca massacre

Lucanamarca massacre
Part of internal conflict in Peru
Location	Lucanamarca, Peru
Date	3 April 1983 (1983-04-03)
Target	Ronderos
Attack type	Shooting, massacre, war crime
Weapons	Axes, machetes, firearms
Deaths	69
Perpetrators	Shining Path
Motive	Retaliation for lynching of Olegario Curitomay

The Lucanamarca massacre was a mass murder that took place in and around the town of Lucanamarca on 3 April 1983, by Sendero Luminoso rebels. The attack, which claimed the lives of 69 members of indigenous peasant families, was carried out by a local cadre of the Shining Path in reprisal for a lynching death of its local commander.

Background

On 17 May, 1980, the Maoist revolutionary group Shining Path went to war against the Peruvian state. The group was based in the Ayacucho Region. In March 1983, the local ronderos vigilantes captured Olegario Curitomay, a Shining Path commander in Lucanamarca, a small town in the Huanca Sancos Province of Ayacucho. Curitomay was taken to the town square, stoned, stabbed, set on fire, and finally shot.

Attack

On 3 April 1983, Shining Path militants responded to the death of Olegario Curitomay by entering Lucanamarca and the villages of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, and Muylacruz, and indiscriminately killing 69 indigenous people in a revenge attack. Of those killed by the Shining Path, eighteen were children, the youngest of whom was only six months old. Also killed were eleven women. Eight of the victims were between fifty and seventy years old. Most of the victims died by machete and axe hacks, and some were shot in the head at close range.

Aftermath

This was the first massacre committed by the Shining Path against members of a peasant community. Abimael Guzmán, the founder and leader of the Shining Path, admitted that the Shining Path carried out the attack and explained the rationale behind it in an interview with El Diario, a pro-Shining Path newspaper based in Lima. In the interview, he said:

In the face of reactionary military actions ... we responded with a devastating action: Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they did not imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. And we say openly that there were excesses, as was analyzed in 1983. But everything in life has two aspects. Our task was to deal a devastating blow in order to put them in check, to make them understand that it was not going to be so easy. On some occasions, like that one, it was the Central Leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions. That is how it was. In that case, the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people's fighters, that we were not the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect ... If we were to give the masses a lot of restrictions, requirements and prohibitions, it would mean that deep down we did not want the waters to overflow. And what we needed was for the waters to overflow, to let the flood rage, because we know that when a river floods its banks it causes devastation, but then it returns to its riverbed ... [T]he main point was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack, and that we were ready for anything, anything.

Abimael Guzmán

Ultimately, the Shining Path's war against the Peruvian state faltered, and Abimael Guzmán and several other high-ranking Shining Path members were captured in Lima in 1992. On 10 September 2002, Abimael Guzmán told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission "We, doctors, reiterate that we will not avoid our responsibility [for the Lucanamarca massacre]. I have mine, I'm the first one responsible, and I will never renounce my responsibility, that wouldn't make any sense."

See also

• List of massacres in Peru
• Communist terrorism
• Red terror