Peru: “If I Don’t Come Back, Look For Me in Putis” 

On Nov. 13, in a crowded room at the Inter-cultural Center at Georgetown University, the audience traveled to Ayacucho, Peru and watched as the Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team-EPAF) exhumed the remains of disappeared persons from the Putis massacre of December 13, 1984. 

On Nov. 13, in a crowded room at the Inter-cultural Center at Georgetown University, the audience traveled to Ayacucho, Peru and watched as the Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team-EPAF) exhumed the remains of disappeared persons from the Putis massacre of December 13, 1984. 

Jose Pablo Baraybar, Executive Director of EPAF, along with Iain Guest, Director of the D.C.-based Advocacy Project (AP) and Ash Kosiewicz, 2008 summer AP Peace Fellow, presented a documentary on EPAF’s work to search for, recover, and identify 123 individuals missing for over 24 years from the remote indigenous region of Ayacucho, Peru. 

Guest introduced the audience to the "largest mass grave in Peru," emphasizing the striking experience of the exhumation for the EPAF employees, colleagues, and relatives of the victims involved. For over two weeks in May, the seventeen-member EPAF team worked tirelessly and meticulously in the freezing Peruvian highlands to exhume the bones and clothing of the 123 Quechua-speaking Peruvians at the Putis mass gravesite.  According to Baraybar, the mass grave is only one of 3,000 found in Peru.    

In his summer experience working with the EPAF team, Kosiewicz blogged about the details of the Putis site: "one of thirteen supposed mass graves…has buried only 123 of the 360 victims claimed to have been massacred in the area."  When asked by an audience member why the Peruvian military killed the indigenous men, women and children of Putis, Baraybar’s face clouded over.

"To steal the cattle," he responded.  "[The massacre] was disgusting, because it’s a calculated killing, and those who engineer it know it’s effective, and keep doing it." 

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Jose Pablo Baraybar

The audience became silent as Baraybar discussed a close encounter of the EPAF team with Shining Path drug traffickers near the Putis site, as well as the irony of how the Peruvian military—responsible for the 1984 Putis massacre—had been assigned to protect the EPAF team from harm during the exhumation. The silence burst when Baraybar disclosed the rape of a surviving victim of the massacre by a military commander just two weeks after the exhumation.

The visit of Baraybar to the United States and the recent and continuing exhumations of disappeared persons come at a critical time in Peruvian judicial and social history.  The work of EPAF, a civil society organization founded in 2001, has figured prominently into the current trials of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.  In 2007, EPAF testified against Fujimori for the 1992 La Cantuta University massacre of nine students and one professor. After EPAF’s testimony, which was one of the most important cases against the former Peruvian President, the panel of judges publicly congratulated EPAF’s work:  "For the first time, Peruvian history has been unburied." 

EPAF continues to track disappeared Peruvians as Fujimori and his administration return to face justice in the courts.  Baraybar asserts that the Peruvian state, which is dealing with confronting its conflicted past while trying to look forward, must combine retributive and restorative justice. The Putis case represents the classic transitional justice debate about peace and justice, as well as the historical argument embedded within this debate of retributive versus restorative justice.  

"In Peru, they [the Quechua-speaking people of Ayacucho] were poor, anonymous…If it hadn’t been for EPAF’s efforts, the victims would stay anonymous," said Greg Maggio, a Foreign Service Officer of the State Department who traveled to the exhumation site to monitor the funds the State Department provided for EPAF’s work.

ImageIn addition to exhumations, EPAF also challenges the findings of the 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the government created to document human rights violations and provide restorative justice to the innocent victims of the twenty-year political conflict.  EPAF is working to access the far regions that weren’t reached by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and in many cases, were not reached by any organization. 

EPAF reports over 15,000 disappeared by the Peruvian military, contrary to the 8,500 documented by the Commission. Those ‘disappeared’, a figure which is officially now greater than 14,000, were suspected of ties to the Maoist insurgent group Shining Path, regardless of the accuracy of these claims.

Over 69,000 people died in Peru’s dirty war, and EPAF is striving to improve communication between forensic anthropologists and judiciary agents in their joint work in the forensic investigation of human rights violations. As the Fujimori trials continue, and the number of disappeared continues to rise, the search for retributive and restorative justice will continue. 

When asked whether another massacre(s) will happen again in the future, Baraybar responds sharply. 

"Things have not changed…people feel that all they get from the state is repression," he said. "Putis is not one place. There are many Putis in Peru." 

A photo exhibit of clothing and personal effects from the grave by Peruvian photojournalist Domingo Giribaldi was originally exhibited in Ayacucho in August 2008 and accompanied the November 13 discussion. 

To see more pictures of the exhumation and to learn more about EPAF’s work in Peru, see the multimedia blogs of Ash Kosiewicz, http://www.advocacynet.org/blogs/index.php?blog=113.

Larissa Hotra is a Master’s Candidate at The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs.