Click to enlarge. It's a high-resolution photo and gets big. Take a good, hard look at what oppression in Latin America means.
It's not water cannon, it's not tear gas in Seattle, it's 123 people
shot to death by their own army and thrown in a mass grave.
A most excellent and moving report on Putis can be found today at Jacqueline Fowks' blog, Notas Desde Lenovo. Today in solemn ceremony, 92 coffins bearing the remains of people massacred by the Peruvian army in 1984 were handed back to locals, 28 of them having been positively identified.
The village name 'Putis' resonates among Peruvians the same way that 'My Lai' does for North Americans; back in December 1984 the Peruvian army rounded up at least 123 Putis villagers and forced them to dig a large pit. Then, as they were suspected of being sympathetic to the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorists they were mown down by gunfire and thrown into the communal grave of their own making. The remains of children as young as one year old were found when the site was excavated last year (photo above).
For an overview on what happened at Putis, the English language wikipedia page does a fair job and it's linked right here. But Fowks' report is far better.
The village name 'Putis' resonates among Peruvians the same way that 'My Lai' does for North Americans; back in December 1984 the Peruvian army rounded up at least 123 Putis villagers and forced them to dig a large pit. Then, as they were suspected of being sympathetic to the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorists they were mown down by gunfire and thrown into the communal grave of their own making. The remains of children as young as one year old were found when the site was excavated last year (photo above).
For an overview on what happened at Putis, the English language wikipedia page does a fair job and it's linked right here. But Fowks' report is far better.
