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| An Andean Woman Looks For The Coffin Of A Relative |
By Oakland Ross
Published 2/10/13
A colonial gem, Ayacucho remembers its long years of suffering, when the terrorist insurgents of Shining Path haunted the Andean region.
They say the past is a distant land and people are different there.
But Adelina Garcia Mendoza recalls the events of Dec. 1, 1983, as if they were part of a film that’s unreeling still, as if she were the same woman she was then — a young wife and mother, just as helpless, just as afraid.
“I remember it all as if it were a moment ago,” she says.
Those were terrible times, the long, dark years of the 1980s and early ’90s, when this handsome colonial town high in the central Andes of Peru was haunted by two murderous forces — an eerie Maoist insurgency known as Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, pitted against the Peruvian police and military.
Now a woman of 50, with her long black hair streaked with filaments of grey and pulled back from her bronze, oval face, Garcia huddles at a small wooden table on the second floor of a building that houses the aptly named Museum of Memory. The structure stands on a street called Liberty in the western reaches of Ayacucho, the city where the Shining Path was born, where it thrived for more than a decade, and where it finally collapsed amid a poisoned legacy of murder, grief and enduring loss.
Just now, Garcia is recalling the night three decades ago when Peruvian soldiers in balaclavas burst into the home she shared with her husband and their two infant daughters at 282 Avenida Arenales.
It was after midnight, a curfew was in force, and Garcia and her family were asleep in their beds.
The soldiers seized her spouse of four years, a self-employed welder, aged 27. His name is Jose Zosimo Prado, or at least it was. They muscled him out of the house.
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