Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 22, 1993 TAG: 9308220019
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MAZAMARI, PERU LENGTH: Medium
"They came and began to kill without speaking," the 10-year-old boy said at a government office in this town, 180 miles east of the capital Lima. "They killed my brother, my sister, my uncle."
Quintumaya escaped into the jungle. Sixty-two others didn't.
A column of rebels and recruited Ashaninka Indians swept through seven villages in the Ene River Valley, 250 miles east of Lima, between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, survivors said.
They killed 55 men, women and children from the Ashaninka tribe and highland colonists in one part of the valley and at least seven in another. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the Shining Path's 13-year insurgency.
Health Minister Victor Paredes told The Associated Press that there were reports the rebels were continuing to attack other communities in the valley, and the death toll could rise.
Many bodies of children and babies were so mutilated by machetes that their faces were unrecognizable. Others had been charred by flaming torches.
Officials in Mazamari lined up dozens of bodies wrapped in blankets as weeping natives tried to identify their relatives.
It was the worst attack since Shining Path mastermind Abimael Guzman was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment last fall. His capture left the rebels in disarray in Lima, but they are believed still strong in rural areas.
President Alberto Fujimori has pledged to crush the movement by 1995.
"The Shining Path has not been defeated. It has proved it can still carry out attacks in the mountains and jungle, and force others to do their killing for them," said Carlos Tapia, a sociologist in Lima who studies the movement.
Rosa Quintimal, a young Ashaninka woman, ran away from Tahuantinsuyo when the rebels, wearing Ashaninka robes, burst into her village in pitch darkness and killed her son.
"There were many of them. They killed everyone, women, babies. Then I escaped," Rosa said dully, in evident shock.
An army spokesman said the attacks were apparently to punish the natives for having deserted the Shining Path's ranks and having helped the army search for the rebels.
Last October, in the last major massacre, rebels killed 47 villagers in the southern Andes to punish them for having formed a rural militia. Nearly 30,000 people have died during the Shining Path's insurgency.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB