And Truth Will Be Our Defense

More than 10 years have passed since the night when the killers burst into the old building on Jirón Huanta 840. If until then many had doubted the magnitude of the horrors of the war — insofar as they occurred far away, in towns with names that were until then unknown — the bodies of fifteen humble neighbors strewn about, commoners of today — paraphrasing the singer of those neighborhoods — dispelled all doubt. The distance between Chuschi, Uchuraccay or Accomarca and the main square of Lima had closed; the will to exterminate had taken hold of the city just as it had of the humble and forgotten towns. Why them? Why that night? The victims will never know; their relatives and some survivors will never accept any explanation. Irrationality is also part of the strategy: to demonstrate a willingness to go beyond all limits in order to paralyze the adversary. The settings are also not arbitrary: to car bombs in residential neighborhoods respond sweeps in working-class neighborhoods; to selective killings on any street responds mass murder in any alleyway. Even more so if it is located in a place identified for centuries with indigenous people, poor mestizos, Black residents of tenements, the mad and the sick, criminals and the dead.