Peru, Ten Years Healing

Ten years after the creation of the Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación, support for victims of the conflict that took place between 1980 and 2000 continues to have gaps. La Hoyada, an open area in the city of Ayacucho, in the southern highlands of Peru, which in the 1980s served as a dumping ground for bodies from the main Army barracks, is now largely taken over by houses, but also has space for a cross commemorating the disappeared. It is an area that victims' organizations from the period of violence from 1980 to 2000 hope will be recognized as a memorial sanctuary. This year marks a decade since the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, which documented that the department of Ayacucho was the most affected by the violence of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso and by the counter-subversive struggle.