What happened at Ayacucho

Ronan Bennett

  • Shining Path: The World’S Deadliest Revolutionary Force by Simon Strong
    HarperCollins, 274 pp, £16.99, June 1992, ISBN 0 00 215930 9
  • Shining Path of Peru edited by David Scott Palmer
    Hurst, 271 pp, £12.95, June 1992, ISBN 1 85065 152 3
  • Peru under Fire: Human Rights since the Return of Democracy compiled by Americas Watch
    Yale, 169 pp, £12.95, June 1992, ISBN 0 300 05237 5

Travelling in the Andean highlands of Peru some thirty years ago, Peter Matthiessen observed a group of drunken Quechua Indians. ‘In this state the Quechua looks more slack-jawed and brutish than the most primitive man imaginable.’ The Indians were ‘rife with hatreds and resentments ... But they are so subdued by their own poverty, and by their failure to realise how very numerous they are, that a Quechua revolution, while one day inevitable, remains remote.’

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