Lucanamarca

Abstract

Shining Path, a Maoist group established in the 1970s by Abimael Guzman, had by 1980 launched a revolutionary insurrection in the Peruvian countryside. When the movement's attempt to recruit Quechuan peasants to its cause was rejected, the guerrillas began a campaign of violence against the local populace, including a massacre in Lucanamarca. Some 20 years later, LUCANAMARCA shows the arrival of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to exhume the bodies of the victims, an effort that reawakens old enmities among the still-divided villagers. The film features interviews with massacre survivors who provide eyewitness testimony of Shining Path atrocities in Guzman's 2005 trial in Lima. By its conclusion, LUCANAMARCA reveals the lingering aftereffects of those violent years, including tensions between former Shining Path adherents and relatives of massacre victims.