The Uchuracay massacre, in which eight journalists were killed in the midst of the fight against terrorism in Peru, recalled the country that January 1983. At that time, the local left blamed the navy of that crime and it was Mario Vargas Llosa the one chosen by President Fernando Belaunde Terry to lead a group of specialists and intellectuals that would investigate that massacre. Years later, the famous writer talked about this subject with our director Cecilia Valenzuela.
The Commission was also made up of the dean of the College of Journalists of Peru, Mario Castro Arenas, and the criminal lawyer Abraham Guzmán Figueroa. The final report of Vargas Llosa, after returning from Ayacucho, determined that the crime had been executed by the community members of the town of Uchuracay, raising great political stir.
Despite the diatribes that Vargas Llosa received for the conclusions reached by the investigative commission he led, time and history were right.
But not only time and history determined that the conclusions of the laureate writer were correct, but also the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), which confirmed that his 1983 report, in the middle of the internal war in our country, was as real as brave, clean and truthful.
The fateful afternoon of January 26, 83, community members who had rebelled against the violence of the Shining Path murdered press men believing that they were part of the terrorist group. This generated the terrible end of the eight press men, as determined by the Vargas Llosa Commission.
Two decades later, and after countless attacks against the report, which ended up being correct, the conclusions of the working group led by our great writer led.
This was told to our director, Cecilia Valenzuela, in an interview in the program between the lines, held on January 19, 2003, almost 20 years after the massacre.
“I have not hesitated in all these years that we told the truth. The death of the journalists was due, I still believe that to a tragic error, which was not the army, but the peasants themselves who lived a terrible moment, a few days of great confusion and violence, those who murdered them,” the writer told Valenzuela.
It should be remembered that the most artisan attacks on Mario Vargas Llosa arrived from leftist politicians, who blamed the armed forces of journalists’ murder in Uchuracay.
“The investigation we did was an in depth, with the desire to help to clarify a truth and that truth was very painful. A violence was demonstrated that had not reached public opinion, where fierce crimes were committed against the peasants and where the peasants did justice by their own hand, because the justice of the official Peru had not reached those regions. That truth was difficult to accept by some political sectors,” said the novelist’s laureate interview.
In this conversation, Valenzuela emphasizes that young students from various universities were instructed to call wrong and soda-and even cover-up, finally-a thorough investigation that, finally, made its way in the history of Peru.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pazlwm6udau
“It was said that we had wanted to facilitate a solution that politically served the government of that time, something absolutely false. Of that commission, of the three people, one was the dean of the College of Journalists of Peru, Mario Castro Arenas, at that time leader of the APRA party, which was of the opposition, and had no interest in serving the government against which his party was at political war,” MVLL said.
“The prejudices, the ideological passion that in those years was very intense, the trial and public opinion had a very confusing idea of what had happened. I am very glad that finally a commission that everyone respects has confirmed the essentials of our report,” added our Nobel Prize.
The report of the commission headed by Vargas Llosa on the massacre in Uchuraccay was always correct and truthful, regardless of the wave of attacks he had for his conclusions in a time stained with blood in the history of our country. One more fact for which he will be remembered.
*This video is housed on the website of the place of memory, tolerance and social inclusion – lum.
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