Slaves of the past

FOR Peruvians it was a reminder of a long-ago nightmare. On July 27th soldiers and police rescued 26 children, ten women and three men whom they said had been held as slaves for up to 30 years by Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), a Maoist terrorist group. The captives, some of whom are from the Ashaninka Amerindian tribe, were growing food for the guerrillas. Officials said the women had been raped. All had received political indoctrination; some were reluctant to be rescued.

Sendero, as Peruvians call it, was the strangest and most vicious of Latin America’s once-numerous insurgent groups. Its creator, Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor who espoused the Maoism of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, launched a “People’s War” against the Peruvian state in 1980, as the country returned to democracy after 12 years of military dictatorship.

Sendero imposed a reign of terror in Andean peasant communities, and bombed and murdered in cities. The army response was a “dirty war” in which civilians were victims. Patient police work led to the capture of...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1SP09Pe