Word: ayacucho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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McNamara's brush with horror began Dec. 4, when four policemen stopped her as she strolled through the southern Peruvian town of Ayacucho. At first they claimed they were conducting a passport check. Then, according to McNamara, the police searched her hotel room and confiscated "suspicious" articles -- medicine, vitamins, a ball of string and tourist maps. In the local jail, McNamara got a hint of the problems to come. "No one told me what was going on," she said. "But the word terrorismo drifted down the staircase...
...marred by scattered acts of violence. Guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the fanatical Maoist revolutionary group that has terrorized the countryside since 1980, shot and killed an A.P.R.A. candidate for city council in Huancayo, 122 miles east of Lima. To the southeast, near the city of Ayacucho, Sendero insurgents threatened to cut off the fingers of campesinos found with stamp marks on their hands showing they had voted. But the anti-A.P.R.A. violence did not approach the level that it was feared would result after government troops killed at least 260 prisoners last June during riots...
...people have lived these days like a celebration." Peru was the Pope's last South American stop, and the spectacular settings were hardly more dramatic than his words. After speaking at the Incan fortress of Sacsahuaman to 80,000 Indians, Pope John Paul chose the impoverished region surrounding Ayacucho to make his boldest political gesture since his visit to Poland in 1983. The area has been terrorized for four years by the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas. Some 4,000 people have been killed, and human rights groups claim that 1,000 more have "disappeared" at the hands of government security...
...road to good! . . . Violence inexorably engenders new forms of oppression and slavery, ordinarily more grave than those which it pretends to liberate . . . I ask you, then, in the name of God: Change your course!" The audience of 40,000 (no ponchos were allowed for fear of concealed weapons) chanted, "Ayacucho wants peace." The Pope, a bishop said later, seemed to be weeping...
...rise a few months ago, when the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas decided to concentrate their efforts on the capital. Following its emergence as a violent force four years ago, the group, which numbers about 2,000, had been confined largely to the remote, poverty-stricken region of Ayacucho in the high Andes...